87

TRANSGRESSION

O f all the terms in the Foucauldian lexicon, “transgression” has perhaps

had the greatest impact, both within later “poststructuralist” work and even
outside it (and outside academic discourse as well). As Suzanne Guerlac has
noted, it was taken up, after Foucault’s use of it, by Tel Quel writers such as Philippe
Sollers and Julia Kristeva; from there it spread outward to the point of general cul-
tural saturation. But at the outset it had a very speciic meaning, and a very speciic
job to do (see Guerlac 1997).
The starting point for this popularity of the word “transgression” is Foucault’s
“Preface to Transgression,” an essay written in the 1963 memorial issue of the review
Critique devoted to Georges Bataille, who had died the previous year (ELCP, 29–52).
(Critique itself had been founded by Bataille, in 1946, so one can easily grasp the
symbolic importance of this issue.)
First, we should note what transgression meant for Bataille. Writing in and
against the Durkheimian tradition, Bataille from the irst had been concerned with
rethinking the role of the sacred in modern societies: How had modern societies
lost touch with the sacred? What was its basic importance? And what would be the
consequences of a return to it? Durkheim’s answer was that the sacred was the force
of human society itself coming together (in periodic festivals and celebrations) and
that a modern, rational form of the sacred should serve as the basis of a reinvigorated
French republic (see Stoekl 1989).
Bataille, inverting Durkheim, sees the sacred as not inherently rational or con-
structive but containing a “left hand” element that founds but also disrupts cultural
coherence and continuity. Indeed the two sides are inseparable: interdiction (accom-
panied by the “right-hand” sacred of consecration and conservation) assures the bal-
ancing of accounts of cultural and economic practices, the coherence of social and
sexual reproduction. But interdiction is meaningless without the imperative of trans-
gression (the left-hand sacred), the force of negation that precisely does not lead to

509
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 510 / Allan Stoekl

positive results: nonreproductive sexuality and the wantonly destructive expenditure

of economic rituals like potlatch, as well as laughter, poetry, and so on. Bataille’s
point is that the relation between interdiction and transgression is precisely not dia-
lectical: transgression is not simply subordinated to interdiction in order to facili-
tate a constructive, progressive historical movement, just as negativity is not always
fully recoverable within a coherent historical movement. In L’Erotisme (Death and
Sensuality), Bataille writes:

[T]ransgression has nothing to do with the primal liberty of animal life: it

opens the way beyond the usually observed limits, but it retains these limits.
Transgression exceeds without destroying a profane world, of which it is the
complement. Human society is not only the world of work. Simultaneously – or
successively – the profane and sacred worlds make it up, which are its two com-
plementary forms. The profane world is the world of interdiction. The sacred
world opens onto limited transgressions. It’s the world of festivals, sovereigns and
gods. (Bataille 1987, 67–68, translation modiied)

Without interdiction, transgression would be only “natural,” sex as mere organic

activity, death as something undergone without foresight: the world of animals. The
human world is the world of awareness and anguish before death, the world of use-
less play and dangerous sexual exuberance – but this is only possible so long as inter-
diction and utility are established against transgression. Transgression by itself is
nothing; it “needs” interdiction to “function” (not that it is comprehensible as a
simple function).
For Bataille, interdiction in the end inds its supreme meaning in intensifying
transgression: we conserve, so to speak, only in order to spend, we live and establish
barriers to activity that violates rules only to engage in activity that fundamentally
transgresses those rules. Thus, nihilistic religions that seem only to provide barri-
ers – that establish a terrifying interdiction as the highest value – ultimately serve
to intensify the “experience” of transgression. Again, in the chapter on transgression
in Death and Sensuality, Bataille writes: “In Christianity and Buddhism ecstasy is
founded on the going-beyond of horror. The accord with excess that carries every-
thing before it is even more intense in religions in which fear and nausea have more
profoundly eaten at the heart. There is no feeling more forcefully productive of exu-
berance than that of nothingness” (Bataille 1987, 69, translation modiied).
Interdiction and transgression are inseparable, but for Bataille transgression
seems in the end logically if not chronologically prior. Just as certain kinds of clothing
exist primarily to intensify sexual pleasure, for Bataille interdiction serves to inten-
sify the movement of “exuberance.” The horror of the void, the fear of risk, incites
one to move in the opposite direction, just as suspension over an abyss invites one
to jump. Transgression is the moment of passing over the limit, but, paradoxically,

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 Transgression / 511

its limitlessness is itself founded on the necessity of the limit. Transgression is con-
tained in, and contains, the limits set by interdiction, and yet the very movement of
social life, the very thing that makes life worth living and makes it something other
than animal life, lies in the passage over those limits.
With all this said, one should note that Bataille’s theory is one of society. It
attempts to explain social phenomena: the ultimate workings, and meaning, of reli-
gion. It is therefore in a sense also a religious theory: it justiies and afirms the
“experience” of the sacred and provides meaning only in the more profound mean-
inglessness of transgression (unbridled sexuality, play, spending without return,
uncontrolled artistic and ludic activity). Bataille is concerned with telling us why we
live and what our ultimate motivations are, whether we recognize them (or can rec-
ognize them, since they operate against limits) or not. He is, in other words, at least
in his arguments on the sacred, a social commentator.
Foucault, in “Preface to Transgression,” is up to something else. His concerns
ultimately turn on textuality and the role of language in it. In his presentation/revi-
sion of Bataille, Foucault asserts that sexuality, like God, is no longer capable of
setting the outer limits of humanity or the limits of the individual. Sexuality for
Foucault appears to be something like what Bataille called eroticism; since God has
died, sexuality “points to nothing beyond itself” (ELCP, 30). (Although Foucault
uses the term “sexuality,” “eroticism” in Bataille’s sense would probably be prefer-
able, since Bataille is not discussing the phenomenon of sexuality examined by the
contemporary medical or social sciences, which clearly have little concern for trans-
gression or interdiction.)
As conveyed by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, sexuality now is a prof-
anation that “links, for its own ends, an overcoming of limits to the death of God”
(ELCP, 33). Through the endless permutations of Sade’s novels, written in the mode
of blasphemy, directed precisely against a God who does not exist, we come to rec-
ognize that sexuality, rather than something outside us (as biological or cultural
imperative), setting our personal limits, even authorized by theology (in its repro-
duction-afirming mode), instead “marks the limit within ourselves and designates us
as limit” (ELCP, 30). Endlessly written sexuality is now internal, referring back to no
animal (“natural”) state; it cannot be incorporated in a benign reproduction under
the aegis of an ininite, and ininitely limiting, God. Rather, it turns on itself, always
generating new permutations, new senseless variants: “Not that it [sexuality] proffers
any new content for our age-old acts; rather, it permits a profanation without object,
a profanation that is empty and turned inward upon itself and whose instruments are
brought to bear on nothing but each other” (ELCP, 30).

The interdiction previously provided by God, and by a naturalizing sexuality, is

now situated in us: it is a constituting line crossed and recrossed by an endless lan-
guage. Transgression is an empty profanation, the sacred devoid of God, devoid

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 512 / Allan Stoekl

even of the sacred, an endless movement in us that accomplishes nothing, guaran-

tees nothing; it “is neither violence in a divided world (an ethical world) nor a vic-
tory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); . . . its role is to measure
the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit” (ELCP, 35).

One has the sense, nevertheless, that there is something positive in all this.
Perhaps in a Heideggerian mode (iltered through Blanchot), Foucault argues for a
transgression that “contains nothing negative, but afirms limited being – afirms the
limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the irst time”
(ELCP, 35) (on Foucault on Blanchot, see EFB). What is this afirmation? “Perhaps
it is simply an afirmation of division, but only insofar as division is not understood
to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment of a separation or the measuring of
a distance, only retaining that in it which may designate the existence of difference”
(ELCP, 36).
Transgression is an afirmative movement, opening the possibility of difference,
but only in and at the limit, not outside; it does not provide a stabilizing boundary,
even in the ininite. It is not scandalous; there is nothing “demonic” about it (ELCP,
37). Transgressive difference is instead the movement not of a productive negativity
making possible revolutionary action, but only an “afirmation that afirms nothing,
a radical break of transitivity” (ELCP, 36) – what Blanchot calls “contestation.”
Division “is” the nonorigin of difference, the “existence of difference” as afir-
mation not afirming any “thing.” Heideggerian Being here morphs into a proto-
Derridean différance, with the difference being that Foucault can still write of the
“existence” of difference. And that difference with Derrida is, I think, signiicant. The
paradox of Foucault’s transgression is that, in the end, its difference from Hegelian
contradiction is not really transgressive in Foucault’s own terms. After all, it exists,
through the difference it afirms. . . . What then is the status of this existence? How
can it be transgressive?
Foucault’s larger goal in his essay on transgression is to dispute the primacy
of the authorial subject and, from there, the role of a constructive or constitutive
negativity. The “experience” is that of the space where experience’s language fails,
“from precisely the place where words escape it, where the subject who speaks has
just vanished” (ELCP, 40). With transgression in and against the internal limit, ini-
tude is lodged in, and transgresses, the space of the absent autonomous subject. Once
again, a Heideggerian note, but the result is quite un-Heideggerian, and indeed un-
Bataillean: transgression entails the sheer proliferation of language, language repeat-
ing and transgressing itself “to ininity,” inding its “uninterrupted domain” (ELCP,
48), permuting endlessly in the void of an authorial, and authoritative, subjectivity
(“transgressing the one who speaks” [ELCP, 44]). This language doubling and dif-
fering from itself, autotransgressing, is a movement that, in Foucault’s view, renders
obsolete the earlier model of Hegelian (and Kojèvian) negation (for a Derridean

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 Transgression / 513

critique of this endless mirroring and replication, see Gasché 1986). The dialectic
proposed a productive negativity, the uptake of destruction in the creative elabora-
tion of spirit, ending in, literally, the end, a steady-state of Spirit at the close of history
(this was Kojève’s rewriting of Hegel, which had an enormous inluence in France
between the wars, as well as after World War II; see Kojève 1947). But by 1963
the dialectic, especially as espoused in the version put forward by French Marxist
intellectuals (including Sartre), not to mention the French Communist Party, was
starting to show its age. The problem was in the question of replacement. Foucault
poses the rhetorical question: “[Must we] ind a language for the transgressive which
would be what dialectics was, in an earlier time, for contradiction?” (ELCP, 40). He
seems to want it both ways: no to a simple replacement of dialectical-philosophical
discourse, but yes to some other model of philosophy as transgressive discourse. But
is “some other model” not merely a version of replacement?
That is the central problem: is contradiction to be replaced by another philo-
sophical discourse? Are we really that far from negation, and from the Aufhebung?
The answer is not at all clear: philosophy only “regains its speech and inds itself
again only in the marginal region which borders its limits” (ELCP, 43), coming from
the impossible space between “a puriied metalanguage” and “the thickness of words
enclosed by their darkness” (ibid.). A philosophy will appear, in other words, that
transgresses the space between a coherent technical discourse and the madness of
proliferating language.
The answer to the question of replacement, then, is both yes and no. Foucault’s
transgressive duality (the line and its crossing) seems to anticipate much of the later
Tel Quel project – the paradoxical effort to establish a rigorous theory of a prelog-
ical “chora sémiotique,” as Kristeva called it (Kristeva 1984) – and therefore there
could be no simple replacement of Hegelian dialectics but only a repetition, with a
difference, the endless turning of philosophical discourse around its internal limit,
the necessary but unassimilable space of transgression. But the important thing to
note here is that Foucault is nevertheless attempting to work out the logic of a
philosophical discourse that would come after, in one way or another, the coherent
philosophical language of dialectics. It seems, then, that he wants it both ways: on
the one hand, transgressive discourse is an ininite murmuring, a differential afir-
mation, reminiscent of Sade’s endless permutations or Borges’s library of Babel. This
avant-garde ideal is doubled by the suggestion (posed as a question) that dialectics
(contradiction) will ind its successor in a transgressive language that would, we can
easily conclude, destroy the legitimacy of dialectical philosophies, not least Marxism,
and lead to some sort of (rigorously marginal) philosophical discourse, founded not
on contradiction but on transgressive language (which is in fact yet to be found, and
perhaps cannot be found: “must we ind?”). Discrediting Hegelianism (read, in the
1963 French context: Marxism) and putting forward some conjunction of Bataille/
Nietzsche would thus ultimately have to be seen as a political gesture, as well as a

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 514 / Allan Stoekl

purely postpolitical one. The demise of a theoretical/practical Marxism, after all, is

not just a matter of the contestation of language: it would have (and has had) real
consequences in the world.
Derrida would later strongly indicate, in his essay on Bataille, the dificulty of
scrapping Hegel and moving on (Derrida 1978a). Indeed Derrida’s Bataille is sit-
uated in and against Hegel, thereby addressing what seems the main problem in
Foucault’s (and thereby perhaps Derrida is situated in and against Foucault as well):
the replacement of Hegelian contradiction with transgression, asserted or implied, is
quite simply not a Bataillean strategy. The ringing (albeit qualiied) statements about
the demise of dialectics are mistaken. Indeed, to replace Hegel, to “liberat[e] . . .
thought from all forms of dialectical language,” as Foucault puts it (ELCP, 51), is
itself to carry out a fully dialectical move, as not only Derrida was aware but Bataille
(according to Derrida) as well.
As Derrida notes at the outset of his essay, “Contrary to Bataille’s experience,
this [shrugging off of Hegel] puts one, without seeing it or knowing it, within the
very self-evidence of Hegel one thinks oneself unburdened of. . . . Hegelian self-evi-
dence seems lighter than ever at the moment when it inally bears down with its
full weight” (Derrida 1978a, 251; italics Derrida’s). Derrida speciically notes the
word transgression (in italics) and then notes as well (in a footnote in Death and
Sensuality) that for Bataille the very use of the term transgression is Hegelian: “It is
useless to insist upon the Hegelian character of the operation” (Derrida 1978a, 275).
Foucault’s version of transgression is clearly at issue in both these passages. One can
perhaps answer Derrida, however, by noting that Foucault’s main formulation of the
“language of transgression” is posed primarily as a question. Derrida the famously
attentive reader seems to miss this. (In any event, one has the sense that Foucault
could have avoided the ambiguities of an antidialectical dialectical position by recall-
ing Deleuze’s formulation: “Negation is opposed to afirmation but afirmation dif-
fers from negation. . . . Afirmation is the enjoyment and play of its own difference”
[Deleuze 1983, 188; italics Deleuze’s].)
Bataille himself in fact proposes not simply replacing (or sublating) but rather
doubling Hegel, ironically enough in a way very similar to Foucault’s internalization
of the limit: in Bataille’s Hegel, or Hegel as Bataille, the radical negativity that Hegel
must expel in order to constitute the dialectic is (impossibly and always already)
incorporated within it, in a inal postdialectical dialectical move, resulting in a (trans-
gressive, Foucault would say) doubling of “absolute knowledge” (le savoir absolu) by
not knowing (le non-savoir) (Bataille 1988, 108–111). Thus, interestingly enough,
Bataille anticipates Foucault’s situation of transgression in the death of God (or of
Spirit), the internalization of the limit transgression, all the while afirming not the
negation or the going beyond of Hegel but his repetition – with a difference. Bataille
thus afirms not sheer “language to ininity,” but instead the doubling of a Hegelian
end of history with the historically resistant but sociologically grounded movements

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 Transgression / 515

of eroticism, laughter, and poetry: dialectical negativity not abolished or superseded

but “out of a job.”
If for Bataille transgression was never restricted to a sheer play of language,
the same soon came to be the case for Foucault as well. By the time of “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History” (1971) (ELCP, 139–164), we can see how the movement of
a seemingly subjectless language, murmuring ininitely, relecting its permutations
around and across an internal limit, morphs into a subjectless history, consisting of
a temporal movement elaborating itself without the intervention of God, spirit, or
great men. The micromovements of historical detail are now extralinguistic to the
extent that the subjectless littéraire/postphilosopher, implied in Foucault’s proto–Tel
Quel version of transgression, is succeeded by the patient and painstaking genealo-
gist-historian, working tirelessly in the hémicycle of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The
two autobiographical personae of Foucault – textual transgressor and genealogist –
are curiously related. Both certainly entail the death of an overarching subjectivity
and ceaseless textual elaboration. But by moving away from a Bataille-inspired trans-
gression, Foucault ultimately doubles Bataille even more rigorously, since Bataille
himself was, by profession, a patient archivist-librarian – at that ultimate fantasia of
the library, the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Allan Stoekl

See Also
Contestation
Difference
Marxism
Space
Georges Bataille
Maurice Blanchot
Jacques Derrida
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Martin Heidegger

Suggested Reading
Bataille, Georges. 1987. Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars.
1988. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: The SUNY Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia
University Press.

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 516 / Allan Stoekl

Derrida, Jacques. 1978a. “From Restricted to General Economy, a Hegelianism without

Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 251–277.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Guerlac, Suzanne. 1997. Literary Polemics: Sartre, Valéry, Breton. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard.
Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Stoekl, Allan. 1989. “1937: The Avant-Garde Embraces Science,” in A New History of French
Literature, ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 928–935.
Tauchert, Ashley. 2008. Against Transgression. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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