ABSTRACT
On 9 July 1962, in a room of the Laennec Hospital in Paris, Georges Bataille died to almost general indifference, the indifference usually reserved to the creators who prefer to deploy their work far from the labile excitations of the time. 1 A year later, in the pages of Critique, the magazine that he founded at the Editions du Chêne in 1946 and which was to resume at Editions de Minuit in 1949, some of those for whom Bataille's work did not deserve such indifference met at the time of a special issue. 2 There were Georges Delteil, Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Jean Bruno, Jean Piel, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Jean Wahl, Philippe Sollers – and Michel Foucault, who signed a text with an enigmatic title: “Preface to Transgression.” 3 Foucault, at that time, was hardly better known than Bataille: after many difficulties, he had just published, at Plon, his History of Madness in the Classical Age, his second book, to which neither newspapers nor universities had paid more than polite attention. 4 It was the same with the other contributors to the issue: the homage paid to the founder of the magazine was the homage of personalities that history had not yet established as major figures of the literary and theoretical subversion appropriate to modernity. Moreover, as was shown with Foucault's text, it was not certain that such a canonization would have pleased them – they who, wrote Foucault, had found, in the work of Bataille, what they needed in order to do away with the easy terrors as well as with the cheap chills of subversion. 5 The magnitude of Bataille was that of a motion which, if it did not allow doing away with philosophy, still allowed doing away with the figure of the philosopher as bearer of the wisdom of the truth which would define its “clear and talkative identity.” 6 This motion, Foucault argued, was precisely that of “transgression”: that of what he called the “passage to the limit” of language and of the philosophical gesture that is supported by it – limits that the logic of subversion dreamed of breaking, whereas transgression was rather about “crossing” or “carrying” them. 7 Transgression is the motion by which we are brought to the limit of our consciousness, our language, and the law, the motion by which we never cease “to cross again and again a line that, behind (it), immediately closes as a wave of little memory, going backwards again to the horizon of the impassable.” 8 This was what Foucault discovered in Bataille, and what he shared with the other authors of the issue number 195–196 (August–September 1963) of Critique: the idea that our relationship to the limit was not the horizontal relationship of frontal struggle but the vertical relationship of its extensive envelopment. Subversion was the dream of destroying the limit, whereas transgression was merely about twisting it, about turning it around in a game rendering it powerless through, like a cartoon magician, the intensification of the spiralling motion of envelopment in which it grabbed it and carried it. 9
