This article argues that vampiric trauma in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in its horror, endless repetitions, paradoxical structure, and apocalyptic potentialities, constitutes an allegorical site for exploring complex epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical aporias that beset and haunt modern life in a postatrocity imaginary. Reading the operation of trauma in Stoker’s vampiric text with and against the claims of cultural trauma theory, I argue first that the novel re-presents traumatic experiences as unspeakable at the individual level, but possible to recover and communicate at the collective level. Second, Stoker’s novel shows not only the limits and impossibility of witnessing, as Giorgio Agamben surmises, but the inhuman potentiality of testimonies that ultimately mutilate the victims and condemn their sacred memories to oblivion. And finally, the novel reconfigures the radical alterity of the vampiric Other within the specific dialectic of perverse pleasure, allowing for the reinscription of the vampire at the same level of representation in the specular space of the mirror, and articulates a sense of ethical responsibility for the persecutory Other.

In this article, I argue that Richard Matheson's (1954) vampire novella, I Am Legend, encodes the protagonist's, Robert Neville, traumatic recognition of his queer sexuality in its monstrosity (the unspeakability of male penetrability). Neville's identification with and desire for his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, are symbolically codified through three different registers: intertextual references to vampiric conventions and codes, the semiotics of queer subculture, and a structure of doubling that links Neville to the queer vampire. Although Neville avoids encountering his unspeakable queer desire, which could be represented only at the level of the Lacanian Real, he must still confront Cortman's obsessive exhortations for him to come out. Only when he symbolically codifies his abnormality in its own monstrosity, by viewing himself through mutant vampires' eyes, can Neville reconfigure the ethical relationship between self and other, humans and mutant humans-vampires. However progressive Matheson's novella is in its advocacy of minority sexual rights, it still renders capitalism's problematic relationship with queer subjectivity invisible. Although capitalism overdetermines every aspect of the social field and makes Neville's daily life possible in its surplus enjoyment, the fundamental antagonism (class struggle) in capitalism is obscured by the assertion of identity politics.

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This article argues that Banksy’s new controversial project, the Walled Off installation-hotel, in Bethlehem, Palestine, can be productively interrogated in terms of what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘architectural parallax’, as a site where the fundamental antagonism (the class struggle) in the context of the Palestinian struggle for freedom is played out. Structured around a few major architectural contradictions, Banksy’s new project in Bethlehem raises critical questions about the contradictions of post-Oslo Palestine within the neoliberal economic realities of the global capitalist system. The Walled Off hotel thus exposes the contradictions or ideological discrepancy between, on the one hand, the free mobility of ideas and capital which made such an installation-hotel possible in the first place, and on the other, the restrictions on the mobility of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation and Zionist settler-colonial regime. As an architectural parallax, Banksy’s Walled Off hotel inscribes the Palestinian struggle for freedom within a radical egalitarian dimension, that Žižek refers to after Hegel as ‘concrete universality’. This allows first, for recognizing the immanent universal dimension at the core of Palestinian particular identity. Second, it makes it possible to link the Palestinian struggle for freedom to other struggles around the world not simply by drawing parallels between them around identity politics, but as the obverse sides of the same class struggle that cuts through various disposable communities and nations within the neoliberal global capitalist system.