Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Although in this excerpt Foucault’s emphasis is on language, at a time in the nineteenth
century when writing and literature detached themselves from other cultural endeavors,
his view is not so different from Julius’s, for he also proposes transgression as something
“radical” and “detached”: a “denial,” a departure from established norms and conventions
that typically engages in the “free play” of everything offensive. In an extended sense,
this and the idea of a rupture in language appear to echo Bakhtin’s concept of
“heteroglossia”— the production of meaning through the interplay between the multitude
of utterances, voices, languages, and contexts—which, as an integral component of the
emerging novel genre in the nineteenth century, “was being historically shaped by the
current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces [and] was … consciously opposed to [the
accepted] literary language” (273).
Foucault’s theory of transgression may also seem to echo the concept of
“trespassing” articulated by Julius, for in “A Preface to Transgression,” he clearly
underlines the involvement of transgression with “the limit” (i.e. the established
boundaries imposed by norms and conventions). Yet, as transgression deviates from
conventional discourses, Foucault’s definition of transgression progressively departs
from that of Julius’s precisely because it not only crosses the limit, it engages in “free
play” with that limit:
The play of limits and 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. (34)
Later, Foucault argues that transgression is not related to the limit as an oppositional
binary but rather, projects it into a void to come progressively to what could be defined as
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