Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:27:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: "E.M. Durflinger" <bc05319-AT-bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu>
Subject: Transgression: Tired or Wired?


 
Personally, I'd be more than happy to leave off with the language of 
transgression altogether, and its rather unahppy lineage of pornology. 
The entire discourse surrounding transgression, and its obsession with 
the bloody mess, seems to me to be no more than the apotheosis of phallic 
philosophy seeking its own Emaculate Conception.
 
De Sade: Let's formulate a law so cold and strict that it becomes its own 
undoing.  Bataille: Let's turn the eye back on itself, let's try to 
conceptualize a headless phallus, let's indule in castration through 
violence.
 
In the words of Ministry, 'the mirror collapses, but the image may not.' 
The ur-deconstructive trope of a law or a violence that is its own 
undoing still remains, to me, too obsessed with the categories of law and 
violence to begin with.  And in the end, you've still got a bloody mess.  
The whole notion that you can engage in an impossible project to reach 
across, push through, chop up, fold, spindle, and mutilate your way 
through representation to attempt to reach the Outside, to finally break 
down the walls of subjectivity, even if only at the impossible limit of 
the death of both Self and Other, may be an appealing project for a 
whitemale subjectivity that finds itself encircled by those limits--but 
who *else* cares?
 
[My problem with Derrida also lies along these grounds--sure, we can 
dwell in the indeterminacy between the phallic and the hymenal all we 
like, but who really wants to?]
 
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

-<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>--<*>-
E.M. Connor Durflinger          		"The perversity of the  
Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture               universe tends towards 
Binghamton University			                   a maximum."
Binghamton, NY 13901                                       --Finagle's Law
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