Mind Your Symptom...

Vamplik and Zomluk (translated) — Slavoj Žižek, "Vampire and Zombie":

According to the Hegelian conclusion to be drawn from Kant, every limitation must be considered a precursor of things "beyond", according to which even Kant's notion of Thing in Itself remains too "reified".

Hegel is nuanced in this regard: when he says that the supra-sense "appearance is appearance," he is suggesting that precisely the Thing in Itself is the limitation of phenomena. "Supersensory objects (objects of suprasensory intuition)" belong to the chimeric "reverse world"; there at best the content of audible intuition is presented in reverse under the inaudible form of another intuition, reflected like a stream [or echoed like a hemsada: Hiçpekora]

Let us recall Marx's ironic criticism of Proudhon in The Misery of Philosophy:

Instead of the ordinary way of speaking and thinking of the ordinary individual, there is only this ordinary style, pure and simple, without an individual.

(The irony here is compounded because Marx wrote these lines with the intention of cynically rejecting Proudhon's Hegelianism—his attempt to support economic theory in a speculative dialectical form!)

This is the point in the chimera of "inaudible intuition": instead of ordinary objects of audible intuition, we still have the same ordinary sense objects, [but] inaudiblely.

The fact that vampires and other "living dead" are often referred to as "things" is quite Kantian: Vampire is something that looks and behaves like us, but it is not one of us. In sum, the difference between the vampire and the living person is the difference between infinite judgment and negative judgment: the deceased person remains the same person even if he loses the quality of vitality; an undead, on the contrary, is not alive even though it holds all of its vitality qualities. As in the Marxian joke above, the vampire "has only this ordinary style, pure and simple, without an individual."

(Lingering with the Negative)

It can be argued that the class difference is embedded in horror films under the guise of vampire-zombie difference. Vampires are mannered, kind, noble, and live with normal people, while zombies are clumsy, lethargic, dirty, and attack from the outside, like the primitive rebellion of outcast mobs.

The equivalence of zombies with the working class was made evictive in the film White Zombie (1932). When filming this first full-length zombie film, made before the enactment of the Hays Ordinance, Hollywood's self-censorship system, it was not yet forbidden to directly address the ruthlessness of the capitalists and the workers' struggle. There are no vampires in this film, but it is noteworthy that Bela Lugosi, who plays the villain who rules zombies, became famous for his role as Dracula the previous year. White Zombie It is set on the farm where Haiti's most famous slave uprising took place. Lugosi entertains another rancher and shows him the zombie workers working in the sugar factory he owns and immediately explains the situation: the zombie workers do not complain about working conditions, do not demand unions, do not strike at all, and work non-stop. Such a film could only be made before the Hays Ordinance was imposed.

(Trouble in Heaven)

Notes:

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

See "It is the appearance that is the self-appearance" Slavoj Žižek, "The sensual is the speech of the transcendence of this world" G. W. F. Hegel, "Arbitrariness beyond the phallus" Jacques Lacan:

Our people – I have acquaitances, I am involved in the public even if they do not come to the seminar – our people call their wives "bourgeois". The meaning of this is obvious. The word is the man who listens, not the woman. (Lacan)

According to Lacan, a woman is a bourgeois of a man. According to Žižek, the worker zombie is symbolized by the bourgeois vampire. So maybe every man has a piece of zombie and every woman has a piece of vampness?

See "Man hates zom masculinity" by Luke Burns