On Tue, 15 Apr 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:
> John, I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you. My first reaction
> to most of your examples of transgression -- and I still do have this
> reaction -- was that they were somehow not the kind of thing that the
> _Preface_ essay is a meditation on. I want to say: they have too much
> practical utility; they trangress not in order to illuminate the limit,
> or "affirm" limited being, as _Preface_ puts it, but in order to move
> beyond certain social or political or economic restrictions: to free women
> from the supposed necessity of bras, students from certain rules of behavior,
> workers from being managed and exploited.
My only response here can be that I think the Transgression essay proceeds
at a more abstract level. More abstract = contains more cases. The
abstract concept "leaf" contains all sorts of different looking things
that we call leaves; "plant" or "foilage"" are even more abstract and
would contain leaves and all sorts of other things too. So too with F's
use of "transgression." Now remember you left out one of my
transgressions, namely that Dahmer guy (may God stomp on his grave). His
transgression was not very utilitarian.
>
> But the specific type of transgression discussed in _Preface_
> -- Bataille's and de Sade's type -- seems different. My feeling is that
> it is precisely because it is a type that cannot be thought of in terms
> of practical utility that it seems to call for the kind of analysis
> that F attempts in the essay. What are its characteristics?
> First of all, it plays itself out on a purely symbolic level -- on the
> plane of _speaking_, not of _working_ (i.e. struggling with the world).
> Not the plane of liberating one's body from bras and girdles, but that
> of, say, drinking menstrual blood.
What's the diff? Burning a bra is very symbolic. It's not that
"practical" or utilitarian. Burning a draft card, to switch examples, is
both practical and symbolic.
> Secondly, it seems very much centered
> around sexuality, and using it in ways which, if God hadn't died, would
> be clearly blasphemous. "But what does it mean to kill God if he does not
> exist, to kill God _who has never existed_? Perhaps it means to kill God
> both because he does not exist and to guarantee he will not exist --
> certainly a cause for laughter: to kill God to liberate life from this
> existence that limits it, but also to bring it back to those limits
> that are annulled by this limitless existence -- as a sacrifice; to kill
> God to return him to this nothingness he is and to manifest his existence
> at the center of a light that blazes like a presence -- for the ecstasy;
> to kill God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because
> this wound must make him bleed until there springs forth 'an immense
> alleluia lost in the interminable silence' -- and this is communication."
I think sexuality is *the* example but not the only one. We need to read
the section you reproduce above not just in terms of sexuality, but also
in terms of all manner of transgressions.
>
> It seems to me that what your examples lose is this sense of pure
> sacrifice, pure expenditure, the "manifesting of God's existence (at the
> same moment as he's being returned to nothingness) at the center of
> a light that blazes like a presence". _Like_ a presence. This kind
> of transgression creates an experience of the sacred -- because it creates
> the experience of desecration -- without there being anything sacred
> to point to: "in a world now emptied of objects, beings and spaces to
> desecrate".
I don't think there's a difference here between the experience of the
sacred we get from drinking menstrual blood and the kind we get from
overturning a police car in the middle of an anti-war rally and setting it
on fire while someone considerately blasts Jefferson Airplane's
"Volunteers of America" out their apartment window. Talk about an
experience of the Divine!
>
> The argument in _Preface_ seems to be that Bataille's "blasphemies" are not
> attempts to liberate sex from strictures, repressions or limits; rather,
> they represent attempts to bring a certain kind of resonance out of
> a space which has been rendered void; in some sense they are meant to
> _create_ a limit, or at least tease forth the experience of sacred dread.
> The space explored in _Preface_, it seems to me, is not the space of
> Ibsen's _Doll's House_, but rather the space of _King Lear_.
I completely agree and think that's quite insightful -- especially the
comment about blasphemies being "attempts to bring a certain kind of
resonance out of a space which has been rendered void" which can be done,
perhaps, by "creating" a limit. That's exactly the problem:
transgressions used to be understood, justified, accepted
transcendentally
sexual transgressions have been understood in this transcendental
way not just by the Church, but in various opposition movements;
not just the 60s, either, though they do come to mind.
if we must give up the transcendental -- and it seems awfully
clear to me that F is arguing we need to give it up *both* in
"Preface" and in "WIE" -- then what to do with transgressions?
to figure that out, we need to look at transgressions more
abstractly; minimally, we need to look at them separated off
from the transcendent forms (God; Revolution; other initial-
capped entities) that used to be their attached-at-
the-hip twin.
Transgression, at a high level of abstraction (and that last phrase is
mine, not F's) "is like a flash of lightning in the night which...gives a
dense and black 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...; the flash loses itself in this
space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has
given a name to obscurity. Since this existence is both so pure and so
complicated, it must be detached from its questionable association to
ethics if we want to understand it and begin thinking from it and in the
space it denotes; it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive,
that is, from anything aroused by negative associations" ("Preface," 35)
>
> But on the other hand, I am not sure whether these spaces are as distinct
> as they seem at first glance -- which is why I am not sure whether I _do_
> disagree with you as much as I think I do.
>
>
> -m
>
When F says things like "the limit and transgression depend on each other
for whatever density of being they possess" and indeed the whole paragraph
there running from 34-35, I feel like he is speaking abstractly in a way
that encompasses both kinds of transgressions -- burning bras, drinking
blood, eating humans. Not because he wants to endorse eating humans! But
because for the purposes of conceptual clarity, transgressions qua
transgression must be studied.
--John
> John, I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you. My first reaction
> to most of your examples of transgression -- and I still do have this
> reaction -- was that they were somehow not the kind of thing that the
> _Preface_ essay is a meditation on. I want to say: they have too much
> practical utility; they trangress not in order to illuminate the limit,
> or "affirm" limited being, as _Preface_ puts it, but in order to move
> beyond certain social or political or economic restrictions: to free women
> from the supposed necessity of bras, students from certain rules of behavior,
> workers from being managed and exploited.
My only response here can be that I think the Transgression essay proceeds
at a more abstract level. More abstract = contains more cases. The
abstract concept "leaf" contains all sorts of different looking things
that we call leaves; "plant" or "foilage"" are even more abstract and
would contain leaves and all sorts of other things too. So too with F's
use of "transgression." Now remember you left out one of my
transgressions, namely that Dahmer guy (may God stomp on his grave). His
transgression was not very utilitarian.
>
> But the specific type of transgression discussed in _Preface_
> -- Bataille's and de Sade's type -- seems different. My feeling is that
> it is precisely because it is a type that cannot be thought of in terms
> of practical utility that it seems to call for the kind of analysis
> that F attempts in the essay. What are its characteristics?
> First of all, it plays itself out on a purely symbolic level -- on the
> plane of _speaking_, not of _working_ (i.e. struggling with the world).
> Not the plane of liberating one's body from bras and girdles, but that
> of, say, drinking menstrual blood.
What's the diff? Burning a bra is very symbolic. It's not that
"practical" or utilitarian. Burning a draft card, to switch examples, is
both practical and symbolic.
> Secondly, it seems very much centered
> around sexuality, and using it in ways which, if God hadn't died, would
> be clearly blasphemous. "But what does it mean to kill God if he does not
> exist, to kill God _who has never existed_? Perhaps it means to kill God
> both because he does not exist and to guarantee he will not exist --
> certainly a cause for laughter: to kill God to liberate life from this
> existence that limits it, but also to bring it back to those limits
> that are annulled by this limitless existence -- as a sacrifice; to kill
> God to return him to this nothingness he is and to manifest his existence
> at the center of a light that blazes like a presence -- for the ecstasy;
> to kill God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because
> this wound must make him bleed until there springs forth 'an immense
> alleluia lost in the interminable silence' -- and this is communication."
I think sexuality is *the* example but not the only one. We need to read
the section you reproduce above not just in terms of sexuality, but also
in terms of all manner of transgressions.
>
> It seems to me that what your examples lose is this sense of pure
> sacrifice, pure expenditure, the "manifesting of God's existence (at the
> same moment as he's being returned to nothingness) at the center of
> a light that blazes like a presence". _Like_ a presence. This kind
> of transgression creates an experience of the sacred -- because it creates
> the experience of desecration -- without there being anything sacred
> to point to: "in a world now emptied of objects, beings and spaces to
> desecrate".
I don't think there's a difference here between the experience of the
sacred we get from drinking menstrual blood and the kind we get from
overturning a police car in the middle of an anti-war rally and setting it
on fire while someone considerately blasts Jefferson Airplane's
"Volunteers of America" out their apartment window. Talk about an
experience of the Divine!
>
> The argument in _Preface_ seems to be that Bataille's "blasphemies" are not
> attempts to liberate sex from strictures, repressions or limits; rather,
> they represent attempts to bring a certain kind of resonance out of
> a space which has been rendered void; in some sense they are meant to
> _create_ a limit, or at least tease forth the experience of sacred dread.
> The space explored in _Preface_, it seems to me, is not the space of
> Ibsen's _Doll's House_, but rather the space of _King Lear_.
I completely agree and think that's quite insightful -- especially the
comment about blasphemies being "attempts to bring a certain kind of
resonance out of a space which has been rendered void" which can be done,
perhaps, by "creating" a limit. That's exactly the problem:
transgressions used to be understood, justified, accepted
transcendentally
sexual transgressions have been understood in this transcendental
way not just by the Church, but in various opposition movements;
not just the 60s, either, though they do come to mind.
if we must give up the transcendental -- and it seems awfully
clear to me that F is arguing we need to give it up *both* in
"Preface" and in "WIE" -- then what to do with transgressions?
to figure that out, we need to look at transgressions more
abstractly; minimally, we need to look at them separated off
from the transcendent forms (God; Revolution; other initial-
capped entities) that used to be their attached-at-
the-hip twin.
Transgression, at a high level of abstraction (and that last phrase is
mine, not F's) "is like a flash of lightning in the night which...gives a
dense and black 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...; the flash loses itself in this
space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has
given a name to obscurity. Since this existence is both so pure and so
complicated, it must be detached from its questionable association to
ethics if we want to understand it and begin thinking from it and in the
space it denotes; it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive,
that is, from anything aroused by negative associations" ("Preface," 35)
>
> But on the other hand, I am not sure whether these spaces are as distinct
> as they seem at first glance -- which is why I am not sure whether I _do_
> disagree with you as much as I think I do.
>
>
> -m
>
When F says things like "the limit and transgression depend on each other
for whatever density of being they possess" and indeed the whole paragraph
there running from 34-35, I feel like he is speaking abstractly in a way
that encompasses both kinds of transgressions -- burning bras, drinking
blood, eating humans. Not because he wants to endorse eating humans! But
because for the purposes of conceptual clarity, transgressions qua
transgression must be studied.
--John