Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

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been attacked on that level, and it was definitely scary. Everybody was scared, and the
future was uncertain. It was definitely on my mind.” One of the most unsettling aspects
of these attacks was how vehicles requiring special knowledge to operate were
transformed into missiles. Despite precautions taken to prevent accidental loss of life,
these planes were re-purposed by terrorists and used to kill intentionally—even making
unwilling passengers agents in the process. States of normalcy were manipulated through
the concealment of identity and malevolent intentions in order to kill ordinary people
with no military affiliations. The resulting devastation eliminated the ability for many
who lived through it to feel completely safe or protected. Similarly, uncertainty exists
and grows throughout The Walking Dead. To understand how faith and sanity deteriorate,
I first want to examine the types of acts and conditions which cause such extreme
transformations of ideals and perceptions.
Philosopher Adriana Cavarero works through a related examination of the impact
of such violence in her book Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. In this text,
Cavarero examines the effects that witnessing extreme instances of violence and
symbolic representations of these acts have upon individual subjects. She is not
concerned with experiences of violence that victims or witnesses can heal from; rather
she works to name a type of force which attacks the helpless and, once experienced,
totally alters the identity of the individual who has undergone its effects. Even more
specifically, she is concerned with tackling the emergence of a relatively new type of
violence which appeared in the midst of September 11 th , 2001 in the form of suicide
bombers. Horrorism is restricted to defining a type of violence which operates as a result
of the following circumstances: the body of is transformed into a weapon used to destroy