The secular sacred: sex, transgression and the numinous in popular vampire fiction

Abstract

This thesis explores the uncanny modalities of erotic affect in vampire literature and film, presenting the vampire as a popular cultural version of transgressive human sovereignty. My theoretical trajectory interfaces literary, cinematic, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, and emerges from an initial overview of twentieth century cultural contexts for discussing the secular sacred. Although I engage with psychoanalysis, I have not merely extended the long history of psychoanalytic interpretations of the vampiric. Rather, I seek to test its application for a body of literature and film which celebrates Plenitude. I also consider the dynamics of Lack and Plenitude via the perspectives on transgression and sovereign human agency offered by continental philosophy.

I will situate my study of this popular form within the history of the genre, debates on the status of the popular, and theoretical perspectives on transgression. Subsequent chapters explore vampiric transgression's particular modalities and their articulation in fiction and film. I consider the libertine as sovereign subject and locate transgression at the beginning of modernity. Vampire fiction developed contemporaneously with Sade's concept of transgressive sovereignty. Despite their commonality with libertines, vampires have developed an economy of maintaining ecstasy. I also explore the perverse fantastic and Lacanian notions of supplementary female jouissance by a focus on lesbian vampires by male authors. The textual operations of jouissance in Gothic are addressed as a form of pornography. Masochistic elements are highlighted in the work of Freud and Nietszche as they theorise the numinous excess of eroticism from a materialist frame. The inadequacy of Freudian Oedipality and Lacan's model of originary Lack are indicated by a Nietszche-based reading of vampires as sovereign übermenschen effecting an eternal return in undeath. To explore this condition, a theoretical approach is needed which considers a human-based metaphysics of becoming.

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