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Keetley, Dawn. "The vegetative part: Organic and plant life in The Walking Dead." Journal of Popular Television 3. (2015): 37–55. Added by: joachim (7/18/21, 1:32 AM) Last edited by: joachim (7/18/21, 1:44 AM) |
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| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1386/jptv.3.1.37_1 BibTeX citation key: Keetley2015 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "The Walking Dead", Adaptation, Adlard. Charlie, Horror, Kirkman. Robert, TV, USA Creators: Keetley Collection: Journal of Popular Television |
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The zombie gaze of AMCs The Walking Dead (2010) signals and elicits the inexorable presence of the vegetative part in the human the uncontrolled organic life that unsettles the very notion of the person as well as those political systems founded upon it. Drawing on Roberto Espositos Third Person (2012) and late eighteenth-century physiologist Xavier Bichat, both of whom argue that humans have a double life our voluntary will inextricably embedded in an involuntary vegetative part I argue that the characters of Shane Walsh and Merle Dixon exemplify the organic life, the automaticity of the biological. But while Esposito and Bichat use vegetative metaphorically, in Season 4, The Walking Dead begins to explore the more literal vegetal life of and surrounding the human, suggesting humans proximity not just to the guts that mark the presence of the organic but also to plants that signal the vegetative part. The series thus asks what it might mean, in the words of philosopher Michael Marder, to think of the constitutive vegetal otherness in ourselves.
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