From Bateman to rat man
American Psycho's unnatural selections
pp. 781-801
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
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.