On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:
> I am somewhat confused about this discussion, for the following reason.
> Does F actually advocate "transgression" somewhere, as a generally advisable
> thing? If so, where? And what is the context and form of this advocacy?
> As far as the _Preface_ goes, I don't read it as containing any claims about
> the advisability of transgression as a mode of conduct; does anyone else?
> To me, the question that is being divagated in _Preface_ seems to be something
> like: Given that there is such a phenomenon as transgressive philosophical
> writing, what is its role in philosophy? _Preface_, as has been said by
> others, is a literary homage to Bataille; it seems to me to deal specifically
> with the meaning of Bataille's writing, his place as a thinker. Where does
> F discuss trangressive acts in general and what does he say about them?
>
>
> -m
>
Bataille may be the occasion for the essay, but at least when I read
"Preface" it seems that a much broader discussion of transgression is
either being presented by Foucault himself or can reasonably be
extrapolated from the text.
Here's how I see the flow of the argument in Preface: (1) We used to know
what to do with transgressions; we used to be able to situate them in a
transcendent hierarchy vis-a-vis God. In particular, we used to know how
to handle sexual transgressions, as in "the ecstasy that I, St. Teresa,
experience is *like* sexual ecstasy, but it's *really* the ecstasy one
feels when filled with the grace of God's love." (2) Now, however, God is
dead, as Nietzsche points out. (3) But not only God -- or rather, God can
be seen as a convenient placeholder for all God-like guarantees of our
being and its purpose, such as Man, Humanity, the Proletariat, etc.
(4) Given these deaths, we need to go "back to the phenomena" and study
limit-transgression in itself. We need to understand the
limit-transcendence dyad in a way that is freed from the stories we used
to tell about them, precisely because those stories no longer work or not
as well.
You ask if Foucault recommends transgression as a general thing, and if so
where. Here's what Foucault said some twenty years after writing the
"Preface" piece:
We must...give a more positive content to what may be a
philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we
are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical
ontology of ourselves.
This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a
*limit-attitude*. We are not talking about a gesture of
rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism
indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon
limits....The point, in brief, is to transform the
critique conducted in the form of a necessary limitation
into a practical critique that takes the form of a
possible transgression. ("What Is Enlightenment" in
_Foucault Reader_, 45)
So it's not that Foucault is recommending "transgression" as a generalized
idea, but that we need to rethink transgression given its fairly ruderless
state in the current setting. Just after the above quotation, Foucault
continues:
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no
longer going to be practiced in the search for formal
structures with universal value, but rather as a historical
investigation into the events that have led us to
constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects
of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense,
this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not
that of making a metaphysics possible. ("WIE", 45-46)
> I am somewhat confused about this discussion, for the following reason.
> Does F actually advocate "transgression" somewhere, as a generally advisable
> thing? If so, where? And what is the context and form of this advocacy?
> As far as the _Preface_ goes, I don't read it as containing any claims about
> the advisability of transgression as a mode of conduct; does anyone else?
> To me, the question that is being divagated in _Preface_ seems to be something
> like: Given that there is such a phenomenon as transgressive philosophical
> writing, what is its role in philosophy? _Preface_, as has been said by
> others, is a literary homage to Bataille; it seems to me to deal specifically
> with the meaning of Bataille's writing, his place as a thinker. Where does
> F discuss trangressive acts in general and what does he say about them?
>
>
> -m
>
Bataille may be the occasion for the essay, but at least when I read
"Preface" it seems that a much broader discussion of transgression is
either being presented by Foucault himself or can reasonably be
extrapolated from the text.
Here's how I see the flow of the argument in Preface: (1) We used to know
what to do with transgressions; we used to be able to situate them in a
transcendent hierarchy vis-a-vis God. In particular, we used to know how
to handle sexual transgressions, as in "the ecstasy that I, St. Teresa,
experience is *like* sexual ecstasy, but it's *really* the ecstasy one
feels when filled with the grace of God's love." (2) Now, however, God is
dead, as Nietzsche points out. (3) But not only God -- or rather, God can
be seen as a convenient placeholder for all God-like guarantees of our
being and its purpose, such as Man, Humanity, the Proletariat, etc.
(4) Given these deaths, we need to go "back to the phenomena" and study
limit-transgression in itself. We need to understand the
limit-transcendence dyad in a way that is freed from the stories we used
to tell about them, precisely because those stories no longer work or not
as well.
You ask if Foucault recommends transgression as a general thing, and if so
where. Here's what Foucault said some twenty years after writing the
"Preface" piece:
We must...give a more positive content to what may be a
philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we
are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical
ontology of ourselves.
This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a
*limit-attitude*. We are not talking about a gesture of
rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism
indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon
limits....The point, in brief, is to transform the
critique conducted in the form of a necessary limitation
into a practical critique that takes the form of a
possible transgression. ("What Is Enlightenment" in
_Foucault Reader_, 45)
So it's not that Foucault is recommending "transgression" as a generalized
idea, but that we need to rethink transgression given its fairly ruderless
state in the current setting. Just after the above quotation, Foucault
continues:
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no
longer going to be practiced in the search for formal
structures with universal value, but rather as a historical
investigation into the events that have led us to
constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects
of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense,
this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not
that of making a metaphysics possible. ("WIE", 45-46)