From: Longs14255-AT-aol.com Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 17:42:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Fwd: A Preface to Transgression Sorry I sent the original to the incorrect address. --------------------- Forwarded message: Subj: A Preface to Transgression Date: 97-05-23 17:39:54 EDT From: Longs14255 To: foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Late, but armed with some understanding... this is in the category of Foucault for Beginners... Sexuality as the "totality of experience" justifiably becomes "the limit" for Foucault. Key to the unconscious, harbinger of the law and its prescriptive moralistic bind, sunchaser of new language in the black holes of silence, it brings us face to face with self-transcendence by "marking the limit within us" and at the same time revealing us as the source of "the limit." Transgression opens on the vast vista of "the limit." Because God is dead and the sacred holds no power or mystery for Foucault, transgression establishes new conditions for the type of sacredness which Foucault calls "unmediated substance." In other words, transgression becomes "savior" because it fills the void once called God with a profaning that "identifies, dissipates, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression." There are no more imposed limits from the "Limitless" one. Only in excess do we discover (in Foucault's words) that "sexuality and the death of God are bound to the same experience" in eroticism, the means of compensation for the death of God. Transgression is the means and the end, pushing wide the envelope of "the limit" in ever expansive vistas of limitlessness. This is paradox turned on its head, with Foucault writing: "... the limit opens on the limitless, and transgression carries the limit to the limit of its being, to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, finding itself in what it excludes." This is masterful use of language and delicious exploration of a conundrum. Transgression is the essential acting out of finitude and being, beyond dialectical thinking, taking the "mad philosopher" to the depths where language is of little or no help. This is indeed heady stuff, extremely thought-provoking and appropriate for contemporary post-modernism. The popular culture understands that in pursuing transgression to its limit, and thereby opening further limitless possibilities for more experience of transgression and the limit, it replaces the God who reportedly does not exist. Yet in the pursuit, destruction lurks in the darkness once thought to contain the limit. It's one of the closing scenes in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when the lid comes off the Ark of the Covenant. All hell breaks loose. The power of sexuality Foucault describes, in the urge to transgression, eventually closes in upon itself, can no longer press the limit of its understanding because in the "empty core where being achieves its limit, and where the limit defines being," there is not fulfillment but emptiness. There is another option, which Foucault graciously opens to us in this multi-faceted description of what he considers "a new heaven and a new earth." Leonard Bernstein put his finger on it in the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1973, when he attempted to use linguistics and the thought of Noam Chomsky to get at the meaning of Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question." What Bernstein was searching for, in his hysterical life of transgression and pursuit of "the limit," was the reconciling of tonality in the late 19th century music of Wagner and Mahler, and the atonality of Schoenberg and the serialists. I think this is exactly what Foucault is attempting, and what we all must attempt. The difficulty is that Foucault believes he's found it in his "dissipating profanation." I have found the answer to Ives' "Unanswered Question," but in music, and not sexuality. Foucault helps me understand the strange, paradoxical nature of pursuit, and what happens when someone like Lenny burns the candle at both ends and the middle for 73 years and dies a premature death in 1990. His whole being was given over to transgressing the limit, and he went up like a Roman candle. That is art gloriously immitating life. Steve Weston
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