Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle
Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle
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 />
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