“The only modern myth is the myth of zombies,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari in 1972, but what is the relation between myth and post-modernity, zombies, post-colonialism and now post-truth?

“In its passage from myth-figure to metaphor,” writes John Cussans at the beginning of his new book Undead Uprising, “the Zombie has come to perform a vast range of allegorical functions, its meaning as diverse as a displaced person eking out a precarious existence at the bio-political limits of late capitalism or the unfeeling advocates of free-market fundamentalism who oversee it…The aim of Undead Uprising is to explore how voodoo horror and zombie films, staples of Anglo-American popular culture since the 1920s have contributed to a fantastical, diabolically exotic and racist optic on Haiti that has served the interests of foreign powers ever since August 1791.”

How foreign powers? Is the Zombie just a metaphor, or something worse, our fate? Wherefore this diabolically exotic optic? What else is Enlightenment except a movement “from myth-figure to metaphor” through modernity from the Thing to its citation? What is the enlightened Earth enlightened by except a billion unearthly screens? What is a zombie army (“of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”) except for Progress on the march?

Evidently, it was Haiti, crucible of the most violent forces of modernity, from where the Zombie shuffled into history. Christopher Columbus first made landfall on the island in December 1492; over the following three centuries the country saw the disappearance of the Taino, the 15th century Amerindian population, and their replacement or absorption into 40,000 European colonists, 30,000 mulattoes and free blacks and 450,000 slaves as the territory developed into the hyper-profitable French colony of Saint-Domingue.

Cussans rehearses the rhetoric of the “horrors of colonial history” to a numbing degree, but appreciates the deeper issue. “The zombies that concern Undead Uprising are all, in one form or another, zombies of historical consciousness.” Specifically:

[T]he general form of the zombie problem can be traced back to philosophical debates between materialists and idealists in the eighteenth century, a period in which moral justifications for slavery were bound up with an emergent philosophy of the enlightened, autonomous, self-conscious human being, distinguished by higher universal and progressive purposes from the mere brute, automaton or machine.

This term “general” really should read “modern”: what was original in Enlightened humanist apologeticism was the moral justification, not the slavery; not brutality, or the transcendental problem of stupidity, but the erasure of brutality, now conceived as a surpassable condition. Ubiquitous in the primitive and ancient worlds, prohibited by Saint Augustine, still widespread in Africa, and the brothels of the world, slavery as brutality was understood historically as natural fact. Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy problematized it in the light of reason: progressive thought, and that which moves without it, its perpetual rebuke.

In his preface Cussans cites the anthropologist Stephan Palmié:

Paraphrasing Marx, one might say that given the particular structuring in the past in the Western historical imagination, the dead have to be represented because they can no longer represent themselves.” What Cussans calls the Zombie Complex enables “access to an analytic dimension that radically exposes, rather than merely metaphorises, a dimension of the now globalised moral-disorder…”

Except what’s missing from our conception of the past, and present, isn’t Marxist paraphrases, but their absence. Why did Europe embark upon the age of sail and advance across the world? What explains the massive movement of millions of people from one side of the planet to the other? Susan Sontag’s infamous, and now ubiquitously banalized line that “the white race is the cancer of human history” (imagine someone substituting Jews or Bantus) isolates the central issue.

Evidence suggests diseases change behavior; in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks reports on latent syphilis stimulating hyper-sexual activity in a ninety-year-old patient; research on HIV patients indicates increased testosterone and promiscuity. Historically, the idea that human behavior may be under compulsion by a foreign power was recognized by Hegel with his concept of a “cunning of reason” grinding through history, coldly selecting and discarding individuals, nations, even species, in its pitiless advance.

Sontag, who died of blood cancer in 2004, proposes, as a metaphor or myth, or ideology, or progressive creed, a universalist and technical inhuman drive possessed by (or possessing) one race but not others: “it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.” For the Haitians, the idea that human individuals may be possessed, or “ridden” by the Lwa, the voodoo gods, breaking through the membrane of the spirit world, is cardinal. If there’s a disorder or lacuna in the normative moral arrangement of the Western historical imagination, it’s here, in the foreclosure of the thought that individuals or groups, or institutions and societies may be possessed by demons, or the dead, and its reanimation as a disembodied “metaphor.”

In short, what Cussans calls the Zombie Complex connects less to the history of colonial slavery, and more to the politicized contemporary grid of understanding, or non-understanding,  this despotic optic ,  which we’re compelled to ceaselessly reiterate (by what?) when anybody brings the subject up. It’s worth reporting that the London-based publisher of Undead Uprising, unilaterally removed a blurb for it from the unpersoned Shanghai-based philosopher Nick Land, the external examiner who insisted during Cussans’ viva almost thirty years ago that “addiction is not a metaphor.”

The metaphor decapitates the question, and the grid effectuates the disappearance of the object, so it becomes impossible to say what Haiti, or the Zombie truly is outside our metaphorical hall, or hell, of narcissistic mirrors. This fact itself becomes the subject, as if some demiurgic force had captured Earth (as Land asserted in his cult essay Meltdown) and now wanders through philosophy, like a warden through a jail.

It would be better to consider the alternative hypothesis — that not only as a metaphor, but as a fact, the Zombie incarnates the evidence, not just of colonialism, but secular history in general, not to mention our own historical conjuncture, as the object of a motive force anterior to its emergence.

Isn’t history itself a kind of zombie process, without a subject, as Louis Althusser imagined? Or to paraphrase Bolaño, isn’t reality an AIDS-infected Haitian whore? The historical triangulation is worth restating:

Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value. (Hegel)

Marxist activist C.L.R James, by contrast, imagines pre-colonial Africa in The Black Jacobins as “a territory of peace and happy civilization” which ended with the arrival of the Europeans.

It was on a peasantry in many respects superior to the serfs in large areas of Europe, that the slave trade fell…Tribal life was broken up and millions of detribalised Afri­cans were let loose upon each other. The unceasing destruction of crops led to cannibalism; the captive women became concubines…Violence and ferocity became the necessities for survival, and violence and ferocity survived. The stockades of grinning skulls, the human sacrifices, the selling of their own children as slaves, these horrors were the product of an in­tolerable pressure on the African peoples.

Either way, the phase shift formed the zygote of the modern world. Cussans, a brilliant teacher, who has spent two decades working in British art schools, is closer unsurprisingly to James, which is further from the truth.

The slavers themselves were Africans, enslaving other Africans, and selling them to Europeans, who shipped them to America. The originality of the enterprise consisted in logistics, scale and capitalist power, and the syncretism of the mechanism: the triangulation of three continents into an catalytic concentration.

Millions of people (and commodities, and capital, and microbes…) moved, or were moved. But who, or what, was not moved? The Haitian revolution, legendarily initiated at the voodoo ceremony of Bois Caiman, developing into the genocide of Saint-Domingue’s European population, most of whom did not own slaves, suggests a cryptic explanation. According to the Haitian houngan Jean Daniel-Lafontant, delegates at Bois Caiman included Africans, Amerindians and Europeans, and Freemasons, whose most illustrious Haitian member remains the plantation owner Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the voodoo gods themselves.

Cussans places the origin of the Zombie “in the displaced African religion secretly forged by slaves under the execrable conditions of the colonial plantation economy” but voodoo isn’t only African, but a syncretic composite which fuses African feitizo with Amerindian rituals and European occultism (Martinez de Pasqually, the legendary founder of Martinism, is rumored to have died in pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue) and there’s no evidence it was created on plantations. Lafontan points out that zombies are found in Amerindian mythology, and not in Africa, and that the deeper that a traveller journeys into the interior of Haiti, where the blood of Taino remnants mixed with the blood of escaped slaves, the more ‘American’ and primitive the ceremonies become.

“History,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “is our myth,” but what creates the myth, and who are we? Suppose that the voodoo gods, or lwa, or entities resembling their descriptions, reach into our dimension and demand things, possess human beings and compel behaviors, including speech, or transatlantic quests, for their own aims, what would that look like? Land’s “right-wing Marxist” theory of accelerationism enters the story at this point as a theory of a Capitalist Lwa, on an adventure of intelligence, beyond the sunset of the human brain and human time.

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-of…

As in voodoo, the dimension of the dead and the Lwa is a parallel reality which penetrates our own erratically, and the questions from this point of view are different. What is the relation, and/or the possibilities of negotiation, between the Lwa and the Haitians, and the Taino, and the Europeans, capital and humanity, or any viral or memetic form of life, and the human bodies, i.e. us, which convert them to political arrangements?

“I thought that I was seeing zombies,” remarks a character in a forgotten film.