“Zombies Are Real”: Fantasies, Conspiracies, and the Post-truth Wars

Eric King Watts University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article asserts that post-truth is the name we have assigned to a powerful repetitive mode of discourse that legitimizes conspiracies and anxieties regarding how blackened biothreat bodies will be unleashed upon society. Post-truth signifies a kind of excess and excessiveness wherein grammars of common sense making are overrun. Post-truth indexes a desire for gratuitous violence against norms of civil society—indeed, against civil society itself. Post-truth is not a set of lies. It is a precondition for tribal war. The article sets forth post-truth as a disorienting and frightening “dissemblage” that is driven by fantasies of sovereignty, rituals of militarization, and the colonization of expertise. I outline the formal features of post-truth by examining a docudrama produced by the Discovery Channel called Zombie Preppers. In the end I speculate about how post-truth metastasizes in the social body as “brain damage.”

Journal
Philosophy & Rhetoric
Published
2018-12-01
DOI
10.5325/philrhet.51.4.0441
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Cited by in this index (4)

  1. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  2. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  3. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  4. Rhetoric & Public Affairs

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