Vampire: Speciation as Immortality

Behold the vampire, with lowercase v, the successful speciation of the hermaphrodite, the sexual composite, the double-sexed. Silent, through the nocturnal mist, the vampire approaches. The neck, the victim’s neck: flesh whole and unblemished. It is pierced, penetrated by the phallic teeth of the Vampire: new holes, a phallus penetrating orifices of its own making regardless of sex or gender: the vampire’s teeth penetrate all. This is the vampire: walking womb, birthing its own immortality, birthing itself again and again. Cronos, Saturn is immortal, is time itself, consuming his begotten sons, absorbing their lives, their time.

Cronos is the progenitor of vampires’ mode of reproduction even though he lacked the latter’s internal engine of recreation/rebirth. The vampire is the dream of the hermaphrodite, it is the hermaphrodite become productive, reproductive, a species onto itself. No longer the accident, impotent and monstrous, site of oracles, the hermaphrodite dreams the eternally reproducing bloodsucker, becomes vamphyr.

The vampire starts as a composite, as all our monsters do. A composite of the sexes, deterritorialized into their most basic functions. The womb-body and the phallus-fangs are both necessary organs/organizations and yet it is true that the vampire is mostly fangs and phallic invasion. In popular imagination, the vampire is seen from the outside, as a menace and a parasite, as necessarily phallic and penetrating; it is seen on human terms, but on its own terms, it is just as much a womb, just as much a gestating process of the self.

The phallus escapes the genital organization to become piercing fangs, drawing the blood of all sexes while the body becomes womb entire, birthing the offspring that is the life of the vampire. A double function, a double sexuality that would approach asexual reproduction were it not for its parasitism on the blood of the human herds. Fresh blood is always welcome, for nothing comes from nothing and there is always a parasite and a host. That the vampire is two formed into ONE is much more evident in the East Asian variety. The Kyuketski’s1 head and neck, plus some entrails, detach themselves from the body at night and go hunting for blood, returning only at dawn. The piercing phallus-fang and the reproducing womb-body are the two functions of the vampire, the abstracted forms of a double sexuality.

In the Gothic-romantic novels of the Stoker tradition, the vampire is often also a composite of a couple, of lovers, heterosexual at first. Dracula is Vlad, joined to his bride even after her death; undead, he bridges the chasms of mortality and sexuality while Mina would finish her speciation only after the death and incorporation of her fiancé. Just as the dead Grandmother and the living Grandson are turned into one in a serial killer’s attempt at becoming the Great Red Dragon2, the vampire is also the composition of two individuals becoming a ONE. The vampire is at first the integration of a heterosexual couple, one alive, one dead, into an undead species of dual sexuality that is no longer bound by heteronormative sexuality or reproduction, free to choose men or women, as Dracula cavorts with Harker before setting his eyes on his fiancé.3

Now undead, now multi-sexed, post-sexual, the vampire’s body is the crucible of its own creation, desiring itself through the blood of others. The Church is the natural enemy of the sexually “deviant” creature that is the vamphyr, taking measures to put it to rest in one grave or another, one sex or another, one gender role or another. The stake through the heart that circulates the lifeblood is not nearly enough to exorcise the vampire without the coercive power of the cross that dictates its rule of the quartet, the grid-cross.

Having become a vampire, the composite possesses a new form of desire. Since the parasitic need of the vampire is for blood, which it attains through the phallus-fang, its desire becomes detached from the “victim’s” gender. Holes, interface sockets for the fangs are created, not found, not specialized. It is the sublimated craving for blood that is at the center of the vampire’s desire, for there is such a thing as vampiric desire. It does not, however, follow heteronormative delineations for it is of a different species from humanity. Each vampire is a species onto itself: there is no vampire-on-vampire sex.

Herodot’s Slave Revolt: Failed Individuation

There is a peculiar story among the classics, the story of the Scythians and their slaves narrated by Herodotus in the 4th book of his Histories. This is a story of an attempt at rebirth, of speciation, of monstrous auto-genesis; whether it ends with success or failure we shall see.

According to Herodotus, the Scythians leave their town to give chase to some foes and it will be 28 years before they will get back to their native country. In the meantime, their slaves mingle with the women, also left behind, and the result of this union is a new “generation of young men who, having learned the manner of their birth set themselves to oppose the Scythians as they were returning from the Medes”. What happens next is rather well-known: the Scythians fight these young men for some time but cannot gain the upper hand, and then one of the former lords of the town is struck by an idea, telling the others:

What a thing is this that we are doing, Scythians! We are fighting against our own slaves, and we are not only becoming fewer in number ourselves by being slain in battle, but also we are killing them, and so we shall have fewer to rule over in future. Now therefore to me it seems good that we leave spears and bows and that each one take his horse-whip and so go up close to them: for so long as they saw us with arms in our hands, they thought themselves equal to us and of equal birth; but when they shall see that we have whips instead of arms, they will perceive that they are our slaves, and having acknowledged this they will not await our onset.

Herodotus, Histories Vol. IV

And this they do and the young men, the new generation, flee before the enemy who is now no longer the enemy but has become the “master”. This is a tale of a tragic failed attempt at rebirth, at genesis; the story of an individuation that, failing, collapses back onto the preexisting order of things.

The Scythians, according to Herodotus, physically mark their slaves. Thus the original slave is a body already monstrous and fragmented, rendered thus by the hot iron rods the Scythians use to blind and disfigure their slaves, marking their bodies as being of a different species. Yet the slave is placed in the order of things: the “slaves” and the “warriors”, two established species, two architecture of life. It is with the next generation that true monstrosity appears. A people without name, a generation born of slaves and “free” women4 and yet not blinded, not disfigured; not slaves but also not Scythian warriors. So far, only an architecture of negatives, of not-things.

We are not told about their attempts at genesis, about whether or not they dreamed of, projected, a new body, but in the act of their opposition to the former masters there is a core of rebirth, of individuation, of identity in the making. It fails, however, as the new body being created collapses back into the dual structure of the world, into the preexisting order of things. The revolt remains a revolt, fails to become a revolution, to form a new whole, a ONE.

Yet the tale could also be read another way. The sons are the dream body of the slaves left alone to procreate with the women (who do not have a place, their role is in between, a threshold, neither Scythian warriors nor blind slaves): two monstrosities giving birth to a projected full body. The slave imagines and re-produces himself in the new body of a generation of Sons that will come to rise up and institute a new system, a new body-politic. This “generation of young men” is the unified projection and uniting image/body of the blind slaves, which will then have to be inscribed via the violence which is to be directed at the body of the Scythians, the previous order, the world as it exists.

Whether the sons fail or the fathers fail is of little consequence in the end, for the end is the collapse of the new individual, the full body. It is an ending akin to the final moments in Lovecraft’s tale of horror, From Beyond: the Scythians realize that the youth attacking them as a united and full body is merely the projection of the corporeality of the slaves which now dissimulate themselves to a mere interface that was there only to facilitate the emergence of these new generation. Just as the protagonist in From Beyond, the Scythians wise up to the real source of the projection, to the corporeal composition behind the unified image before them and turn to fight it with the appropriate weapon or strategy: if these are just phantoms formed by the slaves, then it is the slave in them that must be overcome. The whips cut through the gelatinous image of this generation to the slave within, pretending to be a mere threshold.

The new generation does not succeed in inscribing itself on the body of the Scythians and onto the social memory and so does not manage to lay claim to a proper name that would distinguish it and place it in the prehistory of Truth. No Truth emerges since they failed in the violent act that was to make of them a law and a truth outside time and inside memory.

Later we will see a successful instance of such inscription via violence when we look at the figure of the monstrous in the Manga Berserk. We will also analyze another architecture of auto-genesis in the form of the Japanese genre of Mahou Shoujo or Magical Girl. An architecture of dual composites that transforms into an individual and a species, the Magical Girl is the genesis of the preteen girl.

1. The Kyuketski is a Japanese/Chinese folklore monster whose head, attached to entrails, detaches from the body at night to go hunting for blood, retiring to the body by day.↩
2. See Harris’ Red Dragon, part of the Hannibal Lecter series.↩
3. See also Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic adaptation as well as the film Dracula Untold. The old Peter Cushing flicks also provide ample examples of this lovers’ crucible.↩
4. Themselves a monstrosity, neither free nor blinded slaves…↩