In this paper, I would like to discuss just the structure of transgression.

Now, what makes this task

necessary also makes it somewhat difficult. As we all know, the centrality this notion enjoys in many
contexts across several disciplines today is owing to its prominence in recent continental thought, and
because of this fact, most discussions of this concept are marked by certain tendencies characteristic of
that intellectual tradition. My allusion is to things like unannounced and undefended shifts of meaning
of key terms (like text, subject, language etc.) within a text—from generic to specific, from literal to
metaphorical, from ordinary usage to a special meaning and so on; and second, a quiet shift of vantage
point. This is not to say that other intellectual traditions are flawless or that they do not exhibit these
very tendencies. But some of the most fashionable theories of the postmodern era owe their dazzling
effects to the deployment of these strategies.

In the case of transgression,

the first thing to be noted is that it only adds to confusion to use the term without gloss to any kind of
violation, excess, transcendence, overcoming or deviation. To break a grammatical rule is a
transgression, to exceed the speed limit on the road is a transgression and rape too is a transgression.
To first the invoke the term in a highly charged normative sense, picking it from a deeply theological
context, and then using it in an extremely abstract sense and go on to apply it to trivial contexts where it
is applicable in a weak and nearly empty sense, is not helpful at all.

Secondly, a good deal of mysteriousness that seems to surround the phenomenon of transgression
disappears if we keep in mind from which vantage point it is observed and described. Statements
making much of the supposed fact that boundaries and limits are in a relation of mutual dependence
with transgression are either banal or a result of shifting vantage points. After all, there has to be a rule
for anyone to break, violate or transgress it. Why it should be given an aura of mysteriousness is far
from clear. There are many things that are interdependent in that way: there has to be something for
anyone to destroy it, a thing has to be in some sense absent for anyone to imagine it, there has to be
predator for something to be a prey. In fact, one might as well make a mystery of transitive verbs in
general and choose to be amazed by the fact that the verb needs the object and vice versa. As for the
fact that a transgression involves a recognition of the limit, again it is either a truism or a half-truth. In a
sense, for me to transgress, there must be a limit which I am told I should not cross. It is then a matter
of stipulation whether you wish to treat it as a case of transgression when someone crosses a line
without knowing that there is a line. In certain matters, as we all know, ignorance of the law is not a
defense. Further, there can also be cases where one might recognize that a certain law is inviolable to
the others but might feel entitled or even obliged to break it, from a different or a larger perspective.
Gandhi, when he was charged with sedition, gave a similar argument. He said, ‘ I hold it to be a virtue to
be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any
previous system’. That is, he was questioning the basis on which a certain act was construed as
transgression. As a matter of fact, this is precisely the way in which most reforms come about: one says,
‘I can see that this line is sacred to you, but it is not sacred to me, it does not even exist for me; I can see
that crossing it constitutes a transgression in your eyes, but it is not transgression for me, for the simple
reason that I do not recognize it as a line at all’. Or to take a religious context, someone says, ‘I do not
regard that act as a sin, but since it is a sin in your view, I can see that my act makes me a sinner in your
eyes. So be it, but I will not desist, since I see no reason to’. Or of course, one may plead guilty and say
that one was helpless due to weakness, habit, temptation or some strong emotion. That is not to justify
the transgression but only to plead extenuating circumstances. In other words, one does not justify a
transgression any more than believe in a superstition. One only justifies committing what the other
considers as transgression, just as one does not believe something if he thought it was a superstition.
Irony in such cases is simply compression of juxtaposed viewpoints, and can be expressed very shortly as
‘if that is a sin, well, I am a sinner’. Nobody says, ‘I share the belief that this rule is sacred and should not
be violated by anyone including me, but I also believe that it is quite proper for me to violate it even if I
do not have a special, exempting reason for violating it’. However, a number of thinkers whose work has
brought the notion of transgression to center stage seem to think along these lines. And most of it is
based on a play on the two different senses of

I am laboring the point, but I feel compelled to do it only because the most seminal texts on the topic of
transgression indulge in enormous mystification in this matter. In support of this claim, permit to quote
a few passages from Foucault’s ‘preface to transgression’, which has played a great role in focusing
attention on the notion of transgression. I will concern myself with Foucault’s own views or his
comments on Bataille’s views on the question of sexuality and sin from the Christian point of view,
wherein they seem to require the death of god to enjoy sexual freedom. For all the complicated
accounts on this matter, I believe that the only though extremely significant revolution that has
occurred—though it has been gradual and is more of an evolution—is that we have come to recognize
that the only rule, principle or value that has any real legitimacy is about consent. All else is arbitrary
and a matter of prejudice. The only question to be asked in the realm of sexuality is where there is
consent in the proper, carefully articulated sense of the tem.

Nor will I say anything about his rather confused statements about the relation between the erotic and
the mystical. I will confine myself to those statements which are directly or indirectly concerned with
the notion of transgression.

‘Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred-is this not more
or less what we may call transgression?’

Here Foucault is only recommending a definition of transgression, a recommendation not at all in

consonance with general usage. If there is a substantive point here, it is that in the absence of the
religious or the eschatological, the ethical becomes the ground of transgression, which is
unexceptionable but trivial. It does not shed any light on how we are to understand transgression.

[[[[But what does it mean to kill God if he does not exist, to kill God who has never existed? Perhaps it
means to kill God both because he does not exist and to guarantee he will not exist-certainly a cause
for laughter

The death of God does not restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the
experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it.]]]]
Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the
flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression
has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by
a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a
wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the
uncrossable. But this relationship is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an
uncertain context, in certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as
it attempts to seize them.

It is not clear what exactly Foucault finds so elusive in this connection. His seeking help from a
metaphor—of a wave like trajectory briefly illuminated by a flash of light—seems to be the source of the
trouble. Transgression does consist in crossing a certain forbidden line. Before that there is no
transgression. And after that the transgression has already been committed and there is no going back
on it. If that is all that is being said, it is difficult to understand what the excitement is all about. What
exactly is the crossing and re-crossing or closing the line behind like the Red Sea after Moses and his
people have crossed it?

The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit
could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it
merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. But can the limit have a life of its own
outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? What becomes of it after this act
and what might it have been before? For its part, does transgression not exhaust its nature when it
crosses the limit, knowing no other life beyond this point in time?

In this passage again, once we paraphrase it into simpler terms we can see that too much is made of a
fairly a simple point. One of the points he is making here is that ‘ought/ought not’ implies ‘can’. A
commandment not to do the impossible is meaningless. But what follows from it? And as for the
question whether the limit exists when nobody is transgressing it, what kind of question is this? What
kind of existence does Foucault expect limits and such things to have? All the talk about limits,
boundaries and lines or even rules or laws in this context is only about interdictions, about
commandments that forbid you to commit a certain act. Are we to play the game of Platonic forms here,
wondering in what world moral principles exist when no one is obeying or disobeying them? Finally, the
statement that transgression exhausts its nature when its crosses the limit. One is really surprised that
this kind of statement is taken seriously. Inasmuch as transgression is nothing but the act of ‘crossing a
line’, it is absurd to ask what happens to it after the act is done. You might as well ask what happens to
your leap after you land on your backside. Unless it is meant as a Zen koan or something, this kind of
question is not only pointless but highly misleading.

Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the
fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to
recognize itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall?'* And yet,
toward what is transgression un leashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons
it, toward tha limit and those elements it contains? What bears the brunt of its aggression and to
what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent
act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out in the fine it effaces? Transgression, then, is not related to
the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area
of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no
simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the
beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night
from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its
harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and
becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity.

This I venture to say is a good example of one being swept away by one’s own metaphors. In a
kaleidoscopic shift of metaphors, transgression is seen as a force, the limit as some kind of entity, with
varying modalities, but whatever the substantive point about transgression being made, is stifled under
the rhetoric. The point to be noted here is that most of this kind of talk comes from a play on the two
uses of the term ‘recognition’ or its equivalents. I may recognize a rule in the sense that I know that such
a rule exists, which is another way of saying that I know that somebody has made such a rule, they
follow it and expect me to follow it. But at the same time, I may not recognize it in the sense that I deny
its legitimacy and refuse to acknowledge it as binding on me. By conflating these two senses of
recognition, you get a paradoxical notion that transgression involves an impossible combination of
recognition and non-recogntion.

The second point relating to the ‘violence of transgression’ Foucault is alluding to in this passage and
elsewhere is to do with the structure of transgression but it is possible to rephrase it in a more lucid
fashion. Rules constitute a system. There is no such thing as a rule in isolation. Therefore, to violate a
rule is in effect to explode the system itself, since the removal of one rule transforms the entire network
of rules that comprise the system. Second, even the most rigid system of rules, no matter how
elaborately calibrated, is still amenable to interpretation and variable application. As is well-known, we
cannot achieve a final definitiveness with regard to meta-rules. Therefore the best model to understand
systems in general is to seem them in analogy with games. Take the game of chess. It has rules but
playing the game is not just about following rules but making moves within the frame of rules according
to a strategy. A set of rules permits different strategies which are permissible as long as they are within
the bounds of the system of rules. This is how moral rules actually work. Now, transgression is an
attempt, not to change one’s strategy but change the rule itself. This would necessarily involve
disrupting the system.

Further, there is no such thing as a system of rules comprising only positive commands. Every rule is an
inseparable combination of commandments and interdictions.

Since this existence is both so pure and so complicated, it must be detached from its questionable
association to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it and in the space it
denotes; it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive, that is, from anything aroused by
negative associations. lf Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it
achieve its purpose through mockery or by upsetting the solidity of foundations; it does not transform
the other side of the mirror, beyond an invisible and uncrossable line, into a glittering expanse.
Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a
dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for this reason, its role is to measure the excessive
distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to
arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being-affirms the limitlessness into
which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time.

Having already shifted transgression from the domain of the religious to that of the secular-ethical, in
this passage Foucault is making a transition from transgression as an ethical category to transgression as
a category of philosophical anthropology or a human ontology, where its normative dimension is
eliminated. Now this is a big leap. And Foucault does not bother to offer any justification for this sudden
shift of usage. It could be that he is not initiating this conceptual shift but alluding to someone—in this
case, Georges Bataille—who has already done that, but one would expect a justification for his
endorsement of this shift. Aside from conceptual confusion, there are two other consequences of this
kind of approach. First, by conflating the normatively significant forms of transgression with those that
are neutral or insignificant in their normative import, this kind of writing ends up endorsing and
glorifying—at any rate, giving the impression of endorsing—transgression per se, or transgression in
every sphere. We see the same kind of thing happening with the notion of resistance. For all the talk
about the creative, productive, positive aspects of power, there is an indiscriminate glorification of
resistance per se as a good thing, regardless of what is being resisted.

Second,

0 0 0

The first thing to be noted about transgression is that it is a strictly deontological concept. Transgression
as such is never about consequences. Of course, the deontological and the teleological might converge
somewhere in order that the former is not altogether arbitrary. But the fact is that each has its own
frame and the two frames are incommensurable, although it is possible to argue that the
incommensurability is not altogether symmetrical. The good may connect to the right, but the right
cannot connect to the good. But all this aside, transgression per se is deontological. Even in a
consequentialist frame, transgression would be categorical imperative which says, ‘you must not
commit any act that has such and such consequences. The question then is how does transgression
become justified. The answer has to be sought in the notion of an “unjust law”.

--------------------
There is something of a paradox in the relation between law and justice. Law is the embodiment and
manifestation of justice. However, law is, in the final analysis, not the source of justice but only the
instrument of justice. The sense of justice must not only precede the making of the law but must form
its ground. The wisdom of the law must be grounded in the sense of justice and must finally meet its
approval. However, the sense of justice is an elusive thing. We cannot define it, nor can we locate it
precisely. One can be an expert in law but the idea of expertise in justice is counterintuitive. A judge,
who administers justice, does do only inasmuch as justice is embodied in the law. His duty is to give
expression to the justice that is implicit in the law and is intended in it. The judge may, on occasion, use
her sense of justice to go beyond the law or deviate from it. But for this sense of justice, it is not clear
that she can invoke her expertise in the law, for there is no claim that mastery of a law brings in its wake
any additional sense of justice. This is the strange part: the sense of justice has to be a native faculty. It
is not taught or acquired. It may improve, may get refined with life’s experiences, but no one can claim
that they have a better idea of justice.

However, here one very important point needs to be made. It is possible that someone has a sharper
sense of justice and can see it before others can. But what they see as justice must finally be seen by
others as justice as well. There can be a blindness that comes from prejudice, emotional involvement
and so on. But one has to assume that in principle everyone can see justice when it is shown to them.

It is this fact that allows the possibility of a gap between law and justice. Any law may fall short of
justice, not just in interpretation or application, but in itself. it is this possibility that creates the space
for ‘justified transgression’. This is of course an oxymoron, and in order not to be guilty of the confusion
we have criticized above, we must note that to speak of justified transgression is to conflate two frames
that are necessarily incommensurable. When the transgression is committed, it is a transgression from
the vantage point of the existing law which must at any given stage claim to be its own justification. At
that point it is obviously not justified. It becomes justified when the infirmity of that law is recognized
and accepted, and thereby a new frame is created. But from within the new frame, it is retrospectively
justified and therefore was never a transgression since what is just is not just today but must always
have been just. Therefore, if an act is seen as just today, it is deemed just even if it was committed when
it was thought to be contrary to justice inasmuch as it was a transgression of the law as it existed, and
was regarded as the embodiment of justice. Here, paradox, if any, is the result of the fact that law is
always self-justified synchronically, but diachronically, it is neither immutable nor perfect, therefore it is
always questionable and must change at the demand of a new perception of justice. In the end, this is
the reason why space must always be left for ‘transgression’ to be possible.

------------------

Having agreed that it makes no sense to glorify transgression in a general way, and that if we must use
the term, we must take care to qualify it for different contexts by explicitly marking the normative
import attached to it, one could talk about the essentially transgressive function of philosophy.
One can say that there are two fundamental approaches to our quest for knowledge and understanding.
One could dub them the theological approach and the philosophical approach. The theological
approach, not just in religion but in any domain, including science, is a matter of working out the
ramifications of a system of beliefs understood in a comprehensive sense. It is what Kuhn has
familiarized us with as ordinary or normal science in the context of scientific practice. The philosophical
approach consists in bringing into the ambit of critical interrogation the system of beliefs itself, including
its systemic features. Except in theology proper, in different domains these two approaches
complement each other in different ways. When we talk about philosophy, we are only referring to this
engagement in the questioning of fundamental assumptions. I don’t think there is any philosophical
tradition that disagrees on this understanding of the task of philosophy. The disagreements are as to the
mode of interrogation and as to whether it is the central or ultimate function of philosophy. The latter
point is to do with the question whether a critique of fundamental assumptions is a preparatory task in
the service of a larger objective (such as to provide a worldview) or is the ultimate and exclusive
objective of philosophical practice. That the critical task of holding up presuppositions for examination is
a crucial part of philosophy nobody would deny. The transgressive aspect of this task of philosophy is
that if it is to be of any worth at all, it must put in question those basic categories of thought which
provide us with our bearings on our epistemic journey. This would mean that at any given point
philosophy must go against the grain of all that serves as the basic ground of our thinking in all realms
including the normative. You cannot interrogate the notion of ‘rightness’ without putting in suspension
all that is regarded as right. Philosophy thus must always disturb the equilibrium of thought and
destabilize the structure of our relations with the world.

There is also another aspect to this matter. Continuing with Kuhn’s notion of paradigms, one can say
that the movement of philosophy is not linear, continuous or rational (including the dialectical), but
consists of a series of radical disruptions, fundamental ruptures that must break down everything. This
means that the series of disruptions is not a series since, when everything is changed, the new entity is
not a member of the class to which the replaced entity belonged. Philosophy in its movement, changes
the meaning of all notions such as proof, rule, validity, reality, ground, argument, and finally philosophy
itself. The continuing identity of philosophy is purely differential. Or to take help from Leotard’s concept
of ‘differend’ , the movement of philosophy is marked by the radical gap of differends where the
disagreement cannot be defined since there is no common frame to articulate the basis of
disagreement.

There is another sense in which philosophy can be said to transgressive in a way analogous to the way
poetry is transgressive. This transgression is a subversion of the basic reality of language. In the case of
poetry, the subversion of language consists in two things: first, in giving voice to the signifier that is
supposed to be silent, to give a colour to the necessary transperancy of sounds as vehicles of meanings;
and second, in turning blurring the distinction between words names and making description turn upon
itself to name the singular.

There is a way in which philosophy does something similar. We could perhaps describe it as the
transgression of the interdiction against gazing into a mirror. Just as logic needs an interdiction against
self-referentialtiy (it is another matter that it is negotiated with some ingenious techniques; the fact
remains that logic needs this interdiction), language has an interdiction against self-reflection. This I
think is one of the things implied in the famous lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus about silence.

[[[[[[But this transgression of discourse (and consequently of law in general,

for discourse establishes itself only by establishing normativity or
the value of meaning, that is to say, the element of legality in general)
must, in some fashion, and like every transgression, conserve or confirm
that which it exceeds]]]]]] Derrida, from restricted to general economy, a Hegelianism without reserve]]
Very often the term ‘lakshman rekha’ is used to denote a boundary beyond which lies the impermissible.
To cross that rekha is supposed to be to have violated some sacred rule and by implication done
something wrong. It is used as an instance of transgression. But if you recall the origin of this phrase in
the Ramayana, it does not refer to any transgressive phenomenon. The lakshman rekha is a protective
line. A line beyond which lies risk. To cross the lakshman rekha is not to commit a crime, it is to invite
risk. And it is not the risk of reprisal. It is a risk that lies there beyond the line in wait for the unwary. It is
not like a sign board saying ‘prohibited area’. It is more like a danger sign saying ‘hairpin bend ahead’.