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Dreamboat Vampires and Zombie Capitalists

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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...pitalists/

EXCERPT: ...That humans live simultaneously real, physical lives and symbolic, meaningful existences means that they must die not once, but twice. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, it is possible in the human imagination for these two deaths, one symbolic and one real, to not entirely coincide. In such cases we enter a peculiar state, one he called “entre deux morts” — or between two deaths.

Those whose symbolic selves die while their bodies still live attain a kind of extra-worldly beauty. Lacan identified Sophocles’ great character Antigone with this state — condemned to death by Creon for having defied the state’s law by burying her treasonous brother, she burns with a righteous splendor that puts to shame Creon’s pathetic attachment to the state’s laws.

Those whose bodies die while their symbolic selves linger constitute an entirely different breed. Chained by a law or obligation to an animate state their bodies can no longer support, such beings become monstrous specters, condemned to walk the earth as embodiments of some insatiable hunger.

It is not too difficult to see in these two archetypes our modern vampires and zombies, the former “radiating a sublime beauty,” in Lacan’s words, the latter monstrous excrescences driven on by a fundamental imbalance in the world of men....
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