Conclusion The Blood of the Vampire: Globalisation, Resistance and the Sacred

Abstract

The diversity of a symbolics of blood circulating through different texts and contexts shows the double-edged power of blood to give and take life, and pollute and sanitise racial boundaries and bloodlines, as well as form and destroy the bonds of community. Haemorrhaging from within the body politic and percolating global networks, blood challenges the fixity of boundaries while at the same time creating caesuras within populations, and resuscitating the corpses of old hierarchies and racial categories. While its liquidity and mobility are symbolic of the very conditions that make possible the movement of postmodern anti-essentialist discourses, identities and differences, at the same time such circulations of differences and commodities multiply within the world market. As blood transmits and generates new identities, infecting life with germs of possibility, such a viral potential is easily tamed and consumed by the mouth of the vampire capital. At other times, dangerous becomings and the flows of metamorphosis are equally prevented through prophylactic measures that immunise communities against the threat of difference. Meanings of blood bleed into one another, colouring our attitudes about subjective, corporeal, national and transnational boundaries.