We love to categorise everything good and evil, life and death, young and old, light and dark, male and female, land and sea, right and wrong.
This simplifies everything in to manageable chunks allowing us to function. After all with no clear cut understanding of the difference between good and evil right and wrong a police service couldn't exist. The difference between land and sea/sky helps us understand and evaluate our surroundings.
But then things get complicated. You consider these definitions on their own and they make perfect sense but there's always overlap. The death penalty could be one example of this. Is the death of one man justification enough for his execution? What he did by our society's laws is clearly wrong but if we hold his crime of murder to be wrong isn't killing him in turn for it wrong as well?
Structuralism draws rigid lines of binary opposition for which their can be no crossing. According to Ivan and Derrida this creates a grey area, an anomalous zone where the politics of the ideal binary division can be challenged
Ghosts, zombies, minotaurs, centaurs, Frankenstein's monster, pantomime dames and drag acts all exist in this bleak expanse of human philosophy. Physically zombies suffer from necrosis; the cells in their body are dead and cannot function. However they zombies themselves still exhibit some signs of life, the move and walk, they eat (albeit cannibalistically) and to some extent they talk albeit in a very Neanderthal way. We can recognise some of the signs of life in them yet we know they are not alive. Semiotically they almost like babies, moving and eating but not yet distinctly human until they begin talking and forming some semblance of identity and personal thought. Zombies lack any real personality which further puts them into the grey area of indeterminacy. They can't think creatively for themselves, their only thought is to eat, a baser survival instinct present in all forms of life that still doesn't which furthers the idea of them not being human yet also enhances the thought that they are not entirely dead either.
The idea of binary opposition is relative because the idea is based on a political positional viewpoint. Your own ideologies reflect your comprehension of right and wrong which might clash with someone else's viewpoint. This also raises questions about morality and ethics. A person's morality can be un-changing but the way in which they use those morals, the ethics, can be dependent on other sources.
I think the TV show Fringe shows a great example of this grey area crossover (spoiler alert for those who haven't seen season 3). In the series, the barrier between our reality and another reality has been breached by Dr Walter Bishop, in order for him to save the life of the other reality's version of his son peter from an unacknowledged disease. In doing so he begins a war between our reality and the other side. Neither side exhibits typical indicators of a distinctly evil nature like in the Original Star Trek's alternate reality. Here we see the main characters of Spock, Bones, Kirk etc. go from being essentially good characters to being dark abstracts of themselves.
In fringe we see both sides of the story in season three. We get episodes entirely focused on Walternate and the other unreal characters. Here we see they are much like their counterparts, having much the same ideological views of right and wrong. It's political distinction that sets them at odds with each other. Each side sees the other as being the villain and themselves as the hero. As Einstein might say their perception of morality is entirely relative. They are a paradox. Both realities are right, and both are wrong at the same time, a contradiction paradox.
This statement is false. Is it?
The Statement below is false
The Statement above is true.
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