Remember and fear to transgress Milton Paradise Lost VI1 It aint no sin if you crack a few laws now and then just so long as you dont break any Mae West The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beechtree and the beechtree was in the middle o ID: 557788
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Slide1
Transgression, subversion
“
Remember, and fear to transgress” (Milton,
Paradise Lost
, VI.1)
“It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any” (Mae West)Slide2
Slide3
The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech-tree, and the beech-tree was in the middle of the forest...Next to his house was a piece of broken board which had: "TRESPASSERS W" on it. When Christopher Robin asked the Piglet what it meant, he said it was his grandfather's name, and had been in the family for a long time. Christopher Robin said you couldn't be called Trespassers W, and Piglet said yes, you could, because his grandfather was, and it was short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William. And his grandfather had had two names in case he lost one--Trespassers after an uncle, and William after Trespassers.Slide4
anthropological perspective
Transgression in mythology, religion, politics
Pet theme of theory (Bataille, Deleuze, Kristeva)
Satan; Prometheus
Oedipus, Niobe
Man is circumsrcibed, curtailed, restricted
Greek idea of
sophrosyne
(lack of excess)
Curiosity: Pandora’s ‘box’ or
jarSlide5
anthropological perspective
Freud: to live in civilisation is to be unhappy
‘Four
legs good,
two
legs bad
’
‘
No
animal shall wear clothes
.
No
animal shall sleep in a bed
.
’
vs
the Law in
The Island of Dr MoreauSlide6
the law in The Island of Dr. Moreau
“It is a man. He must learn the Law
.”
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”Slide7
law and desire
desire itself is not transgressive – it is generated by the law
Romeo and Juliet; Tristran and Yseult
love feeds on prohibition (myth of passion vs marriage) Slide8
complicity of law and desire
“The law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression” (Rom 4.15
)
(
nullum crimen sine legen
)
Georges
Bataille
: „a profound complicity of law and the violation of laws”
„a taboo is there in order to be violated”; Slide9
the
Biblical story
of the Fall
Rüdiger Safranski:
A gonosz avagy a szabadság drámája
(
Evil or the Drama of Freedom
)
Tree of knowledge (knowledge of good and evil
):
like the sign ‘Ignore this sign’
It is ‘evil’ to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
(Hegel: the Garden of Eden was the gargen of animals)Slide10
complicity of law and transgression
transgression „suspends the law without subverting it” (Bataille)
Transgression reinforces the law Slide11
anthropology of transgression
Archaic societies: overregulated
Leviticus 11.5: “the rock hyrax, because it chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves, is unclean to you”
Modern societies: new forms of prohibitions, strict regimes (dieting) Slide12
The anthropology of transgression (Roger Caillois: Man and the Sacred
)
(1) Sacred and profane: the basic division
ʻsacred’ (
sacer
; Hebrew
khadosh
, Greek
temenos
– ʻcut off’, ʻseparate’
(2) Every transgression is total and catastrophic (all elements of the world interrelated by magic)
(3) Rules maintain the world - but they cannot renew it → feasts Slide13
feast
„The gods took pity on the human race, born to suffer as it was
, and
gave it relief in the form of religious festivals to serve as
periods of rest from its labours. They gave us as fellow
revellers the
Muses, with Apollo their leader, and Dionysus, so that
men might
restore their way of life by sharing feasts with gods.” (Plato
:
Laws
654)Slide14
Feast and transgression
Creation
~
transgression
Chronos and Rhea: incest
“there is no order that is not founded on crime” (Carlos Fuentes:
Terra Nostra
)
Feast: ritualised return to chaos and creation
Such transgression is also sacred Slide15
The ‘economy’ of trangression
violating the rational logic of economy, of exchange based on eqiuvalence, give and take
Non-productive expenditure: gift,
sacrifice
POTLATCH: excessive giving away of precious objects, gifts; humiliating the recipient
spectacular destruction of wealth
rivalry, fight for prestige; economy before money and market Slide16
Gift ~ Christian agape
The miracle of the fish
“
For if we possess something that does not diminish through being given
awa
y, then, as long as we fail to give of it to others, we do not possess it the way we ought to possess it.”
(
St Augustine:
De Doctrina Christiana
)
Agape
: irrational, absurd, unmotivated giving - waste Slide17
Transgression in modern society
„any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms, be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political” (Barbara Babcock, qtd. in Jonathan Stallybrass and Allon White.
The Politics and poetics of Transgression, 1986
)Slide18
Experience of transgression
mixture of pleasure and anguish: joy of doing sg illicit
but also an anguish, anxiety about being in the wrong (sin, guilt)
(Susan Rubin Suleiman:
Subversive Intent
)Slide19
secular world
Michel Foucault
: „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 that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes … a way of recomposing the empty form of the sacred, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating” („Preface to Transgression”) Slide20
Transgression in modern society
(1) No transcendence, no beyond, no sacred (but the place/site of the sacred is reproduced)
(
2) politics
and morality rather
than religion; prohibitions set up by power, law
(
3) subversion rather than transgressionSlide21
transgression – subversion
showing that prohibitions are not ʻnatural’ → can be transgressed
(Nietzsche’s critique of morality:
The Genealogy of Morals
)
“
If transgression subverts, it is less in terms of immediate undermining or immediate gain, than in terms of the dangerous knowledge it brings with it, or produces, or which is produced in and by its containment in the cultural sphere.” (Jonathan Dollimore) Slide22
the subversion/containment controversy
“Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.”
(Franz Kafka:
The Zürau
Aphorisms
) Slide23
the subversion/containment controversy 2
the impossibility of genuine transgression
(
1) who will transgress or subvert?
(the agent of transgression)
Foucault: power is not just prohibitive but productive: the subject is the product of power
the place of resistance becomes problematic: if I am the product of power, how real is my resistance or act of transgression?
mental illness as ‘resistance’: refusal of the subject position Slide24
Transgression/containment
Orwell:
Nineteen Eighty-Four
O’Brien’s book (
indictment
of the Party)
Georges
Balandier
: „The supreme ruse of power is to allow itself to be contested
ritually
in order to consolidate itself more effectively” Slide25
the subversion/containment controversy 3
Transgression as the ruse of power
Marcelin Pleynet
:
"
In
our time, no more transgression, no more subversion”, only
‘a
parody of
transgression’,
a parody of subversion, a simulacrum.”
Jonathan Dollimore
:
"
Resistance
from the margins seems to be doomed to replicate internally the strategies, structures, and even the values of the dominant.” Slide26
Transgression/containment/4
Transgression institutionalised, inflated
Mainstraim culture incorporates, defuses transgression
Umberto Eco: “in a world of everlasting transgression, nothing remains comic or carnivalesque, nothing can any longer become an object of parody, if not transgression itself” Slide27
the paradox
of law and transgression
culture founded on the impossibility of doing/saying everything
Yet: there is nothing that cannot be done or said