The Philosophical Zombie as the Portrait of the Human Captured by the System/State Apparatus in Marion’s Warm Bodies

Abstract

Though the term zombie generally refers to the undead or living dead, the philosophical zombies mentioned in Thousand Plateau by Deleuze are the inhabitants of the state captured, thus deprived of their identities, by the state apparatuses employed to support the ruling ideology. Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies presents such philosophical zombies captured by the state apparatuses, which are represented by the boneys/skeletons. Though R, hero of the novel, is referred to as “the dead”, that is, a zombie, he is a philosophical zombie who keeps thinking about how he became a zombie, tormented by his identity as a zombie. Through his communication with Perry whose brain he consumes, R, at last, realizes that the closed system supported by the boneys as Dleuzean state apparatus zombified him. And by the collapse of the closed system brought about by his love for Julie, R overcomes zombification. All of zombies, however, are not restored to humans, because there still remain “the Half-Dead” and “The Nearly-Living”. The ultimate message of the novel which ends with the presence of the remaining Dead is not so optimistic, because Deleuzean zombie is actually Lacanian subject who is subject to the symbolic, that is, an allegory for the larger societal self.