If I Stay with You, I Am Rooted, but I Flow: On Discursive Love Between a Vampire and a Saint

Abstract

Through the impossible love story between the eccentric Christian mystic saint and the vampire, contagious muse of folklore and horror erotica, this text addresses the liminal stages of cultural existence and proposes to reimagine love and passion. Virgin Saint, in burning desire for Jesus, was the typical Christian model of the sublime devotional lover for centuries, and only recently has come to be regarded as mentally ill. Meanwhile, Vampire who is now mostly seen as a fictional character, was considered real participant of the social fabric for millennia throughout civilisations. This text emerges as an attempt to study and to intimately relate to historical, cultural and discursive others. Trespassing the boundaries between historical, fictitious and autobiographical realities, it proposes to exercise and practice discursive lineages of passion through transchronological intimacy.