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sport of them. Nevertheless, it maintains a distance where the
abject is concerned. The writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines
its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence
perverts language—style and content. But on the other hand, as
the sense of abjection is both the abject’s judge and accomplice,
this is also true of literature that confronts it. One might thus say
that with such a literature there takes place a crossing over of the
dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin,
Morality and Immorality. (16)
Kristeva not only supports the idea that transgression “plays” with norms and
conventions, but that at the same time, by “perverting” language, by creating its own
system of value, and by “crossing over” traditional binaries of opposition, it defines its
own system of meaning, and/or being as well. With regard to the writings of Bataille, in
texts such as Madame Edwarda or Le Bleu du ciel, Bataille transgresses the traditional
boundaries between philosophy and language, religion and sexuality, poetry and prose,
and in the process, he articulates the concepts of a philosophy based on excess and
transgression by focusing on the experiences of “extreme pleasure and extreme pain”
mentioned earlier. In his discussion of Bataille’s emphasis on excess in his theory of
Eroticism, James Annesley points out that “[t]he result is a system that exceeds all
boundaries by generating extreme, superfluous experiences. The challenge to order
posed by excess is thus seen to destabilize regulating forces and, in particular, to
challenge ordered systems of exchange” (54). According to Roland Barthes, the texts of
Bataille are “texts of Bliss,” for they correspond to his definition: “[the text of bliss]
imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions, the
consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language”
(14).
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