Leonardo: Zombie Theory

This reader on zombie theory is as rich and thought provoking as a Whole Earth Catalog for the makers, creators, curators, thinkers and keepers of the simultaneously dead and alive, the waveform uncollapsed. The index, its end, is its beginning.

Zombie Theory (Sarah Juliet Lauro, editor)I have always thought that thinking about zombies in popular culture - the zombie movies and video games, the meaning of the zombie narrative - was a sideshow, the B-movie to the grown-up, art-house docu-drama, the tractatus zombi-philosophicus of consciousness studies, quantum physics and speculative cognition. It was epistemology as existential thriller and none the worse for that. But now, like a bull-dozer in the night, slamming sideways into the peaceful study of the philosophical zombie, comes this book, a vast collection of interdisciplinary zombie scholarship covering just about everything on zombies in the arts, society, politics, philosophy, forms of alienation and colonisation, and every aspect of the human condition. I now see that there is no way we can approach the refined questions of consciousness, artificial intelligence, free will or indeed life, the universe and everything proper to a well-found zombie-theoretical ouvroir or workshop, without considering what we bring to these enquiries from zombie culture. 

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Published in: Leonardo
By: Brian Reffin Smith