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Reviewed by:
  • Against Transgression
  • Guillaume Ansart
Against Transgression. By Ashley Tauchert. (Critical Quarterly). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. viii + 149 pp. Pb £17.99.

Ashley Tauchert has written a polemical book, engaging, provocative, sometimes irritating, as often with this genre of writing. Transgression, she argues, has for too long been the dominant, even hegemonic concept at work in modern critical theory, with stifling effects on the academic discourse on literature and culture, particularly in the Anglo-American world. Reappropriating a passage from Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), Tauchert makes her position clear from the beginning: ‘In some cultural contexts, transgression is a liberating act, a means of revising, transvaluing, escaping a dead past. In the context of the contemporary academy, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry which befoul the atmosphere, transgression poisons our critical sensibilities. In a culture whose classic dilemma is the hypertrophy of the individual will at the expense of a collective energy and capability, transgression is the revenge of the individual ego on the collective unconscious’ (p. 2). This makes a lot of sense. There is, however, some indecision in Tauchert’s subsequent development of her argument. Understandably, a good part of her book is devoted to Georges Bataille, a key figure in the genealogy of transgression. But is Bataille himself to blame for the emergence of the modern critical dogma on transgression? Sometimes, Tauchert seems to think so. At other times, she proposes a different, more convincing, genealogy: the contemporary concept of transgression was not inherited directly from Bataille but from a later generation of thinkers, the French poststructuralists (chief among them Foucault), on whom Bataille was a major influence. And post-structuralist transgression, Tauchert asserts, marks an impoverishment compared to Bataille, who, unlike his successors, stressed the unbreakable bond between transgression and prohibition, and between eroticism and the sacred. Meanwhile, this indecision does not prevent Tauchert from offering interesting feminist-oriented readings of Bataille’s pornographic fiction, notably Histoire de l’œil (1928) and Madame Edwarda (1941), and of Dominique Aury’s classic, Histoire d’O (1954). In one chapter, Bataille is unexpectedly paired with the Christian conservative Irish writer C. S. Lewis to show how two European intellectuals of the same generation, with similar preoccupations regarding transgression, religion or the nature of the sacred, could formulate radically diverging answers to the same questions. Unfortunately, when contrasting Bataille’s narrow academic readership with Lewis’s wide popular appeal, Tauchert gets dangerously close to conservative anti-intellectualism. This brings us to the ‘irritating’ side of Against Transgression: the intermingling of the personal and the theoretical. Her book, Tauchert tells us, is partly the result of her own transformative journey from transgressive, rebellious daughter to compassionate (with Buddhist overtones) mother. Thus, she laments the death of God and the excesses of the sexual revolution in contemporary (British) society. This also makes sense. But is a return to God and sexual morality the answer? [End Page 231] Or should we remember Tocqueville, that most lucid of conservative thinkers, and his attitude toward democracy? Like democracy, sexual liberation, with all its problems, is here to stay; there is no turning back, so let’s make the best of it.

Guillaume Ansart
Indiana University, Bloomington
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