Patrick Bateman (American Psycho, 1991 [set 1989]) lives on the dash between the M's (M-M1-M2), as represented by Marx's formula for finance (or ‘fictitious’) capital. M differs from M1 (and so on) insofar as the increase represents money made from money (or from financial instruments) rather than from production (or M-C-M1, where ‘C’ may be understood either as Commodity [produced, distributed, consumed] or as Capital [accumulated prior to investment in manufacture]). This essay takes the financier Bateman's preferred activities, brand display, torture, and the serial liquification of ‘hardbodies’, as quasi-allegorical representations of the working of finance capital during the Reagan presidency. In the thin phenomenology of Bateman's experience, an anxious experience of pain-making, fetishism, and disavowal, traces of a means whereby fictitious capital might be critiqued may be discerned.
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Richard Godden (2011) studied this question.