#LOTS of vampire/bourgeoisie comparisons in the 18th century very fun to track back

[transmutationisms]

I just discovered your Succession analysis posts, and I LOVE your vampire and gothic connections. I literally thought I was insane for getting gothic vibes from Succession. Anyway, you vampire posts remind me of this Voltaire quote: " I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces. "

yeah! from the dictionnaire philosophique, right? vampires were all the rage in france in the early eighteenth century, largely fuelled by some reports coming in of them from eastern europe. so i think in the full quote here, voltaire is saying that this is a superstition endemic to the backwards east, whereas he has never encountered vampire myths in paris or london---capitals of the 'enlightenment'---yet the true bloodsucking is actually done by the well-heeled in these cities. marx (among others) later picked up on the metaphor of bourgeoisie as vampires, though by his formulation in das kapital, he had completed the theoretical move of describing the bourgeoisie as nothing more than a personification of capital, and thus described capital itself as vampiric: a dead thing with an insatiable appetite. for marx the metaphor was less moralised and more a way of capturing capital's dialectical transmutation from money to commodity to money again, and from agent to patient to agent of the whole political economy.

anyway this is one of the more reactionary elements of bram stoker's dracula. for stoker, dracula is an anachronism, even an atavism: old nobility, nostalgic about the warfare of bygone days, unable to blend into the bustle of modern england (this latter is also a function of stoker's orientalist view of eastern europe). dracula's appetite for literal blood is also a holdover from a 'pre-industrial' era; he's a creature out of time. this is why vampirism continually confounds the logic of the doctor and the psychiatrist; the only one who understands dracula is van helsing, who’s “a philosopher” (read: doctor in a pre-19th century sense: pre-specialisation, pre-clinical gaze; a man of metaphysics and natural philosophy whose knowledge of the human body is explicitly linked to religiosity). so we have a critique of wealthy people (voltaire) and later the modern value-form of capital itself (marx) as sucking life from the living... and stoker flips that and uses the vampire archetype to implicate only the ancient aristocracy and eastern europeans. quite funny, if irritating.

i think more people could do with reading succession as a gothic, honestly, and when i joined succblr i was surprised that wasn't a more common view. in addition to logan's body as a gothic monster, waystar itself is kind of a looming vampire entity, feeding off the inherent dysfunction of capitalist politics and operating on the logic of legacy media in a digital world. kendall and roman in particular can both function as gothic heroine figures: overwrought emotion, constantly distressed. all of the roy kids are menaced by their father; i've also used the cannibalism metaphor to describe the predation on one generation by its progenitor, but of course this idea of the old consuming the new is also common in gothics. you could even see the glass-and-steel waystar offices as a kind of castle for the 21st century. certainly logan and waystar have the insatiable appetite for expansion that characterises capital and the vampire. this is all a hugely underrated aspect of the show imo!