Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 20:19:30 -0500 (CDT)
From: Erik D Lindberg <edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Transgression: Tired or Wired?


On Wed, 20 Sep 1995, E.M. Durflinger wrote:

>  
>  
> Deleuze and Foucault, it seems to be, both clued in to this fact 
> post-1969.  Some may chose to read it as their own personal Thermidorian 
> stage after the failed revolution, a backlash against their own more 
> extreme work--but I don't think so.  D&G's admonition not to 
> deterritorrialize wildly, to avoid internal fascism, not to become 
> enamoured of power (Foucault's read), to steer away from that black 
> hole/white wall assemblage, indicates a different possibility of relating 
> oneself to Otherness and the Outside.  Foucault's Enlightenment, the 
> reinauguration of the critical attitude, a stance not towards reaching 
> blindly for liberation, liberation, liberation, but in ethically 
> constructing and managing one's liberty with a view towards no longer 
> doing or being what one has done or been in the past also, to me, enacts 
> this possibility.
>  
> So, all this being said, yes, in my view, it *was* tired when Bataille 
> and de Sade did it.  Great, we've got a phallic woman; hooray, we've got 
> another bloody mess--another self-congratulatory ejaculation from the 
> phallic mind, enraptured with its own problematic.
>  
> ///Connor
> 
I think there is some truth to what you say about Foucault and Deleuze 
(though Foucault, at least, remains a dramatic apocalyptic thinker well 
after '69).  But they do this standing on the shoulders of those such as 
Bataille and Sade--or Nietzsche, many parts of which any sane person 
would reject.  Everything is tired retrospectively, but nevertheless 
"necessary."  As Nietzsche put it, "now something you formerly loved as a 
truth or probability strikes you as error; you shed it and fancy that 
this represents a victory for your reason. . . .  What killed that 
opinion for you [however] was your new life and not your reason: _you no 
longer need it_, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out into the 
light like a worm."


Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI  53211
email: edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu


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