TRANSGRESSION, LIMIT, AND OPPOSITIONAL MODES
John S. Ransom
Dickinson College
Aristotle tells us that "man is by nature political animal." With this phrase, Aristotle is participating in a time-honored move in political philosophy, one that is perhaps inaugurated by him: Using an assertion about humanity’s essence as the basis both for understanding and criticizing political institutions. Once our nature is clearly specified, we will know how to look at institutions and be able to tell whether or not they are just or legitimate by comparing what they do to what our nature is capable of doing. Thus, if we are convinced by Aristotle when he says that we are political animals, we will criticize arrangements that do not allow for the fulfillment of that nature.
Aristotle does not merely assert that humans are political animals. He provides a strong case for his claim, at least if we are influenced by teleological arguments. Humans are animals, but alone among animals they have the power of speech. What is the end for which this capacity has been devised? Aristotle denies that the end of speech could be mutually beneficial exchanges of information regarding threats against and opportunities for material gain and security. If that were the case, human speech would be little different from the "voice" that animals use to warn of threats from or opportunities in their environment. The true end of something, Aristotle argues, is only arrived at when its fullest expression, perhaps even its fullest potential, is achieved. Human speech reaches its apex not when it facilitates economic exchange and physical security, but when it produces a common sense of justice, which is then institutionalized in the polis.
Notice that at a certain level of abstraction there is an important similarity between what Aristotle is up to and the "state of nature" theorists such as Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Jefferson. All of them employ something like the same maneuver: establish what is natural about human beings and the institutions designed to contain them will logically follow. As Nozick points out, arguments that proceed from what is putatively "natural" about us — whether in a state of nature, Rawls' Original Position, or Aristotle's polity — are particularly attractive because they satisfy the desire for a particular kind of rhetorical advantage: Society and the state arises out of the necessities of our own lives. We know this is true because every time we try to imagine ourselves outside this state, we find ourselves led inexorably back to it.
I am in particular interested in oppositional thought, what Joan Cocks has called "the oppositional imagination." And it is easy to imagine the kind of oppositional possibilities opened up by the legitimatory link established by the above authors between nature and polis. Aristotle points out that regimes not pursuing the "good life" (in the sense of virtuous living and active participation in the polis by its citizens) are deviant and unjust, and he would not be surprised if the "good man" was unable to function as a "good citizen" regimes of this kind. Using the same logic if not the same kinds of ambitious normative criteria, Locke argues that regimes failing to carry out the duties assigned to them by future citizens in a state of nature are similarly unjust. Clearly, then, political philosophy has done a very good job making it clear when abuses of power occur and what opposition to it must strive to achieve.
The only problem with it is that it is out of date. Too many operations of power are able to slip by undetected by the critical arsenal of traditional political philosophy. Not only that, this critical arsenal has for a long time been associated with a particular means that also seems out of date: Revolution. Revolutions in the West have had two primary goals. First, they are designed to reverse the unnatural condition where a political regime pursues interests that are at variance with the purposes for which the regime was established. Put more positively, such a revolution will reassert the rights and freedoms of the community and its members against an unjust usurpation of authority. Its brief on behalf of human freedom is what links revolution’s first goal with a second: the liberation of the human spirit; human emancipation in its deepest sense. Understood this way, Revolution is not just that expedient employed in the last resort against a regime become tyrannical; it is, rather more ambitiously, the very midwife of a transcendence out of this world into the next. The reader can appreciate the strange combination of seemingly disparate but, as it turns out, closely linked ends of the Revolution. From one angle, Revolution is just the enforcement of a contract previously agreed to. Or, it is the understandable response of a people faced with systematic violations of the most important contract of all, with no neutral umpire to turn to — precisely because the umpire himself has taken sides or, contrary to its purpose, turned himself into a side with interests and goals that take him away from his assigned role as umpire. In another, Revolution is the link to another world, another kind of humanity. Such different uses for the same tool occurs due to the linking word mentioned earlier — freedom — which is used in both versions but which means fairly different things in each.
Foucault comments that words are just so many scratched-over interpretations by so many competing wills-to-power. Perhaps that accounts for the strange double-meaning of the word Revolution, one so practical and business-like, the other so millennial and apocalyptic. But we should notice the similarities, in particular the similar logical pathways, of the two versions. Why have a Lockean revolution? Start one of my revolutions, Locke says, when you see that the state machinery is being repeatedly abused in a long-standing pattern of behavior among the rulers that violates the purposes for which the state machinery was set up in the first place.
Why have a Marxian-Hegelian Revolution? Have a "Margel" (sorry!) Revolution when you believe the moment is propitious for launching humanity into a qualitatively advanced form of human-being. While Locke’s revolution is a return to an original condition due to flagrant violations of both letter and intent, Margel’s is a leap forward in the direction of something that is also in some sense natural. Marx identified this natural something as "species being;" Hegel as "Spirit." For Hegel, Revolutions (along with other forms of political action) were transcendent phenomena. They carried humanity from one articulation of Spirit to the next — not randomly, of course, but in a determinate logical order toward freedom. The same is true for Marx. In a real sense, then, both Marx and Hegel wanted a return to beginnings, though not the kind of beginnings Locke might have had in mind. For them, the relevant kind of beginning hasn’t happened yet — it must be achieved first. Aristotle says something similar in The Politics: the state may be last in time, but it is the first in reality. That is, the actually, fully developed state may come about as the historical result of an evolution that moves from the family to the village to the tribe and then to the state; but the state was the "truth" of the process all along, it was in a real sense the origin and the motive standing behind the historical events leading up to it. We will only really get to the beginning, to the truth of what we are, not by paying attention to our immediately-given characteristics, but by looking to the flowering of a being finally freed from enough necessity to explore the possibilities of its nature.
Today we live in a world that has lost faith in the transcendent possibilities of political action in general, and in Revolution in particular as the vehicle for that transcendence. One way to think of this new condition is in terms of Nietzsche’s phrase "God is dead." While this comment is certainly directed at the traditional figure of God, the term ‘God’ is also a stand-in for other well-known and similar attempts to provide action in the world with an orientation and ultimate meaning. Not only God, then, but Humanity is dead, and we have killed it just as surely as we killed God Himself. All these deaths have made it more and more difficult to conceptualize a way forward.
What, for instance, is to be done with Revolution? To the extent that this is the means of choice for those seeking to attain this-worldly realizations of the Divine idea (conceived as Man or God), it would appear that the activities associated with revolution must suffer its fate. No revolutionary end-goal means no revolutionary activity. But is there no way to rescue or recuperate the will to revolution? Granted that the revolutionary utopian hopes of the nineteenth and twentieth century no longer strike us as possible or even desirable, must the will-to-revolution suffer the same fate as the Revolution itself?
I think we can get clearer on what’s involved with this first issue by comparing it to a similar dilemma in the history of Western thought. Most of us tend to have a certain desire to analyze ourselves. Whether this desire is constructed or original to us is irrelevant here. At the time Rousseau introduced his Emile along with the two discourses, there was some confusion over what to do with the will-to-analyze, this desire to subject oneself to critical scrutiny and even to cultivate oneself in a particular way. The primary vehicle for this activity was usually taken to be the Church. It allowed one to situate the will-to-analyze into a broader system of knowledge. The Church provided the "key" or set of codes that allowed one to identify psychic events and interpret them — not unlike books on dream symbolism.
The very long and very slow decline of the Church’s dominance in European affairs — both political and psychic — left the will-to-self-analysis in a bind. How was it to express itself? It’s said that "where there’s a will, there’s a way," but what was the "way" for this particular will if the "way" in which it had usually operationalized itself had broken down? We should notice here the easy and logical — but mistaken — attitude of persons who find themselves living in an era where the usual means for employing the will-to-X have disintegrated. They tend to devalue and reject the will itself. We have a difficult time separating off our will-to-X from the means used to exercise it, a tendency that could probably be accounted for along Humean associationist lines.
What Rousseau did — and one can only imagine that this accounts for his popularity during his lifetime — was come up with a new set of criteria, a new cognitive map, a new set of keys and symbols, and in short a new arena for deploying the will-to-self-analyze. The internal events of our lives — the stream of observation and assessment that makes up the mental text running parallel to our experience of the world as a series of external events — could now be organized into an opposition between authentic selfhood and a contrived, artificial, social self. Europe fairly swarmed over this new playroom so cleverly designed by monsieur Rousseau. And some say the arts and sciences have not produced progress!
I would say that oppositional thought, or the will-to-revolution is in something of the same bind as the will-to-self-analysis was in Rousseau’s time. Namely, the activity has been dissociated from a specific set of means allowing the activity to be performed. The result is that oppositional thought itself, the very will-to-oppose or will-to-resist— a will that has had more than a little to do with producing the conditions of its own demise — faces a crisis. We might call it the crisis of transgression.
Something about the features of this crisis can be understood with another comparison to the history of thought: I’m thinking here of Nietzsche’s description of nihilism in his notebooks assembled under the title, The Will to Power. There Nietzsche briefly outlines the intellectual history leading up to the development of European nihilism. The Church, according to Nietzsche, was so sure that its vision of the cosmos was the correct one that it started out funding the investigations of nature in the early stages of the scientific revolution. Put another way, the Church provided a setting within which the ‘will-to-truth’ could be deployed. As this will patiently made its way through its investigations and conclusions, it found itself adopting positions about humanity’s status in the universe, about our origins in natural processes, and so on, that were increasingly at odds not only with the Church but with all elevated visions of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Another way to put this conflict would be in terms of the will-to-truth coming into conflict with the will-to-believe (or perhaps the will-to-value is a better term). As Nietzsche puts it, "those of us who pursue truth may very well recognize the inveterate mendaciousness characteristic of human cultures. On the other hand, it is very hard to do without the stories that give our lives value." The result, Nietzsche says, is that "we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation--needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth..."
They may appear to us as "needs for untruth," but they are not any less actual needs. That, Nietzsche thinks, is the problem: our will-to-truth exposes the emptiness of various moral visions of the world, while at the same time we are creatures who need a purpose and a value for their existence. As Nietzsche says, "the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs"---namely, the need for untruth.
I think there is a logical similarity between what Nietzsche describes happening to our will-to-value and what is happening today to our will-to-resist. For a long time our will-to-resist found a setting for itself in the revolutionary paradigm. That paradigm has fallen into serious disrepute and disrepair. Again, this has come about due to the ravenous and uncompromising nature of the will in question. Just as the will-to-truth pushed the logic of its own exercise until the very context required by it to function toppled over, so too the will-to-revolt turns on its mother (or should we say child?), the revolutionary paradigm. In 1843, Marx wrote that what was needed was a the "ruthless criticism of the everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be." The uncompromising nature of this will-to-criticism is well-represented in Marx’s comment. As we all know, that very single-mindedness ultimately led to the demise of the revolutionary project itself, as the "criticism of the existing order" came to include the socialist world as well as the capitalist. Once the revolutionary project is razed, however, the will-to-revolt looks around and blinks in response to an absence it produced but which at the same time deprives it of a sense of its own legitimacy. Let’s reword Nietzsche’s concern about the will-to-truth in our terms. His idea was that the "will-to-value" found itself undermined from within, as it were, by a "will-to-truth." In our case, the will-to-criticism has been undermined by its own action. The result, Nietzsche says, is that "we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation" — in this case, the need-to or the will-to-criticize — that we are no longer able to satisfy.
And why are we no longer able to satisfy it? Because the play of limits and their transgressions has lost its transcendent character, and as this has happened, a multiple crisis of confidence, efficacy, and purposiveness has evolved. The question for us is: to what extent can the transcendent character of the play of border and transgression be (a) reinvented; (b) spontaneously regenerated; (c) disregarded? One way to think about this question is in terms of contemporary oppositional practices. How do they respond, consciously or unconsciously, to the dilemma of the will-to-revolution?
But before any of the above can be answered, we need to make clear exactly what it is that is not working about the old revolutionary paradigm, which once played such a useful role for the will-to-revolution. Certainly there has always been an important faction of revolutionaries who denied that revolutionary activity was a means to an end, but was rather itself the end. Karl Mannheim makes this point nicely when he links the utopian mentality to varying experiences of time. The anarchist revolutionary, the pure chiliastic type,
sees the revolution as a value in itself, not as an unavoidable means to a rationally set end, but as the only creative principle of the immediate present, as the longed-for realization of its aspirations in this world. "The will to destroy is a creative will," said [the anarchist] Bakunin, because of the Satan within him, the Satan of whom he loved to speak as working through contagion. That he was not fundamentally interested in the realization of a rationally thought-out world is betrayed by his statement: "I do not believe in constitutions or in laws. The best constitution would leave me dissatisfied. We need something different. Storm and vitality and a new lawless and consequently free world."
Applied to our discussion of transgressions and limits, Bakunin seems closer to a non-transcendent approach to limits and their violation. But clearly Bakunin was an (important) exception to the norm among revolutionaries. This is what makes Bakunin a heretic: he was an "unbeliever" at a time when revolutionaries (and not a few anarchists among them) believed in humanity or Spirit or some other ideal that revolution would take us to.
Whereas the anarchist, as archetypically presented by Mannheim, plays the game of limits and transgressions in an immediate present, the more typical utopian personality is the one who conceives of the limit-transgression dyad transcendentally. That is, the transgressive act is not an end in itself for such revolutionaries. Rather, it is, as Marx says in one place about the use of force, "the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new": its purpose is to transport us to another realm — what Marx, for his part, called "the realm of freedom."
What, at the appropriate level of abstraction, would this realm of freedom look like? I think that for a wide range of revolutionary thinkers, "freedom" can only be seriously talked about in a setting that is rational. This means that society itself must become rational; must act as the Kantian subject. What this means concretely is that such a society and its operations become transparent to its members, with no element of the social construct allowed to remain opaque or obscured or mysterious. Opacity, obscurity, and mystery are sure signs that a society is not free. They are so many gestures in the direction of ideological distortions produced by powers with an interest in their widespread dissemination.
It is so we may be transported to this society — society-as-Kantian-subject, or, society-as-autonomous-Kantian legislator — that transgressive acts (manning barricades, taking over factories, storming Winter Palaces, tossing tea into Boston Harbor, and so on) are engaged in. But again, if the dream of achieving such a vision has disintegrated, what’s to be done with the transgressions that were to take us there?
Michel Foucault directly addresses this dilemma in his "Preface to Transgression," an essay written as an introduction to the work of Bataille. The particular kind of transgression Foucault discusses is sexuality, and he notes that for a long time transgressive sexuality was integrated into a Christian hierarchy of experience and transcendence. He writes,
never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural under-standing and never did it know a greater "felicity of expression" than in the Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin. The proof is its whole tradition of mysticism and spirituality which was incapable of dividing the continuous forms of desire, of rapture, of penetration, of ecstasy, of that outpouring which leaves us spent: all of these experiences seemed to lead, without interruption or limit, right to the heart of a divine love of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon itself. (p. 29)
A very good and well-known example of the kind of link between Eros and transcendence from the world of art would be Bernini’s "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" (see Attachment 1). The connection between the erotic and the divine is well-captured in the rapture of Teresa’s expression and even in the confused flowing of her robe; these indicators are joined by the coy smile of the angel as he prepares to thrust his arrow of divine love at an angle somewhat lower than one would expect if the heart were being aimed for. What is happening in Foucault’s terms is that the transgressive nature of sexuality is being given a transcendent significance, just as Socrates redescribed his attraction to young men in terms of a glimpse of the eternal harmonies of heaven.
So too do revolutionaries seek to comprehend their transgressive acts in terms of the new social order to be produced by them. Understood broadly, the death of God announced by Nietzsche means nothing more nor less than the end of transcendent justifications for transgression. As Foucault puts it, "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" (p. 30)? In Philosophy of the Bedroom Sade has Dolmance talk about how he gets unusually stiff when he blasphemes against God during sex. Clearly this kind of transgression is not what Marx, Plato, or Paul had in mind. But what role can there be for "profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any meaning in the sacred" — where "sacred" refers not only to God, but to Man, Humanity, or any other of the initial-capped ideals that have made up so much of the oppositional impetus of Western thought?
And if transgressive acts are no longer restrained or justified by a goal and purpose greater than themselves, how can they be tamed? How can we know when to transgress and when not? Into what order will transgressions in a world that "no longer recognizes any meaning in the sacred" be placed? In the realm of sexuality, we have the disturbing example of the Marquis de Sade himself. Transgressive acts for him were what revolutionary activity was to Bakunin: in both cases, the moment is the thing. The death of God, as Foucault puts it, has denied us the "limit of the Limitless" and has produced for us "an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being" (p. 32). Without God (or Man, or Humanity, or the Proletariat, and so on) there is nothing to refer our transgressions to, nothing to measure them against, nothing to help us discriminate among them — or, put less innocently, nothing to provide us with a plausible rationale for exercising the will-to-transgress.
Sometimes thinkers like Foucault and Nietzsche are charged with nihilism, with celebrating the destruction of standards and restrictive moral criteria. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, both Nietzsche and Foucault were deeply concerned about the moral void that nihilism produces. It is also true that they did not regret the passing of old and no longer persuasive stories concerning the value and purpose of life, especially as these did less and less work as creators of meaning and context and more and more work as excuses for the repression of new life forms. But neither thinker believed the problem of nihilism could be solved by turning away from it. That is, not one step forward is taken by arguing that the rudderless condition of transgressions in Sade and elsewhere should return us, uncomplainingly, to the safety and familiarity of long-established moralities and stories of transcendence. We can’t wish away either the death of God or the death of "socialism."
Foucault neither clucks his tongue at Sade nor raises the banner of "transgressions for transgression’s sake!" What’s needed instead of either kind of pop-philosophy knee-jerk reaction is a closer look at transgression and how it works with beings like us. We cannot get past the impasse confronted by oppositional thought either by falling back on cognitive "maps" (to use Jameson’s phrase) that we know how to read but which no longer correspond to much, nor by unconditionally valorizing the crossing of every line. We must take a closer look.
Transgression’s ever-present twin is the limit. No limit, no transgression. Foucault again helps us understand the issue in its purest — and by that I mean its most abstract — form. If we remove all empirical residues on both sides of the transgression-limit dyad, what does their interaction consist of?
The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. But this relationship is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an uncertain context, in certainties that are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them. (pp. 33-34)
Take any transgression. One that was suggested to me recently had to do with the popular and rascally cartoon character, Bart Simpson. Most introductory title sequences to this prime time, quasi-adult cartoon show contain a scene of the show’s rakish anti-hero, Bart Simpson, writing something on a school blackboard as part of some punishment. He's been told to write out a promise of good behavior in light of some violation (viz.,"I will not copy someone else’s homework"). But he twists the discipline he has received in both senses of the word and turns an exercise of power around on its user through parody and reversal (viz., "I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty" or "My homework was not stolen by a one-armed man").
The above is a simple example from the Ren and Stimpy school of critical cultural studies, no doubt, but compare it now to another transgression. In 1917, capitalists began to abandon their factories in St. Petersburg in response to a growing sense that Kerensky’s Provisional Government would not be able to satisfy or contain social unrest. Workers in some factories responded by taking over their factories and running them on their own, thus giving the lie to the claim that the private appropriators of capital were essential to the production process due to their unique organizational abilities.
Let’s add two more for good measure: protestors burning bras at a Miss America Pageant and a teenager at a Catholic school waving a Playboy centerfold in the face of censorious and repressive nuns. Given these examples, I think we can see what Foucault means about the reliance of the transgression on the limit. What unites all our examples? Foucault speaks of the "simple obstinacy" that stands behind the transgressive act, which perhaps without too much violence to what Foucault intends we could think of as the pure, non-transcendental "will-to-resist." But there is another side to the matter. If we think of our examples as points on a "transcendence" scale, they might be distributed like this:
Bart twisting his
waving a "write it 100 times" burning factory
Playboy centerfold punishment around bras takeover
less transcendent more transcendent
As we move to the right on the scale, it is easier to incorporate the transgressive act into a positive vision of human emancipation. Now that those stories have become less compelling, however, our attention has naturally been turned to the kinds of transgressive acts typical of the left side of the scale. Due, I would argue, to their unawareness of the nature of the crisis we confront, critics of postmodernism accuse thinkers like Foucault of highlighting the merely personal or endorsing a foppish cultivation of the self. In fact, he and thinkers like him are the "realistic" ones in the sense of actually confronting the primary dilemma of the postmodern (oppositional) world: what continuing role can be played by the "stubborn obstinacy" characteristic of each of our examples regardless of their position on the transcendence scale — especially as that scale no longer exists?
What happens to transgressive acts in a nontranscendent world? They cross lines set up by limits, and this is done "in a wave of extremely short duration" that nonetheless renegotiates the boundaries between inside and outside and consequently makes thought "ineffectual" in its efforts to thematize and thus subdue the transgressive act. Since the conditions that made the transgression possible have been more or less reworked by the act itself, attempts to provide, say, a "humanist" rationale or story-line for the bra burning or Bart’s blackboard jokes will always arrive late and will miss, or perhaps even distort, its target.
What has been the kind and quality of postmodern responses to the dilemma of oppositional thought and practice in a non-transcendent world? Unsurprisingly, there has emerged a very strong tendency to recreate the familiar transgression-transcendence dyad. As Nietzsche puts it, God is dead, we have killed him, and yet we don’t recognize our own deed nor understand its consequences. Somewhat similarly, a slew of postmodern thinkers want to hold on to the familiar link between transgression and transcendence by visualizing the latter as a kind of transgressive utopia. In a word, postmodern jargon (such as "difference," "the other," "agonistic respect," and so on) is used to reinstall the conceptual machinery that provides transgressive acts with their justification. Elsewhere, I have described such approaches as a variation on the theme of "vitalism" from earlier in the century. Such approaches make, I would argue, a key error: they fail to take into account the mutually supportive dynamic of limit and transgression that Foucault describes. I have already mentioned the brief phrase that encapsulates this point, which though trivial, is still true: "No limit, no transgression." In imagining a political world that reduces limits to as close to the zero point as possible, postmodernists such as William Connolly and Judith Butler, to mention two outstanding lights, unwittingly undermine the conditions required for transgression to occur. After all,
toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and those elements it contains? What bears the brunt of its aggression and to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out in the line it effaces? (34-35)
Are there other, more promising approaches? Yes. Outstanding postmodern theorists and feminists embrace a kind of vitalism that valorizes transgression over the limit in a way that unintentionally undermines the category of transgression. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, offers a model of thought that (a) respects and affirms the inevitability of limits; (b) avoids calls for millennial kinds of transcendence; (c) provides an arena in which transgression can still play a vital role. Textual hermeneutics does not start from a position outside the text, but rather chooses elements within it that lead to insights about the whole. Similarly, "social" hermeneutics does not approach the political world either from the imaginary world of an original social contract, nor from an imaginary state of being somewhere in our future where a final reconciliation between being and essence is achieved.
Gadamer is the primary representative of contemporary hermeneutic thought, and he, along with the "hermeneutic circle," are often thought to champion a conservative and tradition-affirming apology for the circle one happens to find oneself enclosed by. And yet it seems to me to make sense to speak of "left-wing" and "right-wing" hermeneutics, and that we could place Gadamer on the right and Foucault on the left. Whereas Gadamer rejects the Enlightenment’s uncompromising dismissal of all "prejudices" on the grounds that there can be prejuges legitimes, Foucault urges us to adopt a "philosophical ethos" which "may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers . . . . The point, in brief, is to transform critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression."
The continued relevance of oppositional thought is very much at issue now. The "will-to-transgress" is facing a crisis of confidence. In the context of this crisis, two tasks attract me: First, a much broader review of current critical thought in terms of the transcendence/transgression dilemma is needed. Second, an elaboration and defense of a viable "left-wing" hermeneutics needs to be explored to see if it can fill the void felt by the "will-to-transgress" in a nontranscendent world.
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NOTES
1. I am indebted to Malgosia Askanas of the Foucault Listserve discussion group for pointing out the importance of Foucault’s essay, "Preface to Transgression" to me. The archives of the discussion on the Foucault list that relate to this article can be found at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons. Archives are organized by months; the relevant months for this topic are February, March, and April of 1997.
2. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a1
3. Politics, ibid., and 1280a21-1280a34; 1280b29-1281a2.
4. Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique, and Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989).
5. Politics, 1276b20-1276b35.
6. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 222.
7. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in The Foucault Reader, pp. 84-85.
8. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 63-79.
9. Marx, "Preface" to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 19-23. The "Preface" can also be found in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), pp. 3-6.
10. Aristotle, Politics, 1252b27-1253a1.
11. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 343.
12. Nietzsche, The Will to Power trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967).
13. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Section 5
14. Ibid.
15. "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing" in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 13.
16. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1936), pp. 217-218.
17. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 916.
18. Michel Foucault, "Preface to Transgression" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). References to this essay will be inserted parenthetically in the text.
19. Plato, Phaedrus, 250d-251c
20. Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans by Seaver & Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), p. 241.
21. Frederic Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
22. by Richard Pithouse, who forwarded a list of Bart’s blackboard doodlings to the Foucault Internet discussion list.
23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Three, Section 125.
24. John S. Ransom, "Forget Vitalism: Foucault and Lebensphilosophie" in Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 23, no. 1, 1997, pp. 33-47.
25. William Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
26. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition (New York: Continuum, 1994); David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
27. Truth and Method, p. 277.
28. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 45.
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