Work

Catherine Malabou’s “New Wounded” and their Ethico-Political Implications, According to Victor Erice’s Cerrar los ojos.

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Ethical and political implications of zombie-related fantasies have often been studied in relation to Freud’s “death drive”. Catherine Malabou argued that subjects whose personality and memory have been cancelled by neurological traumas (i.e. those whom she calls The New Wounded, after her eponymous book) embody Freud’s death drive beyond Freud and beyond psychoanalysis. The “new wounded” subject, whose personality is reduced to an emotionless, indifferent blank slate, are like zombies, but they are no fantasy: they are real and clinically diagnosable. Because they “become the form of their own death”, claims Malabou, the new wounded embody what is most essential in human subjectivity (its fragility and contingency), while retaining the ethico-political potential traditionally associated with zombies. My paper uses Malabou’s philosophical/neurological framework to analyze Cerrar los ojos (Victor Erice, 2023), a non-zombie film sharing a number of key traits with zombie genre.

Source: New University of Lisbon's Repository (New University of Lisbon)

DOI: 10.57576/ocula2025-38

Author: Marco Grosoli

Institution: Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Language: English

Topic: Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: European Commission

Award: G2914011622