Transgression and Its Limits

Matt Foley · Neil McRobert · Aspasia Stephanou

may 2020 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting’s (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection’s concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.

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Matt Foley is currently completing his doctoral research on “Haunting Modernisms” at the University of Stirling where he has also taught on violence and representation. He has published on T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence and is generally interested in psychoanalysis, modernism and the macabre.

Neil McRobert is currently working towards his doctorate at Stirling University. His primary research focuses on the uses of postmodern narrative experimentation in the Gothic. Other interests include the literature of the fin-de-siècle, horror media, and contemporary American fiction.

Aspasia Stephanou has recently completed her PhD in English Studies, entitled “Our Blood, Ourselves: The Symbolics of Blood in Vampire Texts and Vampire Communities,” at the University of Stirling. She has published on race and the vampire, transgression and blood in contemporary performance art, globalisation and vampire communities, and Black Metal Theory.