The Puzzling Subject: Detective Series, Crime Serials and Trans-subjectivity as a Narrative Device

The argument of this essay is that the reemergence of serial melodrama in contemporary television series has facilitated the return of a certain type of serial figure that characterized popular literature and film in the period between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Since the main feature of such anti-heroes – epitomized by the figure of Fantômas – has always been the disruption of all certainties about individual identity, this essay argues that this new kind of serial crime melodrama inevitably activates a peculiar form of subjectivity, which we call “trans-subjectivity.”