ABSTRACT
I have to this point traced some of the components of serial killing: the relays between murder and machine culture; the intersecting logics of seriality, prosthesis, and primary mediation that structure cases of addictive violence— and, more generally, the addiction to addiction in contemporary society; the emergence of the pathological public sphere as the scene of these crimes. In this part I want to reconsider the intimacies between mass culture and mass murder: the making of what I have called the mass in person. I want to focus here on some very basic questions that I have to this point tracked somewhat obliquely. What counts as serial killing? Or, to put it a bit differently, how did the particular kind of person called the serial killer come into being and into view? The answers to these questions are by no means simple, even in what might appear to be the most self-evident of cases.
