Photography phantomized painting, as it were, transforming it into a ghost, a specter that could only be kept alive by means of artificial infusions. Media as doubling machines are vampires. The new media always claim to replace the old media. Not being able to see and recognize oneself in a mirror means not being one with oneself. But in the myth of Narcissus, as soon as I see myself in the mirror, I am lost.
Vampirism is thus also a modified myth of self-love, narcissism.
This is why the vampire, the phantom, is a signifier of absence. This is why we prefer encountering and thus losing ourselves in the other. While doubling expresses the fear of castration and absence, it also implies them. This is like the head of the Medusa, the myth of the castration complex, where the great number of snakes on the head conceals the fact that the one decisive snake is missing. He duplicates the motif in the way that the snakes on Medusa's head are multiplied so as to hide the fact that the one decisive snake is missing.