Vampires and Desire

I have often wondered at the ongoing fascination with the Vampire. One could offer a simple analysis, that vampires inspire our dreams of immortality and beauty, of desire unbridled, of the beast that transcends the limitations of the human body -- much as the superhero does. But is there something more in the vampire narrative? Does the story relate to a deeper desire, just as Frankstein's monster augurs a fear of modernity and the forward march of technology and reason? I wonder at times if the vampire story differs from other monster tales, where irrationality is confronted and overcome -- often my science and technology, in that we find ourselves routing for the vampire. What is the deeper psychology of this relationship? I sometimes believe it is the deeper desire in humans for the antimodern subjectivity, where we escape the strictures of modern society -- the family, the church and capitalism itself. Rather than capital accumulation and romantic love, the vampire exists but to feed, to suck the life out of experience and return to the baseness of human existence (in a non-human form). Is the vampire channeling our deeper desire to find a way out of the modern, capitalist world of rationality, exploitation and domination and control? Does the vampire not only offer us eternality, but escape from religion, the administered society and notions of progress that seem to really only offer alienation and lack? The vampire is not our superego, or even our ego, but the unbridled desire of our id instantiated in the real. They live in an almost Hobbesian world of chaos and violence, but backed by the charismatic quality of Weber to rule over those who seek to sublimate it.

What is interesting, if I'm on the right track, is the way that Twilight has altered this dynamic. The "good" vampires of the narrative in fact fold back into modern human society. They sublimate their desire for blood, their very raison d'etre. They sublimate their rejection of social mores by "playing human," simply so they can live in human society rather than among their own -- without any real reason proffered for the choice. The celebration of the vampire here is as a beautiful ubermensch that has rejected its proximity to the world of nature (and Nietzsche's incantation to bridge that false dichotomy) even as it continues to rein over it. The vampires here want to be part of human society, particularly Edward who desires marriage and romantic love rather than feeding on his deeper desire. In fact, even this desire for human social normativity requires the ultimate sublimation -- in that his love for Bella is backed by an almost uncontrollable hunger for her blood. One wonders if this augurs the further cooptation of a form of resistance into the fold, a further move toward a world where every alternative is simply a false desire to escape the new "common sense" and its accompanying subjectivity. One can also see this changing nature of the vampire in 28 Days, where the vampire has lost all of its proximity to the human, and like the witch-hunts of Salem, implies that all forms of resistance must be contained, thus reinforcing the normative, even as it is critiqued. Yet I cannot help but think that those outsides, even as they are tamed, continue to dominate the creative imagination because of our own deeper neurotic relationship to the world order we live in and the pathology not only of death but of the sublimation of our very humanity into a rationality that appears to exist above us even as it exists within our own bodies, repeated over and over again though the body burst outward for an alternative.