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While the first category pertains more particularly to the shock that the
transgressive is capable of producing, formal innovation and the art of protest reveal the
subversive potential of transgression with regard to both the canons of art (i.e. culture) as
well as social politics. When taboos are broken, an underlying truth is unveiled, a truth
which is usually repressed by the moral and civic guidelines that dictate social conduct,
and thus, setting loose what Freud would call the “unconscious,” repressed instinctual
drives and desires that can be both revolutionary and cataclysmic—or, an effect that
Bataille and Nietzsche consider to be exhilarating, elevating, and liberating. The second
type of transgression refers to how, as a dynamic entity, art evolves, and such evolution
relies on works that purposely aim to stretch established artistic conventions and
boundaries. Whereas “subversion” has often in recent years been attributed almost
exclusively to ‘minority’ literatures that aimed to challenge the ruling orthodoxies of
race, class, and gender, the element of subversion in transgressive literature proposes a
different perspective. According to Lucy Sargisson, “it is internally subversive” (qtd. in
Julius 238), it aims to cross all boundaries, especially those which delimit established
oppositional binaries. As discussed earlier, Foucault already considered this perspective
and specifically points out that transgression engages in “free play” with these traditional
limits. Moreover, in the writings of Julia Kristeva regarding the “abject” in
contemporary literature, the subversive potential of transgression is portrayed as
remarkably more aggressive towards the concepts of morality and the law:
… [Contemporary literature] seems to be written out of the
untenable aspects of perverse or superego positions. It
acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, Morality, and the
Law—their power play, their necessary and absurd seeming. Like
perversion, it takes advantage of them, gets round them, and makes
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