In The Vampire Lectures (University of Minnesota Press),
theoretical
iconoclast Laurence A. Rickels gives readers a look into his wildly
popular
class on vampire culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rickels' lectures are full of goofy double entendres and Freudian
"slips"
that give the material an endearingly soft, fuzzy edge.
He discusses Bram Stoker's Dracula as a novel about circulation
(of blood and money) and a journey, both into and away from ourselves.
Citing references as diverse as Polanski's The Fearless Vampire
Killers, Karl Marx, Catherine
Deneuve in The Hunger, Sigmund Freud, the Internet, and Andy
Warhol,
Rickels traces the vampire back to an urge to move across.
("Transylvania is
a place entirely of the 'trans.'")
Rickels illuminates contemporary culture's fascination with vampirism by
placing it in the context of AIDS, which signaled a moment where "death
was back in sex, with sex, and as big as, if not bigger than sex."
He locates the vampire on the margins of psychoanalytic theories of
mourning and sees the
undead as a frequently used analogy for mourning and the difficulties we
have accepting death.
It's no wonder Rickels' class was such a hit. The material is
entertaining,
and Rickels, a practicing psychoanalyst and professor of German
literature,
is a very good communicator. But don't let the easygoing manner in which
these lectures are written fool you: The Vampire Lectures is a
feat of
scholarship. OK, sometimes Rickels is reaching, but overall this is a
very
tasty morsel with which to feed your head.
Recent Articles
Movies
