User:Tancre/readings/APrefaceToTransgression

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.

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

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.
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.