Transgression

by Jenks; Chris

• ISBN13: 9780415257572
• ISBN10: 0415257573
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-09
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Transgression is truly a key idea for our time. Society is created by constraint and boundaries, but as our culture is increasingly subject to uncertainty and flux we find it more and more difficult to determine where those boundaries lie. In this fast moving study, Chris Jenks presents a sweeping overview of the history of ideas, the major theorists, and the significant moments in the formation of the idea of transgression. He looks at the definition of the social and its boundaries by Durkheim, Douglas, and Freud, at the German tradition of Hegel and Nietzsche, and the increasing preoccupation with transgression itself in Baudelaire, Bataille, and Foucault. The second half of the book looks at transgression in action in the East End myth of the Kray twins, in Artaud's theater of cruelty, the spectacle of the Situationists, and Bakhtin's analysis of carnival.

Table of Contents

The Author	ix
Acknowledgements	x
Whither Transgression?	1	(14)
Philosophical Origins of the Problem: Ethical or Logical?	8	(7)
The Centre Cannot Hold	15	(34)
Durkheim's Society Sui Generis and Forms of Solidarity	16	(3)
Repressive Sanctions and Restitutive Sanctions	19	(5)
The Normal and the Pathological	24	(5)
The Sacred and the Profane	29	(3)
Mary Douglas and the Concepts of Purity and Danger	32	(5)
Talcott Parsons and Boundary-Maintaining Systems	37	(5)
Van Gennep and Rites de Passage	42	(2)
Victor Turner and Liminality	44	(1)
Freud and Taboo	45	(4)
To Have Done With the Judgement of God	49	(33)
Hegel on History and Logic	51	(10)
Kojeve's Intervention	61	(7)
Nietzsche on Morality and Politics	68	(14)
Excess	82	(29)
Baudelaire and Modernism	83	(4)
Bataille and Excess, and Foucault	87	(6)
Bataille and Eroticism	93	(7)
Bataille and Economy and the Gift	100	(7)
Bataille and the Marquis de Sade	107	(4)
Extreme Seductiveness is at the Boundary of Horror	111	(24)
Journey to the End of the Night	135	(26)
Artaud and Theatre	137	(3)
`Pataphysics', Artaud and the Manifesto of Cruelty	140	(6)
Debord and the Situationist International (SI)	146	(5)
Dada and Surrealism	151	(8)
Rimbaud	159	(2)
The World Turned Upside Down	161	(14)
Bakhtin, Rabelais and the Carnivalesque	164	(11)
Theatres of Cruelty	175	(12)
Existential Criminology	176	(4)
Serial Killers	180	(3)
Bad Girls	183	(4)
Bibliography	187	(8)
Index	195