The limits of zombies: Monsters for a neoliberal age

This chapter asks what monsters most accurately represent in our current age of global neoliberalism. Although the ravenous hunger and destructiveness of zombies capture aspects of the brutal rapacity of contemporary capitalism, this chapter argues that many recent theoretical appropriations of the figure of the zombie are either opportunistic or overly simplistic in the way they use zombies as a symptom for the evils of the neoliberal world order. Moreover, the usefulness of the zombie as a way of analyzing the current conjuncture is limited by what this chapter calls the excessive visibility of this figure; the instantaneous visual impression made by the zombies that throng popular culture hides the fact that the true monsters of neoliberalism—psychopaths—hide in plain sight by means of their bland normality.