‘Nothing is Real, Everything is Permitted’: The Vampire and the Politics of Jouissance

Abstract

This chapter examines in greater depth a theme introduced in Chapters 2 and 3: this is the relation between what Girard calls ‘sacrificial crisis’ and an economy that transforms the impulse towards mimetic violence into the desire to consume. In Žižekian terms, this generates the demand for excessive, obscene enjoyment – for what Žižek terms ‘impossible jouissance’. In its drive to ensure its own infinite, immortal self-perpetuation, capital shifts the entire orientation of the Symbolic Law from the command ‘Thou shalt not!’ to the command ‘Enjoy’! This chapter relates a ‘vampiric’ politics of jouissance to a range of contemporary narratives: The Vampire Diaries and The Twilight Saga, and to The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood.