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What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About
On ‘Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology’
Have You Thought About Evil Today?
Recently I wrote about the question of evil.
It may not surprise you, then, that I also picked up Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology (2015), edited by Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley. This is a collection of postmodern essays about the meaning (or non-meaning) of Life, the Universe, and Everything, centering on what some philosophers think about when they think about serial killers.
I don’t mean that they think like serial killers, mind you, at least not out on the street. And in the headline “What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About,” I don’t mean that murderers put philosophers in a dungeon and forced them to think, but rather that philosophers all on their own generate thoughts about murderers.
The book is about how serial killers have been portrayed, what serial killers say about themselves, and the lessons we — or, at least, some postmodern philosophers — can draw from those phenomena and discourses.
Questions and Answers About Serial Killers
What do they want? Often they have an urge toward sadism for sexual gratification. More abstractly, though, they perpetually seek new objects to destroy. This can be viewed as a deep enactment of neoliberalism. After all, the cycle of desire-take-destroy is a feature of imperialism and capitalism.
What do they not want? The rules and systems that are given to them. They resist them. In that sense, they are nihilistic.
What do they believe? Sometimes they articulate a cosmic awareness of the inseparability of life-and-death, which they interpret as personal license to commit murder.
How do they operate? Free from rules. They assume a right to violence that no one has granted to them. Thus they are hunters even while they are hunted by police.
What do they like? Their own rituals and patterns.
