Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

point that Freccero, Murphet, and Price strongly contend. While Freccero and Price
merely argue that American Psycho is purely symptomatic and that it offers no solutions,
no alternatives, i.e. no guidelines, Murphet is more vehement, arguing that “[t]here is
scant evidence … that Ellis is a ‘supporter of the status quo’ (22).” According to
Murphet, Ellis is “apolitical,” and possibly an anarchist: “most of the values Ellis actually
embraces in his fiction inhered … in the period known as the punk movement, defined
above all by a nihilistic contempt for established middle-class conformity, sartorial
menace, and loud metallic noise; a concerned épater le bourgeois by urban youth (21).”
These conflicting opinions on Ellis’ political ramifications seem to reflect
Walker’s skepticism about the definition of “pure” transgression advanced by Bataille
and Foucault:
However, the Bataille-Foucault paradigm is not without
problematical assumptions. Theirs is a ‘pure’ non-dialectical
conception, transgression is purely ‘for the sake of it’, it has no
purpose as such. It is against all ‘use’ because if one were to exist
it can no longer be truly transgressive. It is questionable whether
this is possible since these ‘energies’ are inescapably ‘directed’,
committed. Such a genuine conception of transgression needs to be
maintained but within dialectics, within political progression. In its
valiant attempt to resist any political implication, the nondialectical
conception leads to ineffectualness and marginalisation
as Stoekl has said of Bataille: “a simple death or wandering” or at
worst to “extremely sinister political configurations (regimes of the
right are only too happy to make use of previously unharnessed
violence). The latter point illustrates how independence from any
appropriation, implication is impossible, and to pretend otherwise
is potentially dangerous.
As mentioned in Chapter Two, “pure” transgression pretends to be limitless and
dissociated from any system of meanings. Nevertheless, for it to be effective and given
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an identifiable purpose, as Walker suggests, it cannot exist in a vacuum, a void; it needs