Fast and Furious : The Accelerationist Attempt to Help Zombie Bite Again
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The 20th century has watched zombie progress from a mindless reactive drone-worker to an active agent of destruction in George Romero’s filmography. But one might wonder at the inclination for another change in the Zombie ethos within the last two decades - a change towards something un-zombie, something fast, something incredibly aggressive. This paper proposes that the so-called “Infected”, often judged as a false friend of zombies, are actually zombies re-expressed through accelerationist thought. As Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek wrote in their #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics: “We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as essential.” This paper proposes Infected’s speed as an attempt at procedural strategy rather than mere velocity. The paper first investigates the gradual progression from the Gothic approach to the mythical Haitian/African zombie to Romero’s canonical Zombie and then focuses on the confrontation of Zombie with the current finitude of affect in contemporary late-capitalist film industry and socio-cultural climate and proposes that the emergence of Infected as accelerated Zombie. It then explores how its attempt to resist the absorption into the late-capitalist axiomatic fails once again. The paper is a part of author’s doctoral research of zombie through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. |
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