Sorry I sent the original to the incorrect address.
---------------------
Forwarded message:
Subj: A Preface to Transgression
Date: 97-05-23 17:39:54 EDT
From: Longs14255
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Late, but armed with some understanding... this is in the category of
Foucault for Beginners...
Sexuality as the "totality of experience" justifiably becomes "the limit" for
Foucault. Key to the unconscious, harbinger of the law and its prescriptive
moralistic bind, sunchaser of new language in the black holes of silence, it
brings us face to face with self-transcendence by "marking the limit within
us" and at the same time revealing us as the source of "the limit."
Transgression opens on the vast vista of "the limit." Because God is dead and
the sacred holds no power or mystery for Foucault, transgression establishes
new conditions for the type of sacredness which Foucault calls "unmediated
substance." In other words, transgression becomes "savior" because it fills
the void once called God with a profaning that "identifies, dissipates,
exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its
transgression." There are no more imposed limits from the "Limitless" one.
Only in excess do we discover (in Foucault's words) that "sexuality and the
death of God are bound to the same experience" in eroticism, the means of
compensation for the death of God. Transgression is the means and the end,
pushing wide the envelope of "the limit" in ever expansive vistas of
limitlessness. This is paradox turned on its head, with Foucault writing:
"... the limit opens on the limitless, and transgression carries the limit to
the limit of its being, to face the fact of its imminent disappearance,
finding itself in what it excludes." This is masterful use of language and
delicious exploration of a conundrum. Transgression is the essential acting
out of finitude and being, beyond dialectical thinking, taking the "mad
philosopher" to the depths where language is of little or no help.
This is indeed heady stuff, extremely thought-provoking and appropriate for
contemporary post-modernism. The popular culture understands that in pursuing
transgression to its limit, and thereby opening further limitless
possibilities for more experience of transgression and the limit, it replaces
the God who reportedly does not exist. Yet in the pursuit, destruction lurks
in the darkness once thought to contain the limit. It's one of the closing
scenes in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when the lid comes off the Ark of the
Covenant. All hell breaks loose. The power of sexuality Foucault describes,
in the urge to transgression, eventually closes in upon itself, can no longer
press the limit of its understanding because in the "empty core where being
achieves its limit, and where the limit defines being," there is not
fulfillment but emptiness.
There is another option, which Foucault graciously opens to us in this
multi-faceted description of what he considers "a new heaven and a new
earth." Leonard Bernstein put his finger on it in the Norton Lectures at
Harvard University in 1973, when he attempted to use linguistics and the
thought of Noam Chomsky to get at the meaning of Charles Ives' "The
Unanswered Question." What Bernstein was searching for, in his hysterical
life of transgression and pursuit of "the limit," was the reconciling of
tonality in the late 19th century music of Wagner and Mahler, and the
atonality of Schoenberg and the serialists. I think this is exactly what
Foucault is attempting, and what we all must attempt. The difficulty is that
Foucault believes he's found it in his "dissipating profanation."
I have found the answer to Ives' "Unanswered Question," but in music, and not
sexuality. Foucault helps me understand the strange, paradoxical nature of
pursuit, and what happens when someone like Lenny burns the candle at both
ends and the middle for 73 years and dies a premature death in 1990. His
whole being was given over to transgressing the limit, and he went up like a
Roman candle. That is art gloriously immitating life.
Steve Weston
---------------------
Forwarded message:
Subj: A Preface to Transgression
Date: 97-05-23 17:39:54 EDT
From: Longs14255
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Late, but armed with some understanding... this is in the category of
Foucault for Beginners...
Sexuality as the "totality of experience" justifiably becomes "the limit" for
Foucault. Key to the unconscious, harbinger of the law and its prescriptive
moralistic bind, sunchaser of new language in the black holes of silence, it
brings us face to face with self-transcendence by "marking the limit within
us" and at the same time revealing us as the source of "the limit."
Transgression opens on the vast vista of "the limit." Because God is dead and
the sacred holds no power or mystery for Foucault, transgression establishes
new conditions for the type of sacredness which Foucault calls "unmediated
substance." In other words, transgression becomes "savior" because it fills
the void once called God with a profaning that "identifies, dissipates,
exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its
transgression." There are no more imposed limits from the "Limitless" one.
Only in excess do we discover (in Foucault's words) that "sexuality and the
death of God are bound to the same experience" in eroticism, the means of
compensation for the death of God. Transgression is the means and the end,
pushing wide the envelope of "the limit" in ever expansive vistas of
limitlessness. This is paradox turned on its head, with Foucault writing:
"... the limit opens on the limitless, and transgression carries the limit to
the limit of its being, to face the fact of its imminent disappearance,
finding itself in what it excludes." This is masterful use of language and
delicious exploration of a conundrum. Transgression is the essential acting
out of finitude and being, beyond dialectical thinking, taking the "mad
philosopher" to the depths where language is of little or no help.
This is indeed heady stuff, extremely thought-provoking and appropriate for
contemporary post-modernism. The popular culture understands that in pursuing
transgression to its limit, and thereby opening further limitless
possibilities for more experience of transgression and the limit, it replaces
the God who reportedly does not exist. Yet in the pursuit, destruction lurks
in the darkness once thought to contain the limit. It's one of the closing
scenes in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when the lid comes off the Ark of the
Covenant. All hell breaks loose. The power of sexuality Foucault describes,
in the urge to transgression, eventually closes in upon itself, can no longer
press the limit of its understanding because in the "empty core where being
achieves its limit, and where the limit defines being," there is not
fulfillment but emptiness.
There is another option, which Foucault graciously opens to us in this
multi-faceted description of what he considers "a new heaven and a new
earth." Leonard Bernstein put his finger on it in the Norton Lectures at
Harvard University in 1973, when he attempted to use linguistics and the
thought of Noam Chomsky to get at the meaning of Charles Ives' "The
Unanswered Question." What Bernstein was searching for, in his hysterical
life of transgression and pursuit of "the limit," was the reconciling of
tonality in the late 19th century music of Wagner and Mahler, and the
atonality of Schoenberg and the serialists. I think this is exactly what
Foucault is attempting, and what we all must attempt. The difficulty is that
Foucault believes he's found it in his "dissipating profanation."
I have found the answer to Ives' "Unanswered Question," but in music, and not
sexuality. Foucault helps me understand the strange, paradoxical nature of
pursuit, and what happens when someone like Lenny burns the candle at both
ends and the middle for 73 years and dies a premature death in 1990. His
whole being was given over to transgressing the limit, and he went up like a
Roman candle. That is art gloriously immitating life.
Steve Weston