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Emmanuel Hocquard recalls having had a lot of trouble learning to read and write. He was a slow pupil, he says—an unusually clumsy struggler with classroom materials. Leaky pens, smudges, chalk dust, torn papers were problems for all schoolchildren in those days (right after World War II), but upon him they weighed inordinately, wearing him down so much that he barely made it in the early grades to even the most elementary forms of abstract knowledge. Reading was as bad as writing. The words and phrases that revealed meaning to his classmates—the same meaning, he dimly perceived, to all of them—for him remained obscure. He kept crashing into strange piles of letters, and the force of the collision would cause whole pages to crack up and smell terrible: “It was a period when I felt truly miserable.”

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This short essay turns on the difference between, yet also the difficulty of separating definitively, representations of extinction and apocalypse. Apocalypse of course means revelation or unveiling (apo, “away” + kalupto, “cover”), whereas extinction means disappearance without residue. The word is interestingly tautological: extinguo is a third conjugation verb based on stinguo, which itself means to extinguish or put out, which in turn means that the ex-prefix adds almost nothing, just a little extra death: extinguo—to quench, extinguish, kill, destroy. The ex (from the Greek and ultimately Indo-European eks or ek, “out of”) is an x of excessive withdrawal, the mark of an extra extinguishing, and that tautology or stutter may offer the best help we can get if we are seeking a non-(or almost-non-) apocalyptic representation of extinction.

For this is in fact very hard to do. The difficulty of distinguishing stories of or about extinction from stories of or about revelation can be illustrated if we look closely at a few of the rhetorical tropes that sustain Ray Brassier’s recent Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Brassier is one of a number of younger philosophers loosely associated with what is sometimes called “speculative realism.” In this book he argues for the reality of extinction as the condition both of life and of thought. Yet this argument, committed to a hard-eyed acknowledgment of the nothingness of human things, repeats a sacrificial plot as it extracts meaning from the void.

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A formalized theory of modernism finds one pronouncement in the 1909 critical preface to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1884), in which James lauds a new sense of vision: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.” These windows do not “open straight upon life.” Each is equipped with “a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other”. James invokes neither biography nor the psychology of the writer but rather the “posted presence of the watcher,” a center of consciousness positioned within the novel itself. As Douglas turns his back upon the group of listeners around the hearth in “The Turn of the Screw” (1896), one might say that the Anglo-American novel lost its voice, an orally based aesthetic being synonymous, as it had been for Flaubert, with all that prevented the novel from achieving aesthetic freedom.

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This essay bites off more than it can chew. Inspired by the work of Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and an increasingly widespread fascination with zombies of all kinds, we track the significance of the recent “zombie renaissance” across a range of popular and academic cultural texts. As mindless figures introduced into Western consciousness by way of slavery, and possessing insatiable hunger and drive, but no subjective desire, zombies are uniquely positioned to mirror the fears and desires of humans living in a world in which new forms of sovereignty (neoliberal, globalizing, corporate, bio-and necro-political) have transformed the meanings and experiences of life and death. Here we focus on what we call “zombie porn,” a heretofore largely neglected if also still emergent subgenre of a much larger zombie corpus. We should note at the outset that, like the film we analyze here, our title defers the promise of its object: our theoretical money shots are less shattering or dramatic than they are impassive or undead, and porn appears less as gratifying sexual representations than as a materialist conceit to think through relationships between sex, queerness, and power. We therefore cultivate definitions of zombie porn that are variously earnest and awkward, camp and critical, in the hope that they might help us to reflect on the sex lives and political presents of zombies and, maybe, the rest of us.

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In Palermo, Goethe discovers—or thinks he discovers—the Urpflanze, the “archetypal plant”; its model and structure, that of the primary cell of plant diversity, is an expression, in his view, of the Nature-God, the divine and natural power that holds together the Whole in the infinite variety of its forms. He speaks with enthusiasm to Schiller, calling it “an experience,” to which Schiller replies: “it’s not an experience, it’s an idea.” Irritated, Goethe says that he would like to have some ideas and perhaps even behold them; later he will say that this rift, this gap between idea and experience, marked a clear boundary between him and Schiller, and also between him and the majority of other writers, scientists, and philosophers.

Forget ideology, of which he likely knew nothing; Goethe views the very word idea as suspect. Throughout his life, and with increasing vehemence, he will attack it again and again, in order to defend Anschaulichkeit, sensory evidence—facts, things, colors, smells—against abstraction, which seemed to him to weigh more and more on science, philosophy, and the very conception of the world they endeavored to affirm. The greatest example of this is his passionate, errant, but in its own way brilliant and creative polemic against Newton on the subject of light and color, which in turn led him to write, based on his own experiments, a theory of colors which he erroneously considered his masterpiece.

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What is thinking? In the history of philosophy there have been essentially two heterogeneous solutions to this problem. (A) Thought is one of the names of Being, the lived relation of Being to itself, localized in the form of a Subject, a process of subjectivation, or a non-subjective Universal. (B) Thought is a determination of Being, which cannot be totalized to the whole; it thus overturns the equation Being=thought, but at the price of folding itself into Being as an immanent and non-localizable event. On both sides of the duality, thought is vital: it draws its power from Being in order, by eternally returning to it, to reaffirm its ground (A) or to invest it with new distributions (B). Vital thought animates Being, it engenders a creative dynamism. But it is always Being that renews and animates itself in thinking; Being folds and doubles Being. From this viewpoint, thought is the site or the effect (the two are ontologically indiscernible) of the self-folding of Being. We are thus left, despite appearances, with a passive thought condemned to remain in its relations outside of itself (partial transcendence) and to constitute in its logic the immanent outside of Being (partial immanence). Nevertheless, as Varèse showed through music, there always exists a third dimension in which the poles of a duality are displaced, where they go beyond their coupling and enter into in-determinate and reversible relations. What happens to thought in the third dimension? In essence, it becomes neutral: thought neutralizes Being, de-potentializes its self-movement. By denaturing, thought ceases to constitute the hinge for the doubling of Being on itself and reaches the active threshold at which this doubling runs aground, giving way to an absolute milieu where bodies and ideas cast off their nature as effects and emerge thoroughly unhinged. This absolute milieu is immanence. And immanence is neutral.

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Up to now, aesthetics has merely been a system of fine arts. We seek what it would become within the limits of a science of the essence of art.

What is at stake? Rendering art intelligible, producing a science of it instead of a philosophy. It is not a question of mimetically describing what the dancer and the photographer do, of photographing photography and dance, of dancing dance and photography, of fabricating the philosopher, a half-dancer half-photographer being. We will not add a “thinker” so as to double up the thing itself. There is an order of aesthetic reasons more important to us than what artists spontaneously and apparently do. For by what right do we know that they are artists, whether it is a question of the dancer in “dance” or the photographer in “photography”? This is a pure supposition that legitimates philosophy only because it is itself, by a supplementary turn, philosophical. But neither is it a question of making a science of finished, individual works offered to consumption; for there is no science of singular things, but a science of universal essences—of the essence of the work of art.

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Ethics will have known several historical deaths. But beyond these deaths in the Enlightenment, the de-Christianization, the murder of the moral God, as beyond its fits and starts, assembling these accidents in the flux of a unique decline, there is a death-process of ethics that fuses with the effectivity of its existence. This process in which it does not cease to sink in an interminable fall, we call Ethologos, the becoming-ethological of ethics. This formula must be complicated, explicated, prolonged also by the following thesis, which adds to it almost nothing, except the supplement of which it is capable by itself: No known form of the occidental field of ethics is still capable of furnishing a rule of life, a criterion or a basis for decision, the principle of a legitimation of human existence when this existence develops in an intense technological milieu. The problem of “legitimation” begins to be posed when it is too late and there are no more criteria of legitimation. Legitimation becomes a problem when the problem of legitimation is no longer itself legitimate. To be more precise, the “etho-logical” formation in which our existence and our “values” are increasingly submerged functions—we must grasp this—at once as a hypo-legitimation, an active lack of legitimation affecting all of our behaviors, and as an over-legitimation in which any behavior whatever is immediately justified and valorized by means of its overdetermination by the others.

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A review of Moon, Michael, Darger's Resources (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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A review of Mialet, Hélène, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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A review of Terada, Rei, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Richter, Gerhard, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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