Abstract
In the wake of the economic crisis of 2007 caused by an overvaluation of assets in the American banking system, American Psycho has gained significance among its critics for its specific political and economic context, as both a cultural document and a prophetic allegory. The book functions at two levels, which are central to Ellis’s act of underwriting. It documents the repression at work in the commodity society of the 1980s, the merging of the subject with the economic apparatus shown in Price’s definition of himself at the outset of the novel: “I;’m resourceful… I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset— (AP, 3). Set at the end of the eighties, the novel disinters how this subject-apparatus merger resulted in the liquidation of subjectivity. On a more micro and culturally specific level, the book critiques the cultural milieu of New York in the 1980s through subverting the icon of the city’s prosperity: the Wall Street banker.
What keeps mankind alive?. The fact that millions
Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
For once you must not try to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by its bestial acts.
—Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera1
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Notes
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera in Brecht: Collected Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1998), 145.
Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 130.
Mailer perceived the greatest intellectual damage that could be inflicted by the novel as being the possible reinforcement of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. He states: “It is the banality of Patrick Bateman that creates his hold over the reader and gives this ugly work its force. For if Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic. The extension of Hannah Arendt’s thesis is that we are absurd, and God and the Devil do not wage war with each other over the human outcome. I would rather believe that the Holocaust was the worst defeat God ever suffered at the hands of the Devil. That thought offers more life than to assume that many of us are nothing but dangerous, distorted and no damn good.” For this reason Mailer states “I cannot forgive Bret Easton Ellis.” See Norman Mailer’s “Children of the Pied Piper: a Review of American Psycho” in Vanity Fair, (Fall 1991), reprinted, in The Time of Our Time. London: Little Brown, 1998; 1077.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 218.
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Story and Scandal’in The Book To Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 190.
Naomi Mandel, ‘“Right here in nowheres”: American Psycho and Violence’s Critique’ in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 9–20. Mandel performs a brilliant critique of both violence in the novels and the discussions of violence in the novel by Marco Abel and Carla Freccero’s essay, “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics 27.2 (1997); 44–8.
While this chapter refers to the novel’s references to Reaganism as a way of articulating one mode of Ellis’s underwriting in the novel, it also fully adheres to Marco Abel’s astute understanding of the critical cost of viewing the novel simply “as a satire of the immoral materialist excesses of Reaganomics.” Abel, “Judgment is not an Exit,” 38. Approaching the novel through Deleuze’s concept of “symptomatology,” Abel addresses the problems of judgment in the critical reception of American Psycho. While I agree with Abel that to see the novel as simply a satire on Reagonomics is somewhat reductive, my interpretation constitutes a departure from Abel’s purely aesthetic reading of the book. I regard Ellis’s aesthetic practice of underwriting in terms of an example of what Rancière’s understands to be aesthetic practices: “forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ways of ‘doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of invisibility.” See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.
Joan Didion, “New York” in Sentimental Journeys (London: Flamingo, 1992), 255.
For an excellent study that interrogates the relationship between the serial killer and contemporary American culture see Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (London: Routledge, 1998).
For a brilliant study of the culture wars, see Richard Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992).
Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), xiii.
It is worth acknowledging Althusser’s objection to the “fashionable theory of ‘reification’ ” that Martin Jay points out in his introduction to Honneth’s lectures. Jay cites Althusser’s footnote in For Marx in which Althusser criticizes the reduction that takes place in what Althusser regards as the “projection of the theory of alienation found in the early texts, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, on to the theory of ‘fetishism’ in Capital!” “In the 1844 Manuscripts” Althusser remarks, “the objectification of the human essence is claimed as the indispensable preliminary to the reappropriation of the human essence by man. Throughout the process of objectification, man only exists in the form of an objectivity in which he meets his own essence in the appearance of a non-human, essence. This objectification is not called ‘reification’ even though it is called inhuman. Inhumanity is not represented par excellence by the model of a ‘thing’ “. Thus for Althusser” An ideology of reification that sees ‘things’ everywhere in human relations confuses in this category ‘thing’ (a category more foreign to Marx cannot be imagined) every social relation, conceived according to the model of a money-thing ideology.” See Martin Jay’s ‘Introduction’ to Reification: A New Look t an Old Idea, 12; Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 230.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the State” (1969) in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 2.
Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, translated, edited, and Introduction by Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971): 69–87.
Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 6.
Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992), 164.
See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno, translated by Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 89. Here the translator adds a note explaining “of souls who lost the good of intellect That is, those souls who have lost sight of the Summum Bonum, the’ supreme Good,’ or God.”
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 20.
Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation, (Hammondsworth: Pelican, 1972), 15.
Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 118.
Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), xiii.
Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structures, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1965), 2.
For a brilliant recent study on homosexuality in American Psycho, see Berthold Schoene, “Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho”in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54. no. 2 (2008), 378–97.
Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea For Ethical Violence” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 177.
Nancy J. Chodorow, “Hate, Humiliation and Masculinity,” in Violence or Dialogue’? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, edited by Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Volkan (London: The International Psychoanalytical Association, 2003), 102.
Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004), 172.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, (London: Verso, 1999), 159.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 32–33.
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© 2011 Georgina Colby
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Colby, G. (2011). An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence, and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho . In: Bret Easton Ellis. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_3
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