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Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

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Within the perspective enunciated above that transgression is a rupture in language,<br />

Foucault aligns himself with the Nietzschean imperative regarding the death of God.<br />

Like Bataille, he traces the origin of his argument to the works of the Marquis de Sade:<br />

From the moment that Sade delivered his first words and marked<br />

out, in a single discourse, the boundaries of what suddenly became<br />

its kingdom, the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night<br />

where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to<br />

this absence in a profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates<br />

it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its<br />

transgression. (31)<br />

This elevation into the “night,” of which he speaks is no other than the “limitless” realm<br />

into which the transgressive propels its audience and sets its own limits. In advocating<br />

the power of language, and more specifically, the appearance of sexuality in language,<br />

Foucault argues that eroticism leads to a questioning of language as a system of meaning<br />

(50). In other words, he reasserts the argument that transgression is a disinterested<br />

endeavor that is not preoccupied with established boundaries and or the line between<br />

binary oppositions.<br />

For Bataille, eroticism plays an essential role in transgression: these<br />

transgressions not only break taboos, they call for an upheaval against arbitrary systems<br />

of meaning by blurring conventional borders and by defining their own philosophical<br />

language. In other words, transgressions of a sexual nature are not only taboo-breaking,<br />

they challenge norms and conventions and establish new paradigms. Furthermore, what<br />

is potentially more threatening regarding the import of the erotic within social, cultural<br />

and political discourses, is the incorporation of pornography for it specifically blurs the<br />

established boundaries between high and low culture. Briefly stated, the difference<br />

between sexual content and pornography is that the latter typically aims to provide<br />

79

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