THE LAST DESK: ZOMBIE WRITERS AND WRITING, AND THE ACADEMIC GHOSTS OF MEMORY

Writing, including academic writing, exists in and from a place and a context. The writer’s place, and the objects populating it, can be memorialized through tourism or discarded in a dumpster after death. This article probes ‘the Last Desk,’ the final writing location of a writer. A desk is the conduit for how a body writes. But how is this desk remembered or forgotten? Deploying Derrida’s hauntology, this article offers a theorization of absence, loss, and the ghosts that dance around writing after the (post)Barthesian death of the author. The death of the author’s body leaves fragments, shards, and scraps of zombie writing that are not alive, but continues to move.