Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 16:55:11 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: A Preface to Transgression


Here is a passage I find almost totally opaque.  Can you-all help me interpret 
it?  (It may also have some bearing on Sebastian's proposal about 
transgression as expenditure and the dialectic as accumulation.)
It starts on p.49 of LCP. 

"The twentieth century will undoubtedly have discovered the related categories
of exhaustion, excess, the limit, and transgression -- the strange and 
unyielding form of these irrevocable movements which consume and consummate
us.  In a form of thought that considers man as worker and producer -- that 
of European culture since the end of the eighteenth century -- consumption
was based entirely on need, and need based itself exclusively on the model
of hunger.  When this element was introduced into the investigation of profit
(the appetite of those who have satisfied their hunger), it inserted man into
a dialectic of production which had a simple anthropological meaning: if man
was alienated from his real nature and immediate needs through his labor
and the production of objects with his hands, it was nevertheless through
its agency that he recaptured his essence and achieved the indefinite
gratification of his needs.  But it would undoubtedly be misguided to conceive
of hunger as that irreducible anthropological factor in the definition
of work, production, and profit; and similarly, need has an altogether
different status, or it responds at the very least to a code whose laws
cannot be confined to a dialectic of production.  The discovery of sexuality
-- the discovery of that firmament of indefinite unreality where Sade placed
it from the beginning, the discovery of those systematic forms of prohibition
which we now know imprison it, the discovery of the universal nature of
transgression in which it is both object and instrument -- indicates in
a sufficiently forceful way the impossibility of attributing the millenary
language of dialectics to the major experience that sexuality forms for us."


-malgosia