Nov 17, 2012
A quote from Zizek (Tarrying with the Negative, pp.113-4):
Invoking the “living dead” is no accident here: in our ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments precisely when we endeavor to comprehend those borderline phenomena which undermine established differences, such as those between living and being dead. In the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures which are neither alive nor dead, the “living dead” (vampires, etc.), are referred to as “the undead”; although they are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us, ordinary mortals. The judgment “he is undead” is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgment in the precise sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the domain of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domain of the living (as in the case of the simple negation “he is not dead”). The fact that vampires and other “living dead” are usually referred to as “things” has to be rendered with its full Kantian meaning: a vampire is a Thing which looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us.In short, the difference between the vampire and the living person is the difference between indefinite and negative judgment: a dead person loses the predicates of a living being, yet he or she remains the same person; an undead, on the contrary, retains all the predicates of a living being without being one. As in the above-quoted Marxian joke, what we get with the vampire is “the ordinary manner of speaking and thinking purely and simply — without the individual.”
One is tempted to affirm that this logic of infinite judgment contains in nuce Kant’s entire philosophical revolution: it delineates transcendentally constituted reality from the uncanny, prohibited / impossible, real domain of the Thing which had to remain unthought since in it Good overlaps with radical Evil.
In short, Kant replaced the traditional philosophical opposition of appearance and essence with the opposition of phenomenal reality and the noumenal Thing which follows a radically different logic: what appears as “essential” (moral law in ourselves) is possible and thinkable only within the horizon of our finitude, of our limitation to the domain of phenomenal reality; if it were possible for us to trespass this limitation and to gain a direct insight into noumenal Thing, we would lose the very capacity which enables us to transcend the limits of sensible experience (moral dignity and freedom).