Notes on "A Preface To Transgression" (1963) by Michel Foucault

Christian world → main moment of natural understanding of sexuality through fallen bodies and sin.Tradition of mysticism and spirituality incapable to divide the continuous form of desire, rapture, penetration, ecstasy, that leave us spent. Experience that seems to lead to the heart of a divine love (outpouring and source returning upon itself)

Contemporary experience → regained the full truth of sexuality as a process of nature. Now it can emerge in the clear light of language.
What characterize the modern sexuality (from Sade to Freud) is not to have found the language of its logic but that through the violence of this language they have found an empty zone where it establish the limits of every form is bestowed upon it.

Non-rappresentational nature of sexuality

// Impossibility to give form to the language of sexuality, it shows always the limits of the language

Sexuality points to nothing beyond itself, no prolongation except in a frenzy which disrupts it. No liberation of sexuality but we found its limit,

limit of consciousness, only reading of unconscious,
limit of the law, sole substance of universal taboos,
limit of language, it shows how much language can advance in the sand of silence,
limit of ourselves, designate us as a limit VS basis of our isolation or individuality.

Only division possible in an empty world (objects, beings,spaces) to desecrate. Profanation without object, empty profanation that turn inward upon itself, bear on nothing but each other. World that no longer recognize any positive meaning in sacred (transgression?)
Transgression as the sole manner to discover the pure sacred and a way to recompose its empty form, absence, through which becomes more scintillating.

Transgression and absence of God

Language from sexuality doesn't reveal secrets but that it exists without God. We announce through ourselves that God is dead. All of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation that at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausted itself in it and restore it to the empty purity of its transgression.
Modern sexuality as a superficial discourse of a natural animality, while obscurely addressing to Absence. (Eponime – L'abbé C)
This death is not the end of his reign as a nonexistence but a constant space of our experience.

By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience where nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, so an experience interior and sovereign. But disclose its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. >> inner experience as an experience of the impossible.
Death of God not just as an event that shape our contemporary experience but continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline.

The meaning of this death of God is a strange solidarity between the realization of his nonexistence and the act of kills him. But what does it means to kill God if he does not exists?

Perhaps to guarantee his nonexistence VS a nonexistent God that limits life.
But also to bring it back to those limits annulled by this limitless existence, as a sacrifice.
To return to this nothingness he is and to manifest his existence in the ecstasy.
To lose language and to gain communication as 'an immense alleluia lost in the interminable silence'.

This death doesn't restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it. Excess that discover that the death of God and sexuality are bound to the same experience or that 'God is a whore'. So the thought on God and sexuality are linked in a common form.

Definition of eroticism: an experience of sexuality which links, for its own end, an overcoming of limits to the death of God. Eroticism(VS mysticism) reveal that God is nothing if not the surpassing of God in every sense of vulgar being, horror, impurity, and sense of nothing.

At the root of sexuality (limitless as constantly involved with the limit) and this discourse on God (impropriety of a word that surpass all words) a singular experience is shaped: transgression.

Relation between the limit and transgression

Transgression, action that involves the limit. Metaphor of the line. T constantly crosses and recrosses a line which immediately close up behind it. Horizon of the crossable. But more complex. Uncertain context. They depend on each other. A limit could not exists if it were absolutely uncrossable, and transgression is pointless if the limit is composed by illusion. --> Glorification of the nature it excludes The limit open violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plentitude which invades it to the core of its being. Transgression force this. Perhaps to recognize itself for the first time, to experience its positive truth in its downward fall? Not black/white relation but spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Metaphor of the flash lighting in the dark that intensify the dark itself denying it and losing itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and then become silent after has given a name to obscurity. To analyse this space we must be detached from ethics, scandalous or subversive, negative associations. Transgression is neither violence as division nor victory over the limits. Nothing negative but affirms limited being, the limitlessness of this zone that it opens for the first time. But nothing positive, no content can bind it, no limit can restrict it. Division as the existence of difference not as affirmation of division itself.

Nondiscursive language

Discovery in philosophy of nonpositive affirmation lead to the advance of critical thought kant – nihil negativum/nihil privatium Blanchot – principle of 'contestation', affirmation that affirms nothing, break of transitivity. Not denying existence or value but carries them to their limits. To contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being. Power to implicate, question, everything without respite and to indicate place where it occurs in its most essential form, the immediacy of being. VS demonic character who denies everything Transgression opens onto a constantly affirmed world, without shadow or twilight, without 'no', originally linked to divine. Return of philosophy to Greeks not as an homeland without opposition but in reintroducing the experience of the divine at the centre of thought, since Nietzsche questions an origin without positivity and an open indifferent to the patience of the negative. No dialectical movement or transcendental analysis can serve as support to such experience or to access it. Can this instantaneous play of limit and transgression be the central thought on the 'origin', a Critique and an Ontology, understanding that comprehends both finitude an being? What generates this thought? → Kant articulated enigmatically a metaphysical discourse and reflection on the limits of reason, but relegated all critical investigation to an anthropological question. We interpreted this as a respite to meatphysics because dyalectics substituted for questioning being and limits the play of contradiction and totality. To awaken us from dialectics and anthropology, we required the Nietzschean figures of tragedy, Dyonisus, death of God, philosopher's hammer, Superman, Return. But why discursive language is ineffectual to maintain the presence of those figures and itself through them? Why its so silent before them as if it were forced to yield its voice, there extreme forms of language in which Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski have made the summits of thought? Sovereignty of these experiences must be recognized and assimilated, not to reveal the truth (ridiculous pretension) but as the basis for finally liberating our language.

Philosophy of eroticism & limit experience

Sade >> philosophical discourse is the product of complex architectural laws. Alternation, continuity and thematic contrast, are inadequate where the rational order is linked to an order of pleasures subjects in various discourse and constellations of bodies. Discursive language, explicit, continuous, no absolute subject.

Bataille >> Continuous break down, exposure of nakedness, inertia of ecstasy, subject that tries to keep the language at arms lenght but finds himslef exhausted in front of the nothing.

Philosophy of eroticism but also essential experience of finitude and being, limit and transgression.
What space and whant kind of language can it adopt? No form of reflection and no established discourse can supply its model. Must we search a language for the transgressive as dialetics was for contradiction? Better efforts if we try to speal of this experience and making it speak from the depths where langauge fails, where words escape it, subject vanished, where the spectacle topples over before an upturned eye. Protect those who seek a language for the thought of the limit, dwelling place that may already be a ruined project.

The end of dialectic

This thought from a language that leads to its very impossibility. Philosophical langauge is linked to dialectics from the time of Kant, not as a recapture of the lost Greek thought but, as the approach to the possibility of a nondialectical language. Our times of commentary, historical redoubling from which we cannot escape,does not indicate the velocity of language in a field with new philosophical objects, but indicate the inadequacy of a philosophical language. Philosophy as a multiple desert divested from its natural language. Not end of philosophy but marginalized at its limits, where it finds itself in a purified metalanguage or in words enclosed by darkness, by their blind truth. Not disarray but profound coherence. Philosophy now address separation and real incompatibility, and here we must focus our attention.

New language of philosophy

What language from this absence? Which philosopher will begin to speak? The philosopher becomes conscious of his limit and discover the existence of another language that speaks but it is unable to dominate, that strive and fails. A language that he spoke but separeted itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent. Not anymore always lodged in his language in the same fashion of the traditional philosophy, that from Plato to Nietzsche it's been hollowed. From the speaking subject to the multiplicity of speaking subjects, joined and severed it, combined and excluded.
From the lessons on Homer to the cries of a madman in the streets of Turin,who can be said to have spoken this continuous language, so obstinately the same?
Breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and dispersion in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence, probably one of the foundamental thoughts of contemporary philosophy. Not end of the philosophy but end of the philosopher as primary form of the philosophical language.

Bataille against language

Bataille as the first to oppose against all those who strive to maintain the unity of the philosopher grammatical function (at the price of the coherence). First reflected torture in philosophical language, dispersion allowing voiceless words to be born. Not only juxtaposition of reflective texts in the language of thought that makes us aware of the shattering of the philosophical subject but constant movement to different level of speech and systematic disengagement from the 'I', who is already on the verge of deploying his language and installing himself in it. Temporal disengagements, shift in the distance between the speaker and his words, inner detachment from the assumed sovereignty of thought or writing. At the center of the subject's disappearence the philosophical language proceeds as in a labyrinth, not to recapture it but to test (through language itself) this extremity of its loss but already completly lost and becomed an absolute void. This opening where the being surges forth is communication. Reversal of western movement which sustain wisdom since Socrates, and promise the serene unity of a subjectivity constituted by and through it. But where language of philosophy always repeat the philosopher's torment and discard his subjectivity, meaningless wisdom, it arise the possibility of the mad philosopher, who finds in the inner core of his philosophy the transgression of his philosophical being and the non-dialectical language of the limit arised by the transgression of the one who speaks. Play of transgression and being as foundamental for the constitution of philosophical language which reproduce and produce it.

The Eye

This non-langauge that describe a circle, refering to itself and folding back on a question of its limit, as a small night lamp with a strange light signaling the void from which it arises and to which it addresses everything it illuminates and touches. Maybe this is why the Eye, in the whole Bataille's carees, has a particular prestige, as a figure of inner experience. Eye as a limiting circle that only sight can cross, and from its inner darkness it lights up the world. It gathers up all the light in the iris, small black spot, where it is transformed into an image. Mirror and lamp, discharge its light into the world around while precipitates this same light into its well. Its globe as a seed, an egg, figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit.
In a philosophy of reflection, eye derives from the capacity to becomes always more interior to itself. Recursion of a series of eyes, one inside the other, progressively more discreet, agile and subtle, until we arrive at an eye whose entire substance is nothing but the transparency of its vision. Non-material center where the intangible forms of truth are created and combined, earth of things which is the sovereign subject. Bataille reverses this direction by taking the eye outside of itself and conducting it to the limit of its flesh and its being, only a cranial cavity remains. Eye as the philosophizing subject, void left by the exorbitated subject.

Upward act

As extreme act the eye turn upwards, back to the nocturnal interior of the skull, revealing its concealed surface, white (clarity) and unseeing (incommunicability), most open and impenetrable eye. The pivotal movement as the act of crossing the limit but to return on itself again from the other side, transgression of every sight, experience of death as ceasless transgression in the natural location, bond between language and death at the moment of the relationship between limit and being, permitting the possibility of a language for this play.
"If man did not imperiously close his eyes, he would finally be unable to see the things worth seeing." (René Char - Méthode de méditation)
In the end of 'Bleu du ciel' there is the same scene.

But what does this mean at the heart of a system of thought? What significance has this eye that Bataille succesively designated it as the inner experience, the extreme possibility, the comic process, meditation? Descartes - third meditation, "clear perception of sight", acies mentis.

No meaning, it marks its limit and indicates the moment when language, at its confines, overlap itself, explodes, challange itself in laughter, tears, ecstasy, horror of sacrifice, and remain fixed at the limit of its void, speaking in a second language where the absence of a sovereign subject outlines its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of its discourse. Somewhat like the eye of mystics and spiritualists, pointing at the secret language of prayer that becames embedded and chocked by a marvelous communication which silences it. Connection between the death and God (sun that rotates), experience of finitude, and the turning back of language upon itself from the failure. Sight of truth or of contemplation to the absolute, well known in other philosophies.
In the movement which carries it to a total night, the experience of transgression brings to light this relationship of finitude to being, this moment of the limit which anthropological thought, since Kant, could only designate from the distance and from the exterior through the language of dialectics.

Conclusion

XX century have discoverd the categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit, transgression. In a form of thought that considers man as worker and producer, consumption was based on need, and need on the model of hunger. When this element in an investigation of profit (the appettite of those who have satisfied their hunger), man into a dialectic of production. If man is alienated from his real nature and immediate needs through his labor and production of objects, neverthless through its agency he recaptured his essence and achived the indefinite gratification of his needs. But misguided to conceive hunger as that irreducible anthropological factor in the definition of work/production/profit... Need has a different status or cannot be confined to a dialectic of production. The discovery of sexuality (Sade - firmament of indefinite inreality),of systematic forms of prohibition which imprison it, of the univesal nature of transgression in which it is both object and instrument, inicates the impossibility of attributing dialectics to the experience that sexuality forms for us.

Emergence of sexuality in our culture, as a multiple values 'event':

death of God and ontological void which his death fixed at the limit of our thought.
silent apparition of a form of thought in which interogation of the limit replaces the search of totality, and the act of transgression replaces the movement of contraddiction.
questioning of language by language in a circularity, which 'scandalous' violence of erotic literature displays from its first use of words.

Sexuality as spoken and to the degree it is spoken, not that it is our language has been eroticized. Rather the universe of language has absorbed our sexuality, denaturated it, placed it in a void where it estabilishes its sovereignty, and where it sets up the Law the limits it transgresses. Here the appearence of sexuality as a fundamental problem marks the passage froma philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy on a being who speaks; and insofar as philosophy as secondary role to knowledge and work, not as sign of crisi but of essential structure, now secondary to language. Not that philosophy as repetition or commentary, but it experiences itself and its limits in language and in this transgression of language which carries it to the faltering of the speaking subject.

When sexuality will begin to speak and be spoken, language will no longer serve as a veil for the infinite, where now we experience finitude and being. This dark domain (absence of God, death, limits, transgression) can be also seen as a source of light for those who have liberated their thought from all forms of dialectical language. Loss of language in the dead of night.
What I call night differs from the darkness of thoughts: night possesses the violence of light. Yes, night: the youth and the intoxication of thinking.

This 'difficulty with words' not as the loss of language but actual penetration of philosophical experience in language and the discovery that the experience of limit is realized in language and in the movement where it says what cannot be said. It also defines the space of an experience in which the speaking subject, instead of expressing himself, is exposed, goes to encounter his finitude and, under each of his words, is brought back to the reality of his own death. Zone which transforms every work into 'tauromachy' suggested by Leiris (Manhood). The death (of the bull in an arena that is a gigantic eye), communicated with communication and that uprooted eye, as a violent seed in the night of the body that could give substance to this absence, of which sexuality has never stopped speaking and from which it is made to speak incessantly. In the moment in which the horn of the bull penetrate the eyeball of the toreador, Simone performs the act of swallowing a seed that returns to its original night, virility that has just committed murder.
There being appears, where the act which crosses the limit touches absence itself.

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