![]() ![]() Batman's exploration of the Asylum is symbolic of the legal unconscious, and reflects the processes of repression that can be seen in dominant legal knowledge. Reading Arkham Asylum jurisprudentially, we encounter a story of the meeting of reason and unreason in the context of justice – of conscious law and its unconscious threat. This aestheticized violence, augmented by slow motion, 3-D effects provides relief from the film’s pervading sense of claustrophobia and urban overcrowding, supplying what I read as the suppressed wish-fulfilment of a hegemonic white, male and middle-class subjectivity in the context of diminished material security brought about by global capitalism. Though the film makes superficial gestures toward diversity and affirmative action, a sustained state of emergency allows for the liquidation of racialized segments of the population under the pretext of “saving” citizens from the rule of a gang of drug dealers. ![]() Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Foucault's and Agamben’s theorizations of biopolitics, and Eric Cazdyn's concept of “bioeconomics,” I offer the 2012 sci-fi film Dredd 3-D as an example of how the zombie imaginary uses racialized and gendered violence to manage negative affects associated with neoliberal austerity and global geopolitics. The zombie imaginary is a contemporary ideological construct by which political, economic and systemic issues are coded into the language of population and projected onto manageable and often disposable, racialized and gendered bodies. ![]()
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