On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

“If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,” says Eric Nuzum, author of The Dead Travel Fast. Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted. Some of them go hungry rather than feed on humans, and some of them drink synthetic blood. “Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral,” the journalist Margot Adler observed after immersing herself in vampire novels and vampire television for months after her husband’s death. “It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth,” she reported. “But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.” Power, of course, is vampiric. We enjoy it only because someone else does not. Power is what philosophers would call a positional good, meaning that its value is determined by how much of it one has in comparison to other people. Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well. Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they giv...

Vampires as a metaphor for our interdependence on each other and the lack of any true boundary between our body and those of others…