Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

to be “committed.” The question remains, how can a novel be transgressive if it operates
independently of a normative set of standards? What could it possibly transgress?
Perhaps, in the minds of Bataille and Foucault this is not the point, and as explained
previously, within the objective of this study, American Psycho cannot be considered
within their paradigm because it is inadequate for examining the transactions between
canon-formation and transgression.
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On another level, the connection between sex and violence as illustrated in
American Psycho, while either appalling or enthralling, leads to some important
implications within the frameworks articulated in Chapter Two. Regarding taboo and
transgression, it is precisely on such extreme experiences of pleasure and pain that
Bataille establishes the foundation of his philosophy of excess and transgression. For
him the interest lies in perceiving sex and death not only as interrelated but as
simultaneous experiences, a concept which is accurately represented in the most
gruesome passages of American Psycho. As discussed earlier, Ellis purposively
engineered American Psycho for it to have a profoundly discomforting impact on the
reader, which Alberto Manguel describes as “a revulsion … of the gut” (102). This
observation echoes the remarks made earlier regarding the profoundly unsettling effect of
“horror,” a device which aims to trigger a visceral type of response from the reader, and
how it is related to Bataille’s emphasis on conceptualizing a literature that gives way to
experience in order to produce an “immediacy of being.” The elicited reaction to the
passages of sexual violence is most likely to be that of shock and awe, possibly disgust,
revulsion, or sickness—as it was the case for Manguel. For Bataille, however, it is in
these visceral experiences that the transgressive reveals its full potential: “Without doing