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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Book | Chapter

187711

From Bateman to rat man

American Psycho's unnatural selections

Doug Haynes

pp. 781-801

Abstract

This chapter reads Bret Easton Ellis's slasher satire American Psycho (1991) as a novel about the displacement of affects in capitalism. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology alongside writers on economy and psychoanalysis, this chapter investigates how structures of feeling in the finance economy of the narrative are both symptomatic and constitutive of the capital relationship—hiding the truth as well as facilitating lies. Patrick Bateman, Ellis's financier protagonist and serial killer, becomes the horror hidden in plain sight that we all experience and yet repress in our everyday world.

Publication details

Published in:

Blake Thomas (2017) The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 781-801

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_30

Full citation:

Haynes Doug (2017) „From Bateman to rat man: American Psycho's unnatural selections“, In: T. Blake (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Dordrecht, Springer, 781–801.