Transgression, subversion

1. Transgression, subversion “Remember, and fear to transgress” (Milton, Paradise Lost, VI.1)

2. anthropological perspective: the economy and politics of transgression • Satan; Prometheus; Frankenstein • Oedipus, Niobe, Narcissus • Pandora’s box, the daughters of Cecrops (curiosity) • Laws: ten commandments, the Law in The Island of Dr Moreau

3. law and desire • Freud: to live in civilisation is to be unhappy • Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation • Leviticus 11.5: “the rock hyrax, because it chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves, is unclean to you”

4. Paradox of law and transgression • culture founded on the impossibility of doing/saying everything • Yet: there is nothing that cannot be done or said

5. The anthropology of transgression (Roger Caillois: Man and the Sacred) • Sacred and profane • ʻsacred’: Hebrew ʻkhadosh’, Greek temenos – ʻcut off’, ʻseparate’ • All elements of the world interrelated (magic) • Every transgression is total • Rules maintain the world - but they cannot renew it → feasts

6. Feast and transgression • Feast ~ creation • Chronos and Rhea: incest • “there is no order that is not founded on crime” (Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra) • Feast: ritualised return to chaos and creation • Such transgression is also sacred

7. Sacred, ritualised trangression • economic view (Bataille): trangression violates the rational logic of economy, of exchange based on eqiuvalence, give and take • Non-productive expenditure: war, sacrifice • POTLATCH: excessive giving away of precious objects, gifts; humiliating the recipient • spectacular destruction of wealth • rivalry, fight for prestige • „we vie with one another in our presents of thanks, banquets and weddings, and in simple invitations. We still feel the need to revanchieren” (Marcel Mauss: The Gift)

8. Gift as transgression • potlatch affects society and nature and the supernatural/divine. • giving incites the dead, wildlife, spirits and gods to be generous in turn • the exchange of gifts produces a general abundance

9. 32 ¶ Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. • 33 And his disciples say unto him, Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness, as to fill so great a multitude? • 34 And Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven, and a few little fishes. • 35 And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. • 36 And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. • 37 And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the broken meat that was left seven baskets full. • 38 And they that did eat were four thousand men, beside women and children. (Matthew 15. 32-38)

10. Christian agape • “Ha ugyanis olyasmit birtoklunk, ami nem fogyatkozik meg az ajándékozás révén, akkor mindaddig, amíg nem adunk belőle másnak, nem úgy birtokoljuk, ahogyan birtokolnunk kellene.” (A keresztény tanításról) • Agape: it is about giving (plenitude); it is irrational, absurd, unmotivated (why does God love me? No reason)- indifferent to ʻvalue’ – it creates value

11. Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and the metaphysics of transgression • distinct, discontinuous individual (self-preservation and reproduction) vs. biological life: continuity, leaking, waste. proliferation • Wish to preserve autonomy – wish to melt into life, continuity: will to loss, will to death, will to violence: “the need to lose oneself goes beyond the need to find oneself”

12. Bataille/2 • death and sensuality • “In human consciousness, eroticism is that within man which calls his very being into question” • The origin of the sacred (set apart, untouchable): the putrifying body • “a fetid, sticky object without boundaries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death” (The Accursed Self)

13. Bataille/3 • heterogeneity; the highest (sainteté) and lowest (souillure, filth) noble, supreme, entirely pure, majestic vs. filthy, contaminating, impure, accursed • Christianity: divided the sacred into high and low; the low aspect renamed demonic • “the only sacred remained the majestic, the divine; on the other side there was darkness in which the profane and the diabolical world are joined” (The Accursed Self)

14. Bataille/4 • (1) Ecenomic view of transgression: • waste, unproductive expenditure • (e.g. Transgressive/perverse sexuality) • sacrifice, gambling, war, potlatch • (2) the experience of transgression

15. „any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms, be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political” (Barbara Babcock, qtd. in Jonathan Stallybrass and Allon White. The Poliics and poetics of Transgression, 1986)

16. Experience of transgression • mixture of pleasure and anguish: joy of doing sg illicit • but also an anguish, anxiety about being in the wrong (sin, guilt) (Susan Rubin Suleiman: Subversive Intent)

17. law and desire • desire itself is not transgressive – generated by the law • Romeo and Juliet; Tristran and Isolde • love feeds on prohibition (myth of passion vs marriage)

18. Complicity of law and desire • “The law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression” (Rom 4.15) • nullum crimen sine legen) • Georges Bataille: „a profound complicity of law and the violation of laws” • „a taboo is there in order to be violated”; transgression „suspends the law without subverting it”

19. the Fall • Rüdiger Safranski: A gonosz avagy a szabadság drámája • Tree of knowledge (knowledge of good and evil) like the sign ‘Ignore this sign’

20. complicity/2 • transgression „suspends the law without subverting it” (Bataille)

21. Transgression in modern society • transgression • (1) Violation – implies violence: crossing a line, trespassing, sacrilege • (2) transcendence: the idea of a ʻbeyond’ • the border separating two realms (forbidden territory) • sacred and profane realms

22. secular world • Michel Foucault: „Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred  is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes … a way of recomposing the empty form of the sacred, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating” („Preface to Transgression”)

23. Transgression in political anthropology • (1) No sacred (but the place/site of the sacred is reproduced) • (2) politics rather than religion; prohibitions set up by Power, law • (3) subversion rather than transgression • (4) the site of subversion shifts into the symbolic sphere (transgression→ subversion; textualised)

24. transgression - subversion • (political) subversion - (metaphysical, religious) trangression • boundary vs limit (deconstruction) • “we are studying statements at the limit that separates them from what is not said” (Foucault) • no access to a beyond→ exploring the limits of what can be said • “Meaning is confronted not as an absolute transcendence grounding language, but in the limits of language” (Foucault)

25. transgression – subversion/2 • showing that prohibitions are not ʻnatural’ → can be transgressed (Nietzsche’s critique of morality: The Genealogy of Morals) “If transgression subverts, it is less in terms of immediate undermining or immediate gain, than in terms of the dangerous knowledge it brings with it, or produces, or which is produced in and by its containment in the cultural sphere.” (Jonathan Dollimore)

26. the subversion/containment controversy • the impossibility of genuine transgression • (1) who will transgress or subvert? The possible site of transgression • Foucault: power is not just prohibition but productive: the subject is the product of power • the very locus of resistance becomes problematic: if I am the product of power, how real is my resistance or act of transgression?

27. “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” (Franz Kafka: The Zürau Aphorisms))

28. the subversion/containment controversy/2 • Transgression as the ruse of power • Marcelin Pleynet: „In our time, no more transgression, no more subversion”, only „a parody of transgression, a parody of subversion, a simulacrum.” • Jonathan Dollimore: „Resistance from the margins seems to be doomed to replicate internally the strategies, structures, and even the values of the dominant.” • Georges Balandier: „The supreme ruse of power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in order to consolidate itself more effectively”

29. Transgression/containment/3 • Transgression institutionalised, inflated • Mainstraim culture incorporates, defuses transgression • Umberto Eco: “in a world of everlasting transgression, nothing remains comic or carnivalesque, nothing can any longer become an object of parody, if not transgression itself”