The ‘vegetative part’: Organic and plant life in The Walking Dead

The ‘zombie gaze’ of AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–) signals and elicits the inexorable presence of the ‘vegetative part’ in the human – the uncontrolled organic life that unsettles the very notion of the ‘person’ as well as those political systems founded upon it. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s Third Person (2012) and late eighteenth-century physiologist Xavier Bichat, both of whom argue that humans have a ‘double life’ – our voluntary will inextricably embedded in an involuntary ‘vegetative part’ – I argue that the characters of Shane Walsh and Merle Dixon exemplify the ‘organic’ life, the automaticity of the biological. But while Esposito and Bichat use ‘vegetative’ metaphorically, in Season 4, The Walking Dead begins to explore the more literal ‘vegetal life’ of and surrounding the human, suggesting humans’ proximity not just to the ‘guts’ that mark the presence of the organic but also to plants that signal the ‘vegetative part’. The series thus asks what it might mean, in the words of philosopher Michael Marder, to think of ‘the constitutive vegetal otherness in ourselves’.