Vampiric love: Autoimmunization, Romanticism and sacrifice in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes the concept of vampiric love as love of the dreaded thing. Through an analysis of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, I show how vampiric love is love turned back on itself to threaten the communal bond with its own excess. Through an act of sacrifice, catastrophe is averted and the community saved in leaping from dread to love. Drawing on Derrida’s idea of autoimmunization as well as Hägglund’s idea of secular love, the article examines vampiric love as an autoimmunization of the biopolitical community – an attack upon itself – that exposes the communal organism to death and chance as salvation from dread. The autoimmune process is traced back to Romantic yearning for impossibly lost love and its flipside in Gothic dread in Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre , where the outlines of the autoimmune process can be clearly seen. Employing Kierkegaard’s concept of dread, I undertake an analysis of the sacrificial logic at work in Nosferatu, where dread must be passed through in an awakening of the spirit to possibility; a process enfolded into the performativity of the film itself in an autoimmune attack on its own formal system.