ABSTRACT
To be close to normal in a Highsmith novel – and Tom Ripley more than any other of her characters figures this closeness – is to simultaneously reveal the pleasures and dangers of not being normal, of not being if that means having a psyche, a history, a sexual orientation, a conscience. Using Jasbir Puar’s understanding of American exceptionalism as referring “both to particular discourses that repetitively produce the United States as an exceptional nation-state” and Giorgio Agamben’s “theorization of the sanctioned and naturalized disregard of the limits of state juridical. Both Michael Trask and Mary Esteve locate Highsmith’s aesthetic in a 1950s that can be characterized on the one hand by social interaction theories of social performance and self-management, and on the other with widespread social and political anxiety. On the structuring pervasiveness of normalization in the modern, disciplinary society, François Ewald writes: The norm is also the means through which the disciplinary society communicates with itself.
