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could not rule, King Arthur becomes, like Dracula, an undead creature, the vitality of whose protracted dying sucks life from the ordinary world. Death, not the king, is Tennyson’s hero’ ( 1990 : 97). Photographic practice brings home the physical nature of such sacrifice. Cameron’s sitters – like all sitters – literally give over some of their mortal life for the sake of the image. The camera collects the residue of light that bounces off them, the outline of their bodies in physical nature, preserving it chemically, as André Bazin ( 1960 ) notes in ‘The Ontology
of such places with the undead ( draugr ), inhabiting tombs that also contain grave-goods. Into what appears to be a northern folk tradition of these haunted places, the poet has introduced a weapon linking the place with those rebellious primeval giants that he mentioned in the family tree of monsters when introducing Grendel earlier in the poem. The giants’ war with God is not an explicit element
‘Dark ecology’ is the term recently coined by critic Timothy Morton to describe our profoundly interconnected coexistence in a world poised on the brink of environmental catastrophe. 1 Morton's vision of ‘nature’ as morbid, enmeshed modes of being has more in common, he tells us, ‘with the undead than with life’, 2 and his thinking might provide a new sense of the gothic as a genre full of dark environmental resonance. In
Freud’s Theory 154–5). His threat to David is thus precisely his elusiveness to the signifier, and as David’s double, struggling for the same object of desire, he seems to embody what Lacan terms (in his later work) the “lamella,” that undead asexual thing that is at once object and nonobject, like das Ding , intimate to and alien to the subject. Thus David is “oppressed … with
psychotic as if . “[T]ongue-tied and blindfolded,” these “voluntary human sacrifices” seem more like the self-interned undead inmates of a global camp than members of a privileged leisure class. These walking “human sacrifices” devoid of human consciousness (sight and speech) are strikingly similar to what Schreber calls “fleeting-improvised-men” or