Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 02:55:29 +1100 (EST) From: Sebastian Gurciullo <sebtempo-AT-silas.cc.monash.edu.au> Subject: Re: A Preface to Transgression vs the dialectic I have recently read a chapter that Allan Stoekl devotes to Foucault in his book "Agonies of the intellectual". He argues quite forcefully that a language/philosophy of transgression, in so far as it claims to replace or topple dialectical thinking is engaged in a kind of dialectical manouver itself. In this view, even if a language of transgressivity is to be taken as "a practice which forces philosophy (or language) to acknowledge that which it cannot acknowledge", it is, by virtue of claiming to be that much more aware of what is going on, in language, in philosophy, that it ends up repeating the dialectic itself but in a strange way, where the dialect and the transgressive (as its other) "interfere" with each other. Any claim to have somehow found a limit experience in something like sexuality, madness, death, that transcends the usual confines of philosophical thinking is claiming to find an other, a hidden double of "man" which can be recuperated even while one is ostensibly out to destroy the anthropological conception of "man" itself. Sexuality as limit experience, where speaking breaks off, is itself recuperable in the dialectical movement if it somehow captures something which normal (logocentric/rational etc) philosophising experience cannot. Then again, if it is only a parody of the dialectic, as in Bataille's "The Story of the Eye", where the culminating (dialectic/transgressive) movement is the sacrifice (I mean first raping then killing) of a priest (and all that he represents, not only the church but the despised universalism of dialectical philosophers) out of the ever more transgressive lusts of the three transgressors (the I of the story, Simone, & Sir Edmond). The three escape the consequences of their hideous crime and after Sir Edmond purchases a yacht at Gibraltar, and still intent on new and more comprehensive conquests, "set sail towards new adventures with a crew of negroes." A bit of a laugh really. The dialectic returns. Transgression is non-dialectical when it fails to master the dialectal manouver of replacing dialectics, but somehow contents itself with "playing" with it, repeating it, in various parodies. Stoekl suggests that of the avant-garde French writing which operates in this transgressive tradition, only Bataille was somehow able to comprehend this in his writing. I would be very interested in any responses to Stoekl's views. Sebastian Gurciullo
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