VON DER AUFKL RUNG DES VAMPIRISMUS

In the first part of this essay, I shall sketch the debate about vampirism during the age of Enlightenmenthistorically, while in the second part, I will interpret this debate philosophically. The historicalreconstruction mainly relies on Gábor Klaniczay’s brilliant essay The Decline of Witches and the Rise ofVampires in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy. My purpose, however, is different from thatof Klaniczay. While he is interested in the connection between the decline of witches and the rise ofvampires in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg monarchy, I am interested in the relationship between theperformances of vampirism in Eastern European countries, and their theoretical responses in WesternEurope. In the second, philosophical part of this essay, I shall read this whole phenomenon of vampirism,both in the Western European theoretical debate and in Eastern European performances, as a symptom,behind which I see an entirely different discourse at work: the power struggle between the old faculty oftheology, and the new faculty of medicine. I argue here that Western European Enlightenment vampirismtransforms into medical Enlightenment vampirism, and that the Eastern European peoples criticizedprecisely this through their actual performances of vampirism. Thus, the debate about vampirism actuallyconceals the dialectics of the Enlightenment. Looking back from the present, we are surprised to find thatperhaps Western European scholars with their allegedly enlightened knowledge were not the ones whohad the final say, but, on the contrary, the Eastern European peoples with their popular beliefs.