„Tym, co znika, jest Człowiek we właściwym znaczeniu”. O relacji między Kojèviańską „śmiercią człowieka” a ekspansją popkulturowej figury żywego trupa

Abstract

In the chapter “What Disappears is Man in the Proper Sense”. On the Relationship Between the Kojèvian “Death of Man” and the Expansion of the Zombie Figure in Popular Culture, Marcin Czardybon shows the convergence taking place between the globalist, anti-ideological narrative that found its voice at the end of the 20th Cen-tury and the expansion of the character of the zombie in texts of culture. It corre-sponds perfectly with theses that construct expressions about the “end of history”. One often forgets that Francis Fukuyama’s claims and beliefs about the imminent pri-macy of Western, consumerist, liberal-democratic culture are – in their fundamental principles – only a reflection of the idea preached by a French philosopher of Russian origin, Alexandre Kojève. If we consider the phenomenon of the rising popularity of the zombie in cinema and literature as a kind of social reaction to the homogenization of individuals in a-ideological realities of late modernity, we cannot avoid returning to the claims of this philosopher. In his famous Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in an intriguing way the condition and role of the individual in the realities of post-his-torical times were described. This vision, apart from components of turpitude and aggression, perfectly matches the image of zombies described in contemporary texts of culture. We can say that the expansion of “living corpses” in popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries is a (grotesque) disclosure of this content, which from the very beginning lay at the roots of this the final narrative about the end of history, ideology, struggle and work. Citizens of post-historical state are zombies, an inherent part of the world that Fukuyama and his enthusiasts saw and described in their theses.