Judith Surkis - No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault - Diacritics 26:2Fri Oct 03 2003 00:45:01 Europe/Copenhagenfile://localhost/Volumes/Arkiv/DownLoads/Judith%20Surkis%20-%20No%20Fun%20and%20Games%20Until%20Someone%20Loses%20an%20Eye%20Transgression%20and%20Masculinity…Page 3
thus organized and produced by the imposition of a limit always existing in relationto it, even and especially at the moment of its rupture. The sensation of transgression is conditioned by a cognizance of the taboo and is, as a result,fundamentally "duplicitous," performing "a reconciliation of what seems impossibleto reconcile, respect for the law and violation of the law . . . " [36].
[End Page 19]
Transgression thus
heightens
or
creates
an
awareness of the law. As Bataillewrites: "If we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it.But in the act of violating it we feel the anguish of mind without which the taboocould not exist . . . That experience leads to the completed transgression which, inmaintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit by it [
pour en jouir
]" [38;
OC
42]. Since the pleasures or
jouissance
of eroticism are intimately related to theinjunctions that prohibit them, the subject must always be aware of the existence of the law in order to experience limitless being in the moment of transgression; hemust be sensitive "to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less great than thedesire which leads him to infringe it" [38-39]. This is the fundamental structure of Bataille's transgression, and, as Carolyn Dean has argued, this paradoxical dynamicis integral to his understanding of the subject. Because his self-loss actually makeshim aware of the law, it is "lived as the constituent moment of self-hood" [242; seealso Hollier]. However, Dean questions the universal applicability of a subjectivityfounded by its own dissolution. She argues that it presumes a "masculine" subjectwho initially possesses a position or self to transgress or lose. Dean suggests that,for Bataille, the reconciliation of "manhood" and castration are constitutive of hisnotion of the "virile" rather than incompatible with it. In effect, the "wholeness" of Bataille's virile man is, as she writes, "paradoxically linked to an experience of transgressing limits rather than of containment within boundaries that woulddemarcate his being." If this virility is repeatedly produced in and by self-dissolutionof a masculine subject, Dean wonders where "women figure in this scheme of things" [244-45].
3
Upon reading
Erotism
, we find that images of women's self-lossare prominent in Bataille's theory of erotic transgression; they are instrumental tothe enactment of
masculine
self-loss.Bataille's introductory discussion of the process by which individual discontinuity isruptured--the
mise en oeuvre
of eroticism--relies on an initial, gendered differencebetween erotic partners. Bataille writes:The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desirepresupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in therealm of discontinuity. . . . In the process of dissolution, the masculinepartner [
partenaire masculin
] has generally an active role, while thefeminine part [
partie féminine
] is passive. The passive, female side isessentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity [
en tant qu'êtrecontinué
]. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passivepartner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion whereboth are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution.[17;
OC
23]A fundamental division is enacted here between the "masculine partner" and the"feminine part"; the feminine side is already lost as a subject, a partial object fromthe beginning. In order for the masculine side to lose himself, the passive, feminineside must be always already dissolved as a continuous being:
her
loss initiates hisfall into continuity. In the meantime, the masculine partner is only "relativelydissolved," remaining "discontinuous" enough to derive meaning and sense from
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