Re: A Preface to Transgression

Sebastian wrote:

> In what way, would you say, is the "finding" and "capturing" of the truth of
> a transgressive language/philosophy different to dialectical (eg.
> scientific) thinking. Has it to do with the notion that in transgression
> one experiences an aesthetic relation to truth, a truth not found or
> captured so much as created and made.

What an interesting question.

It seems to me that we never experience truth as something "created and made".
That is to say we never, at one and the same time, have a "truth experience"
_and_ also perceive it as an experience of something created and made.
Also, the way I tend to use the word "aesthetic", I don't think that one can
have an aesthetic relation to truth itself; rather, certain kinds of truth
experiences may occur as part of an aesthetic experience.

It seems to me that in postulating a co-legitimacy -- for lack of a better
word -- of a transgressive language and dialectics, one is operating in
a framework in which what is interesting about "truth" is not so much its
own status -- the standards by which it is, or can be, legitimized as a
"truth" -- but the "truth experience" itself. Perhaps one can say that in
this move the status of the thing that the truth-experience is an
experience of gets bracketed out.

There are many kinds of truth experience, and I would say that they are
all experiences of some kind of communication with something, of "touching"
something. One can have these experiences in any intense interaction:
sex, work, art, prayer, contemplation, a sudden heightened perception,
and so on. One might say that both dialectics and the scientific method
are concerned with producing "reliable" truth experiences, ones that can
be relied upon to ultimately yield something stable, usable intersubjectively
and with ascertainable, verifiable effects.

As to the particular nature of the truth-experience produced by transgression,
I am very taken with Andrew's description of it as an experience of
"communication with communication". And maybe this passage is relevant:
"Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the
prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area
of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes
the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it
is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time,
gives a black and dense intensity to the night it denies, which lights up
the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark
the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised
singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its
sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity."


-m



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