And Say the Zombie Responded? Or, How I
Learned to Stop Living and Unlove the Undead
In February 2011 Serene Branson, a TV reporter for CBS News who
was covering the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, suffered an on-air
breakdown. Over the course of ten seconds on live TV, Branson began slurring
her speech and, ultimately, spouting gibberish:
Well a very very heavay ah heavy de bertation
tonight, we had a very deris-derison. By lets go heah
teris tazin loash tiblet hav le pet.1
The Internet video went viral. Some jokingly claimed Branson had
become a real-life zombie on the air. Others worried that she had had a stroke.
Either way, it appeared that her brain was suddenly not functioning in the way
that a normal human brain functions—she was no longer one of us.
Branson’s incoherence turned out to be caused by a migraine that
mimics the symptoms of a stroke. She recovered quickly and was sent home.
But the next day when asked to describe what had happened, her response was
still terrifying. At first, she explained, it was not clear to her that something was
wrong. She thought she was making sense. All she meant to say was: “Here at
the Grammys, Lady Antebellum swept the awards.” When she realized that
something had gone wrong, she was still unable to summon up the words to
communicate her own inner thoughts. She was making sounds, and was
compelled to continue, but the sounds were non-communicative.2 Even the
words “very very” and “tonight we had” were not words that she was meaning
to say.
It is true that some of the most interesting and confounding thing about
zombies is their relationship to language and desire—and what this means for
consciousness. But before we can confront such complicated issues we need to
meet the zombie head on, thinking through exactly what it means for those of us
who are living to have the dead still with us.
Freud tells us that it is pathological to love the dead. Libido is often
mistakenly characterized as exclusively sexual energy, but Freud is clear that it
merely indicates one’s life force or life energy in general—the instinctual drive
of the id that propels us all forward. When we love, we make an investment of
libido in the object of our affection. And this is the problem with loving the
dead. Libido must always be “attached.” Once the libido no longer has an
external subject or object to which it can be attached, the only way in which we
can continue to love the dead is to re-attach that flailing libido to ourselves,
taking our self to be the now-missing Other, mistakenly converting a part of the
Self into a puppet version of the Other. It is not only metaphysically wrong, it is