Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

automatic reaction to the law (17). This observation is also what prompts Foucault to
point out that transgression and the boundaries it so purposely violates are in fact,
interdependent:
The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever
density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were
absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be
pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and
shadows. (34)
Perhaps this is also what prompts Julius to link transgression with instinctual desire:
“[t]he transgressive is a cultural instinct, the desire to subvert what culture itself has
given us” (98). While Julius’s terminology might seem contradictory—a “cultural
instinct” seems an oxymoron especially when, ever since Freud, instinct has been
repeatedly defined in opposition to culture—this instinct (or impulse), this “desire to
subvert,” seems closely related to the Oedipal complex and the “natural” predisposition
of humanity for breaking what Jacques Lacan would call “the law of the father” as
imposed by culture. More specifically, Julius cites both Picasso and Apollinaire to
explain the necessary aggression of the transgressive towards the law and the father:
“[t]he transgressive is about the violence of the artist towards his forebears (recall
Picasso’s motto, ‘In art one must kill one’s father’), and it is also about the commitment
of art itself to the ‘perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order’ (Apollinaire’s
project)” (99). Transgression is first and foremost a disobedient, even rebellious,
offspring of art, one that specifically aims to displace and destroy authority, to break
taboos and to subvert established norms and conventions, an act that is typically
perceived to be shocking and/or even disturbing. Furthermore, there is a shared belief
amongst writers and critics such as Georges Bataille, James Gardner, and Anthony Julius
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