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“pure” transgression, a concept implicitly detached from the properties of shock and
subversion:
Since [the] existence of [pure transgression] is both so pure and so
complicated, it must be detached from its questionable association
to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it
and in the space it denotes; it must be liberated from the scandalous
or subversive … (35)
Foucault eventually conceptualizes pure transgression as being “limitless” (35), a
property he identifies in the writings of Georges Bataille (47-52) whose oeuvre focuses
on attempting to reveal the possibilities of transgression as detached from any system of
meaning: a “truth which exceeds the possibility of thought” (Erotism 268). In both his
critical and creative work, he demonstrates how such possibilities can be unraveled
through transgression and excess, and more particularly, through the extreme experiences
of pleasure and pain, which are to be found in what he defines as “Eroticism.” For
Bataille, Eroticism is the “problem of problems … It is the most mysterious, the most
general, and the least straightforward” (273). He argues that although philosophy and
eroticism coincide, philosophy is confined within its own language, for language sets
limits. In that sense, philosophy “sets itself against transgression” and, he maintains, “if
transgression became the foundation-stone of philosophy (this is how my thinking goes),
silent contemplation would have to be substituted for language” (275). Bataille values
experience over language, which is driven by excess to reach a point of rupture, where
this rupture becomes what Roland Barthes would call jouissance or “bliss”: the
expression of the inexpressible. Language sets its own limits; as a system of meaning, it
is confined, whereas experience is not. In order to breach these confinements, to reach
the eternities of possibilities, one needs to strive for the horizon where experience
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