Laurence Rickels: All You Vampires

The title “All You Vampires” summarizes the drift of the presentation by tampering with the title of Robert Heinlein’s time-travel story “All You Zombies” and placing the vampire in the seat of sole survivor (and mourner). To this end I attend to the origin story of the living dead, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. The contest that reopened at the start of the new millennium between identification with the undead and thrill-a-kill consumerism of the living dead also rereleased but did not contain the prospect of psychopathic violence, of the psycho as our near-miss double at close quarters, which slasher and splatter movies carried out unto therapeutic termination by the 1990s, but which at the time of vampirism’s return to a culture industry monopolized by zombieism found a new setting in infernal torture-testing (the Saw franchise). In the second part of the presentation I explore the import of science fiction in the US reception of Dracula, a mix that in fact gave rise to the modern zombie. I follow Gotthard Günther’s notion of the New World as the sole continuity shot with the European Enlightenment, which thus affords the staging area for a new intergalactic high culture. The zombie allegorizes a new way of death that cuts loose from the metaphysics of the regional high cultures (last seen in Europe). By the end of the presentation it turns out that I am still within range of my reading of the import of mourning in Matheson’s I Am Legend.