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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Vampire
• romanticism
• autoimmunization
• love
• sacrifice
• dread
• jacques derrida
• martin hägglund
• soren kierkegaard
• f.w. murnau
• nosferatu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For sacrifice as meal in this religious ceremonial culinary sense, see Klawans [2006, 44].

2. In ancient Greek drama, methexis meant participation or sharing, particularly where the chorus invites the audience to participate in or comment upon the action taking place on the stage (Foster 2015).

3. For the self-negation of the communicative act see Benjamin [1996, 63].

4. For Stimmung see Eisner [1969, 199].

5. For the negativity of desire see Freud’s essay ‘Negation’ (Freud 1984).

6. We do have accounts of the film’s anticipated effects on its audiences in Kaess [2009, 98–99].

7. I am indebted to David Baker for raising this important point with me.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warwick Mules

Warwick Mules is Adjunct Associate-Professor in Film and Media Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University. He is the author of Film Figures: an Organological Approach (forthcoming Bloomsbury), With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy (Intellect 2014), and co-author of Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: a Semiotic Approach (Palgrave 2002), and author of numerous articles on film, art, and visual culture.