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asic material satisfaction but for perpetual excess and inhuman
ends.
Thus, according to Walker’s initial reading of Bataille and Foucault, it would seem that
Ellis’ novel is indeed “transgressive” at both ends. However, in an exact reflection of the
discussion in Chapter Two, Walker fittingly argues that Foucault’s conceptualization of
“transgression” is detached from anything that is “scandalous” or “subversive” and that it
does not offer any form of social commentary in the way that Ellis’ novel does. In other
words, American Psycho is not transgressive in the Foucauldian sense because it is a
satire of consumer society and that consequently, it is aware of the “limit” it transgresses.
185
Interestingly, this observation prompts Walker to draw a parallel between the
Bataille-Foucault paradigm of ‘pure’ transgression and the Barthesian distinction
between the “text of pleasure” and “text of bliss,” or the subsequent categorical binaries
of “readerly texts” and “writerly texts.” While it is true that a priori Ellis’ novel
resembles Roland Barthes’ definition of a text of Bliss because it “discomforts (perhaps
to the point of a certain boredom),” it does not, on the other hand, “unsettle the reader’s
historical, cultural [and] psychological assumptions” (Pleasure of the Text 14), for it is
too deeply involved with the ideology of the culture it addresses. Young also suggests
that even though American Psycho resembles a “writerly text” it is intrinsically linked
with the culture that produced it; no matter how critical it may be, “it lacks the ‘shock,
disturbance, even loss, which are proper to ecstasy, to bliss’” (120). Young’s implication
is that because Ellis’ novel is so precisely situated, it does not contain the qualities
enunciated above. Yet she bases her argument on her belief that “Ellis’ vision is
comformist and conventional… He is denunciatory, a supporter of the status quo,” a