Abstract | It is hardly necessary to begin with what has become a common invocation: “we live in Gothic times.” As the observation is commonplace, so are many of the commentaries on why this is the case, which more often than not fall back on some version of the return of “mankind’s deepest fears” in explanation (see Warwick). Our argument here is rather the opposite: that something like our shallowest fears provide the most plausible reading of these “Gothic times,” in that they are marked by a peculiar lack of rootedness in both the historical and the individual past. There is a presentness in the fi gure of the zombie and in the image of the apocalypse accompanying it that explains both their frequent conjunction and their shambling presence in our contemporary culture of advanced capitalism and the universalization of exchange value. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that the zombie and the apocalypse are, we argue, emphatically not Gothic, despite the ways in which they are persistently tumbled into that endlessly capacious category today. |
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