ABSTRACT
The chapter brings together de Manian materiality and blood writing, so that it can examine gothic forms of mediation and communication with a world outside of human perception. Blood inscriptions in gothic novels such as The Monk and Dracula draw attention to writing as an automatic and machinic process controlled by inhuman forces. As attributes of this inhuman materiality, repetition, the mechanical inscription of surfaces and the erasure of interiority are explored in Matthew Lewis and Bram Stoker’s texts in order to uncover a world beyond human experience, where the inorganic and death are not passive but have their own agency. Both novels play with the myth of Faustus, as blood and the body become the means of communication and the message itself. As forms of gothic mediation, blood and other occult media expand our understanding of media beyond that of technological apparata, to include the organic, inorganic and supernatural. The monk and the vampire acquire knowledge and power through inscriptions, only, however, to be inscribed by the law and destroyed.
