A Lesser Human Future: Posthuman Monstrosities in World War Z (2013) and Annihilation (2018)

• Published in: Gender forum no. 71; pp. 44 - 63
• Main Author: Zeitz, Christian David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Köln Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Actor-network theory; Actors; Anthropomorphism; Capitalism; Concept formation; Culture; Earth; Fiction; Forster, Marc (1969- ); Geology; Haraway, Donna; Monsters; Motion picture criticism; Otherness; Posthumanism; Shimmer; Suicide bombings; War; Zombies; United States > US; Minnesota
• ISSN: 1613-1878

World War Z's (Palestinianized) zombies and Annihilation's anthropocenic Shimmer post or rework conceptions of humanist and anthropomorphic monstrous bodies as sociologically knowable and biologically bound entities, as they are monstrosities of entanglement in nonhuman, informational, technological, ecological, and geological Latourian actor-networks. The monstrous of canonical monster theory, as a nonindividual discursive network of power, mediates a specific cultural body, whilst, in a conceptualization of monstrosity as actor-network, the monster would not be monstrous because it is the othered, not-quite-human alterity-body of humanity, but because it demonstrates (monere) the transcorporeality and nonhumanness of humans in the first place, as well as their status as nonexceptional and non-autonomous actors and actor-networks within larger-than-life actor-networks. The Jerusalem scene from World War Z links the posthuman terrorist becomings and resistances of the zombie and the (Palestinian) suicide bomber: the zombie bite, which collapses undeath into undeath, body and flesh into body and flesh, is comparable to the explosive death of the ballistic suicide bomber confusing boundaries between flesh, metal, life, death, and undeath. World War Z's zombie and the racialized suicide bomber share the monstrous potentiality of posthuman contagion and networkability. In Annihilation, the Shimmer, the Alienocene as analogy of the Anthropocone, is a demonstrative monstrosity, cautioning that it is not simply humans changing the morphism of the Earth, but that the Earth itself is a nonhuman actor-network whose alterations effect alterations in the morphisms of the human. The monsters of climatological and geological change, the monsters of what-we-have-done-to-the-earth, will ultimately get us, precisely because we irreducibly intra-act with our Anthropocene.