![]() Rather, I would claim that the serial "form of violence" is conditioned not so much by the monolithic coherence of representation as by its breakdown. I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in particular are totally free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial killer is not constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though the narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). My goal in this essay is to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easy fit between discursive moulds of identity and the individual self-experience of serial killers, and to suggest that representation may be not so much the cause of violence as a post factum defence against it. Violence of representation, representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into an unbroken chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to fingertyping of putrefying bodies. Simply put, 'murder by numbers' (as serial murder has been called) is the form of violence proper to statistical persons. The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized experience of typicality within. For Seltzer the enigma of the serial killer's personality consists in " an experience of typicality at the level of the subject": In his recent book Serial Killers and in the series of articles that preceded it Mark Seltzer applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of serial killing, variously identified also as "stranger killing" and sometimes "lust murder". In this particular reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by some (post)modern subjects upon others. In their Introduction to the collection typically entitled Violence of Representation Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of this approach:"The violence of representation is the suppression of difference" (8). The universal Man of the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the universal killer, armed with the most potent of weapons-representation. Man the Universal Subject, a cookie-cutter mold of (post)technological identity, stamping out simulacra of individuality.But why should we be "comforted" and experience "relief" at the thought of his imminent dissolution? Perhaps because, at least from Adorno on, the subject of reason has also been identified as the subject of violence. ![]() It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as this knowledge has discovered a new form. ![]()
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