Oppositions
The terms “life” and “death” from a BINARY OPPOSITION: a pair of contrasted terms, each of which depends on the other for its meaning. There are many such oppositions, and they’re all governed by the distinction.
EITHER/OR. If we accept this, it establishes conceptual order.
Binary oppositions classify and organize the objects, events and relations of the world. They make decision possible. And they govern thinking in everyday life, as well as philosophy, theory and the sciences.
Undecidables disrupt this oppositional logic. They slip across both sides of an opposition but don’t properly fit either. They are more than the opposition can allow. And because of that, they question the very principle of “opposition”.
The Horror of Indeterminacy
Zombies are cinematic inscriptions of the failure of the “life/death” opposition. They show where classificatory order breaks down: they mark the limits of order. Like all undecidables, zombies infect the oppositions grouped around them.
These ought to establish stable, clear and permanent categories.
But what happens to “white/black”, “master/servant”, and “civilized/primitive”, when white colonialists can also be the zombie slaves of a black power? Can “white science/black magic” remain untroubled, if what sometimes works against a zombie is white magic – the Christian religion, the power of love or superior
morality? How certain is the opposition “inside/outside”, if the zombie’s
internal soul is extracted and an external force becomes its inside? Is there any security in opposing “masculine” to “feminine” and “good” to “evil”, when the zombie is usually de-sexualized and has no power of decision?
The Zombie is therefore fascinating and also horrific. It poisons systems of orders, and like all undecidables ought to be returned to order.
In zombie movies, this return to order is difficult. For a classic satisfying ending, the troubling element has to be removed, perhaps by killing it. But zombies are already dead (while alive). You can’t kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be “killed” categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being.
At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled. This is a restoration of conceptual order. There are other endings, less final. The zombies might be ineradicable, they might return. Perhaps undecidability is always with us. If not figured in the zombie, then something else: ghosts, golems or vampires, between life and death. Between male and female, the androgyne. Between human and machine, the android. Between friends and enemies, the stranger … (Derrida: A Graphic Guide, pp. 33-39)
陌生人的定義是非敵非友 有人說旅途中
我們仰賴的是陌生人的善意 上面這個掛在樹上的印地安人 可以說明這點
