The English version of "A Preface to Transgression" appears in _language,
counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews_. I would like to
just reproduce a couple of key moments of the first section, which runs
>from pages 29-33, as a way to contribute to this discussion. My brief
comments on the selections will be indented, thus easily passed over.
Selection #1: We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in
contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth
which has long been lingering in the shadows and hiding under various
disguises--until now, that is, when our positive awareness allows us to
decipher it so that it may at last emerge in the clear light of language.
Yet, never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural understanding
and never did it know a greater "felicity of expression" than in the
Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin. The proof is its whole
tradition of mysticism and spirituality which was incapable of dividing
the continuous forms of desire, of rapture, of penetration, of ecstasy, of
that outpouring which leaves us spent: all of these experiences seemed to
lead, without interruption or limit, right to the heart of a divine love
of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon
itself. (p. 29)
I was first reminded--perhaps because I'm more familiar with it--
of the claim in _The Will to Knowledge_ that sexuality has not
been repressed in modern societies, but rather produced. See
_HS_, Vol. 1, p. 10 of English edition. But maybe all he's trying
to do is assert the close relationship between religion and God,
on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other.
Selection #2: What characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is
not its having found the language of its logic or of its natural process,
but rather, through the violence done by such languages, its having been
"denatured" -- cast into an empty zone where it achieves whatever meager
form is bestowed upon it by the establishment of its limits. Sexuality
points to nothing beyond itself, no prolongation, except in a frenzy which
disrupts it. We have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we have,
to be exact, carried it to its limits: the limit of consciousness, because
it ultimately dictates the only possible reading of our unconscious; the
limit of the law, since it seems the sole substance of universal taboos;
the limit of language, since it traces that line of foam showing just how
far speech may advance upon the sands of silence. (pp. 29-30)
So: unlike the way sexuality was used to point to something
beyond itself in Christianity, sexuality today is unable to
do so -- "except in a frenzy which disrupts it." Perhaps with
that last phrase Foucault is referring to the orgasm. A good
pictoral representation of the link between sexuality, desire,
and God, is the famous sculpture Bernini of the Ecstasy of St.
Theresa. See image at:
http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~mworkman/Masters/Bernini/berframes.html or
http://www.thais.it:80/scultura/image/sch00349.htm
So I guess the question F is asking is: what role will sexuality/
desire play now? Previously it was installed in a kind of
transcendent hierarchy.
Selection #3: Perhaps we could say that [sexuality] has become the only
division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to
desecrate. Not that it proffers any new content for our age-old acts;
rather, it permits a profanation without object, a profanation that is
empty and turned inward upon itself and whose instruments are brought to
bear on nothing but each other. Profanation in a world which no longer
recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred--is this not more or less
what we may call transgression?
In _Philosophy of the Bedroom_ Sade has Dolmance talk about
how he gets unusually stiff when he blasphemes against God
during sex. (See _Justine, Philosophy in the bedroom,
and other writings_, trans by Seaver & Wainhouse; intro by
Jean Paulhan & Maurice Blanchot, p. 241.) But Sade is
clearly an atheist. In any event, sexuality is no longer
submerged into a transcendent aesthetic. The only way to
get beyond oneself using sexuality is no longer through
transcendence, but through transgression.
Selection #4: In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and
speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering
the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its
empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more
scintillating. A rigorous language, as it arises from sexuality, will not
reveal the secret of man's natural being, not will it express the serenity
of anthropological truths, but rather, it will say that he exists without
God; the speech given to sexuality is contemporaneous, both in time and in
structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is
dead. From the moment that Sade delivered its first words and marked out,
in a single discourse, the boundaries of what suddenly became its kingdom,
the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is
absent, and where all our actions are addressed to this absence in a
profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in
it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression. (pp. 30-31)
So: it's not that we have returned from a Christianization of
sexual desire to a naturalization of it. Rather, sexuality and
the speech given to it by authors like Sade takes us to a realm
where God is absent. Instead of acting as a path to God,
sexuality takes us to the absence reamining upon His departure.
Selection #5: Perhaps the importance of sexuality in our culture, the fact
that since Sade it has persistently been linked to the most profound
decisions of our language, derives from nothing else than this
correspondence which connects it to the death of God. Not that this death
should be understood as the end of his historical reign or as the finally
delivered judgment of his nonexistence, but now as the constant space of
our experience. By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God
leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority
of being, and consequently to an experience which is *interior* and
*sovereign*. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an
explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its
intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of
those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In
this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the
*impossible* (the impossible being both that which we experience and that
which constitutes the experience). The death of God is not merely an
"event" that gave shape to contemporary experience as we now know it: it
continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline. (pp. 31-32)
So, (1) the death of God denies us the limit of the Limitless;
that is, we are no longer able to inscribe sexuality/desire
into a religious story of transcendence. The truth of our
being, of our sexuality, can no longer come to us from the
outside. (2) Such experiences will now be "interior,"
occurring and coming to an end within us, as well as sovereign,
completely our own. (3) But this limitation of sexuality to
ourselves, and our "limitless" inability to get beyond
ourselves, is experienced as fairly empty or perennially
impossible. (4) Thus, the continued importance of the death
of God, which must be seen not merely as an event (which
comes and then goes) but as the ever-repeated meaning of
"contemporary experience.
One final note: In his essay on "Existentialism" (English version
translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York, Philosophical Library, 1947)
Sartre comments that the existentialist finds it very distressing that God
does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of
ideas disappears along with Him ("Existentialism," p. 26). Sometimes
readers of Sartre and Foucault talk about the latter as if they were to blame
for promoting transgression or actionism. But often--and I think this is
the case with the material reproduced above--thinkers like S and F are
*describing* a condition that exists, one that confronts *all of us*.
There is a tendency, in other words, to blame the messenger, to fault
postmodernists for the existence of the postmodern condition, whereas in
fact they are trying to describe it and trace out some possibilities for
responding to the new conditions.
counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews_. I would like to
just reproduce a couple of key moments of the first section, which runs
>from pages 29-33, as a way to contribute to this discussion. My brief
comments on the selections will be indented, thus easily passed over.
Selection #1: We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in
contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth
which has long been lingering in the shadows and hiding under various
disguises--until now, that is, when our positive awareness allows us to
decipher it so that it may at last emerge in the clear light of language.
Yet, never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural understanding
and never did it know a greater "felicity of expression" than in the
Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin. The proof is its whole
tradition of mysticism and spirituality which was incapable of dividing
the continuous forms of desire, of rapture, of penetration, of ecstasy, of
that outpouring which leaves us spent: all of these experiences seemed to
lead, without interruption or limit, right to the heart of a divine love
of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon
itself. (p. 29)
I was first reminded--perhaps because I'm more familiar with it--
of the claim in _The Will to Knowledge_ that sexuality has not
been repressed in modern societies, but rather produced. See
_HS_, Vol. 1, p. 10 of English edition. But maybe all he's trying
to do is assert the close relationship between religion and God,
on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other.
Selection #2: What characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is
not its having found the language of its logic or of its natural process,
but rather, through the violence done by such languages, its having been
"denatured" -- cast into an empty zone where it achieves whatever meager
form is bestowed upon it by the establishment of its limits. Sexuality
points to nothing beyond itself, no prolongation, except in a frenzy which
disrupts it. We have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we have,
to be exact, carried it to its limits: the limit of consciousness, because
it ultimately dictates the only possible reading of our unconscious; the
limit of the law, since it seems the sole substance of universal taboos;
the limit of language, since it traces that line of foam showing just how
far speech may advance upon the sands of silence. (pp. 29-30)
So: unlike the way sexuality was used to point to something
beyond itself in Christianity, sexuality today is unable to
do so -- "except in a frenzy which disrupts it." Perhaps with
that last phrase Foucault is referring to the orgasm. A good
pictoral representation of the link between sexuality, desire,
and God, is the famous sculpture Bernini of the Ecstasy of St.
Theresa. See image at:
http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~mworkman/Masters/Bernini/berframes.html or
http://www.thais.it:80/scultura/image/sch00349.htm
So I guess the question F is asking is: what role will sexuality/
desire play now? Previously it was installed in a kind of
transcendent hierarchy.
Selection #3: Perhaps we could say that [sexuality] has become the only
division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to
desecrate. Not that it proffers any new content for our age-old acts;
rather, it permits a profanation without object, a profanation that is
empty and turned inward upon itself and whose instruments are brought to
bear on nothing but each other. Profanation in a world which no longer
recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred--is this not more or less
what we may call transgression?
In _Philosophy of the Bedroom_ Sade has Dolmance talk about
how he gets unusually stiff when he blasphemes against God
during sex. (See _Justine, Philosophy in the bedroom,
and other writings_, trans by Seaver & Wainhouse; intro by
Jean Paulhan & Maurice Blanchot, p. 241.) But Sade is
clearly an atheist. In any event, sexuality is no longer
submerged into a transcendent aesthetic. The only way to
get beyond oneself using sexuality is no longer through
transcendence, but through transgression.
Selection #4: In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and
speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering
the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its
empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more
scintillating. A rigorous language, as it arises from sexuality, will not
reveal the secret of man's natural being, not will it express the serenity
of anthropological truths, but rather, it will say that he exists without
God; the speech given to sexuality is contemporaneous, both in time and in
structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is
dead. From the moment that Sade delivered its first words and marked out,
in a single discourse, the boundaries of what suddenly became its kingdom,
the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is
absent, and where all our actions are addressed to this absence in a
profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in
it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression. (pp. 30-31)
So: it's not that we have returned from a Christianization of
sexual desire to a naturalization of it. Rather, sexuality and
the speech given to it by authors like Sade takes us to a realm
where God is absent. Instead of acting as a path to God,
sexuality takes us to the absence reamining upon His departure.
Selection #5: Perhaps the importance of sexuality in our culture, the fact
that since Sade it has persistently been linked to the most profound
decisions of our language, derives from nothing else than this
correspondence which connects it to the death of God. Not that this death
should be understood as the end of his historical reign or as the finally
delivered judgment of his nonexistence, but now as the constant space of
our experience. By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God
leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority
of being, and consequently to an experience which is *interior* and
*sovereign*. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an
explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its
intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of
those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In
this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the
*impossible* (the impossible being both that which we experience and that
which constitutes the experience). The death of God is not merely an
"event" that gave shape to contemporary experience as we now know it: it
continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline. (pp. 31-32)
So, (1) the death of God denies us the limit of the Limitless;
that is, we are no longer able to inscribe sexuality/desire
into a religious story of transcendence. The truth of our
being, of our sexuality, can no longer come to us from the
outside. (2) Such experiences will now be "interior,"
occurring and coming to an end within us, as well as sovereign,
completely our own. (3) But this limitation of sexuality to
ourselves, and our "limitless" inability to get beyond
ourselves, is experienced as fairly empty or perennially
impossible. (4) Thus, the continued importance of the death
of God, which must be seen not merely as an event (which
comes and then goes) but as the ever-repeated meaning of
"contemporary experience.
One final note: In his essay on "Existentialism" (English version
translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York, Philosophical Library, 1947)
Sartre comments that the existentialist finds it very distressing that God
does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of
ideas disappears along with Him ("Existentialism," p. 26). Sometimes
readers of Sartre and Foucault talk about the latter as if they were to blame
for promoting transgression or actionism. But often--and I think this is
the case with the material reproduced above--thinkers like S and F are
*describing* a condition that exists, one that confronts *all of us*.
There is a tendency, in other words, to blame the messenger, to fault
postmodernists for the existence of the postmodern condition, whereas in
fact they are trying to describe it and trace out some possibilities for
responding to the new conditions.