Cyberkill: Melancholia, Globalization and Media Terrorism in American Psycho and Glamorama

TLDR: This article examined the relationship between violence, global space and political subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Glamorama and found that these somewhat disparate narratives share an aesthetic logic of violence and global space, a logic based on a metaphorical equation between bodily violence and descriptive discourse.

Abstract: T essay examines the relationship between violence, global space and political subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Glamorama. By analyzing the depictions of violence in these novels, I want to theorize an aesthetic of globalization and a corresponding figuration of subjectivity that I see in a number of particularly brutal postmodern narratives including popular horror films on the order of Eli Roth’s Hostel, James Wan’s Saw and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and literary texts such as J. G. Ballard’s fiction and Cormac McCarthy’s recent novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road. What these somewhat disparate narratives share is an aesthetic logic of violence and global space I’m calling rendering, a logic based on a metaphorical equation between bodily violence and descriptive discourse. In order to capture this equation, my pun on rendering is meant to refer, on one hand, to the discursive act of constructing a representation and, on the other hand, to the visceral act of processing a carcass for consumption. In this double sense, both painting and butchering are rendering. Indeed, the visceral sense of rendering, i.e. the physical butchering of a body, points toward the symbolic commodification of said body as meat. That is to say, the bodily register of the term gestures toward the discursive register and vice versa. As an aesthetic phenomenon at work in Ellis’s fiction, then, this metaphorical equation of the visceral and the discursive—an equation I am terming rendering—articulates an abstract space of globalization and a melancholic subject homologous to this global space.