SOURCE: "Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho," in Diacritics, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 44-58.

In the following essay, Freccero discusses reactions to American Psycho and explores the significance of the novel's violence.

US mass media has become a much-publicized target of censorious commentary within American public culture in recent years. Censorship, as E. S. Burt notes, may take at least two forms: philosophical censorship, such as that discussed by Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing, and the more commonly applied form of US censorship enacted against "pornography" or "obscenity." Philosophical censorship, in this reading, entails the state's persecution of message-bearing texts or utterances that counter the doxa and threaten to disrupt the state, while the second form of censorship involves "a language use that falls outside the interpretive scheme defining the work as the intentional act of a moral being...