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Monologue I: The post-modern (yuppie) subject
“I live in the American Gardens building on West 81st Street on the Eleventh floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m twenty-seven years old. I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine.
“In the morning if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice-pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep-pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel-scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask, which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out, and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing ‘protective lotion.’
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.”
Monologue II: The hysteric confession of guilt
“Howard! It’s Bateman, Pat Bateman. You’re my lawyer, so I think you should know I killed a lot of people! Some escort girls in an apartment uptown … some homeless people, maybe 5 or 10! Ummm … some girl I met at an NYU party. I left her body in the parking lot behind some old donut shop! My old girlfriend Beverly with a nail gun. Some man – some old FAGGOT with a dog!
"Hey Paul!"
“I killed another girl with a chainsaw. I had to, she almost got away. There was someone else there – I can’t remember…maybe a model or something. But, she’s dead too. And, uh, Paul Allen! I killed Paul Allen with an axe in the face! His body is dissolving in a bathtub in Hells Kitchen. I don’t want to leave anything out, now. I guess I killed maybe…twenty people. Maybe forty!
“I’ve got tapes of a lot of it. Some of the girls have seen the tapes. I even…I even ate some of their brains. And I tried to cook a little. Tonight … I just HAD TO KILL ALOT OF PEOPLE! And I don’t think I’m gonna get away with it this time. So…I guess…I guess I’m a pretty sick guy. Well … if you get back tomorrow … I’ll meet you up at Harry’s Bar so … keep your eyes open. Bye.”
Monologue III: Guilty of … well, you (should) know!
“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain in constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this there is no catharsis.
“My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
Postlogue
“[A]ccording to Saint Paul, the Law itself generates the desire to violate it. Along the same lines, in contrast to the Law’s precise prohibitions (“You shall not kill, steal …”), the true superego injunction is just the truncated “You shall not!” – do what? This gap opens up the abyss of the superego: you yourself should know or guess what you should not do, so that you are put in an impossible position of always and a priori being under suspicion of violating some (unknown) prohibition. More precisely, the superego splits every determinate commandment into two complementary, albeit symmetrical, parts – “You shall not kill!,” for instance, is split into the formal-indeterminate “You shall not!” and the obscene direct injunction “Kill!” The silent dialogue which sustains this operation is thus: “You shall not!” “I shall not – what? I have no idea what is being demanded of me! Che vuoi?” “You shall not!” “This is driving me crazy, being under pressure to do something without knowing what, feeling guilty without knowing of what, so I’ll just explode, and start killing!” Thus killing is the desperate response to the impenetrable abstract superego prohibition.”
(Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 105)
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
(Mark 15:33-39, NRSV)
G. K. Chesterton, in response to the above passage:
It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 145 (Image | Doubleday edition)
Zizek, in response to the above Chesterton passage:
Chesterton is fully aware that we are approaching ‘a matter more dark and awful that it is easy to discuss … a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific rule of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but also through doubt.’ In the standard form of atheism, God dies for men who stop believing in Him; in Christianity, God dies for Himself. In his “Father, why hast thou forsaken me,” Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith.
(Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf; the Perverse Core of Christianity, p. 15)
Zizek gives a great talk at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon about his newest books, new-age deep ecology, bullshit, the presence of ideology in our post-ideological society, and so forth (and so forth, and so forth). Take a couple of hours and enjoy!
