A Postscript to Transgression

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s important paper A Preface to Transgression published in 1963 and dedicated to the philosopher and writer Georges Bataille, who had died a short time before. Relying on the literary and metaphorical intuitions of Bataille as a writer, Foucault transfers Bataille’s concept of transgression from a social context to a philosophical one and radicalizes the idea. Bataille does not regard transgression as an anthropological constant, but as a historical phenomenon characterizing the modern secular era. Foucault does not define transgression in terms of a legitimate violation of prohibitions, but as the passage of human beings beyond their ontological limits, primarily in the experience of sexuality.Foucault makes the opposition pointed out by Bataille between transgression and dialectics a more profound one by interpreting transgression not as a dialectical restoration of the world’s integrity through contradictions, but as a permanent experience of the subject’s self-transcendence. Like Bataille, Foucault postulates the necessity of a special language to express such an experience in a non-discursive, non-dialectic, and ultimately even a non-conceptual way that adopts a discontinuous and “aphoristic” form. On the last point, he disagrees with Bataille’s pursuit of a mimetic and continuous “communication” reconstituted in literary texts rather than a semiotic discreteness of messages.