Me or Chaos

‘Me or Chaos’ was Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 election campaign slogan. The ‘me’ refers to de Gaulle as an avatar of governance that expels chaos. This ‘me’ also functions conventionally to refer to an agent that can say ‘I’. Thus, superimposed on the pair ‘governance or chaos’ is ‘autonomy or chaos’. The law, via governance, ‘rules’ the living by referring to them as subjects who are already self-ruled in autonomy. In zombie apocalypse films such as 28 Days Later, why does a lawfully governed society spontaneously dissolve into chaos? Zombies are more than a criminal force. They don’t ‘break’ the law, they vitiate it. As a new category of existence, the ‘undead’ collapse the legibility of the categories ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘agency’ and ‘flesh’. This is not merely a problem for biology, it catastrophically deactivates the possible operation of law, which requires that ‘life’ is the definitive category over which it rules. Zombies threaten the autonomous living with a bite, which transmits the contagion of undead-ness, the contagion of chaos.