It is very rare that sinological research influences contemporary European philosophy. Sexual Life in Ancient China by Robert van Gulik is a remarkable exception. During his research in the Chinese ars erotica he coined the term "sexual vampirism" to describe certain practices within Taoist sexual cultivation. Thereby he incited a still ongoing scholarly debate. Van Gulik was shocked by what he perceived as a vampirist tendency within Taoist erotics. His serious doubts about some sexual applications of Taoist energetics obviously have ethical implications, which provoke reflections upon the relation between ethics and energetics within the field of selfcultivation. At this point the Chinese art of the bedchamber becomes a philosophical problem. This paper begins from the idea of sexual vampirism and goes through its astonishing interpretation by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, to a discussion of how Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze use the supposed difference between East and West to open up enlightening meditations on the relation between energie (force) and the self, thereby revealing the significance of a certain "energetic vampirism" for contemporary philosophy.