The Vampire

Alright, so there is a confusion of categories: adolescent-rebel, adult-bourgeois, maturity-respectability. But why, as a child of the bourgeoisie, should I care? Why not just bite the bullet and become bourgeois?

As mentioned earlier, I have a mysterious incapacity to take this step; maybe if I could I would. But there is also something about bourgeoisdom that troubles me. It seems to me that there is no escape from it, that nowhere, or almost nowhere, could I find a group of people that does not hold its values and aspirations, that would not judge me a failure because I have failed to be bourgeois. It is almost as if the bourgeoisie is no longer merely a class but something more abstract.

Several years ago, a friend sent me an excerpt he had translated from a 1968 essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which Pasolini discusses the bourgeoisie in a manner that introduced a whole new category into my thinking, a category which has since come to seem essential to understanding the world I live in. Here is the excerpt:

I will often speak violently against the borghesia [the bourgeoisie], in fact, this will be the central theme of my weekly columns. And I understand very well that the reader will be “taken aback” by this fury of mine; well, what is going on here will become clear once I specify that by borghesia I do not mean a social class so much as a disease in every sense of the word. A very contagious disease, so much so that it has infected nearly everyone who fights against it – from the Northern workers, to the workers who have emigrated from the South, to the borghesi opposing the government, to the ‘isolated individuals’ (like me). The borghese – let’s describe the phenomenon playfully – is a vampire, who doesn’t find peace until he bites his victim on the neck out of pure, simple, and natural enjoyment at seeing the victim turn pallid, unhappy, ugly, devitalized, contorted, corrupt, restless, full of a sense of guilt, calculating, aggressive, terroristic, just like him.
        How many workers, how many intellectuals, how many students have been bitten by night by this vampire, and without knowing it, are becoming vampires themselves!
[…]
        From my solitude as a citizen, I will therefore attempt to analyze this ‘borghesia’ as an evil wherever it is found – meaning, by now, nearly everywhere (this is a more ‘lively’ way of stating that the borghese ‘system’ is capable of absorbing every contradiction – in fact, it creates the contradictions itself, as Lukács says, in order to survive by overcoming them).