Every individual is on one hand the subject of cognition, that is to say, the complementary cognition of the possibility of the whole objective world, and on the other a single manifestation of that same Will, which objectifies itself in each thing. But this duplicity of our being is not founded in a unity existing for itself: otherwise we should be able to have consciousness of ourselves through ourselves and independently of the objects of cognition and willing: but of this we are utterly incapable; as soon as we attempt to do so, and, by turning our cognition inwards, strive for once to attain complete self-reflection, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void, find ourselves resembling the hollow glass ball out of whose emptiness a voice speaks that has no cause within the ball, and, in trying to grasp ourselves, we clutch, shuddering, at nothing but an insubstantial ghost.
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

[The Subject without properties is] the philosophical figure for what becomes, with increasing literalness throughout the nineteenth century, the global ubiquity of the white European. His domination is virtually self-legitimating since the capacity to be everywhere present becomes a historical manifestation of the white man's gradual approximation to the universality he everywhere represents.
- David Lloyd, Race Under Representation

I am everyone, and no one. I am everywhere, yet nowhere.
- Darkman

*

Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, may stand as the most