Where Does Transgression Belong?

I recently came across a zoom discussion that has lit something of a fire under my ass about writing. If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of erotic writing, of transgression in fiction, and the mechanisms of eliciting jouissance in the reader, I highly recommend you take a look at this. It’s produced by the Lacan Circle of Australia. The author is Tim Themi, in conversation with Russell Grieg. He’s just published a book called ‘Eroticizing the Aesthetic: In the Real with Bataille and Lacan.’ Don’t let some of the vocabulary put you off. Yes, some of it is couched in the language of psychoanalysis, referring to Freudian and Lacanian theory that might sound like gibberish if you aren’t acquainted with this field of study, but it is very much worth watching anyway, and don’t skip the questions and discussions at the end. They’re meaty and exciting.

Tim Themi Eroticizing the Aesthetic

You register at the bottom with an email and it gives you a link to the talk. I’ve registered for a lot of talks on the same site and they don’t seem to abuse or sell your info.

One of the most important things I took away from the talk was that art (writing, visual, etc.) is exactly the place where transgression should live in our society. Not in politics. Not in government. Not in civic life. And one way I think we can push back against that encroachment of the transgressive into our civic life is by putting it back into our cultural life, and pushing back against those cultural institutions that demand political correctness and ethics in all the wrong places. Perhaps because they feel so powerless to impose it in the places where it should be, like our systems of law, of education, of government?

This has also inspired in me a real desire to speak with other writers, to discuss and discover how to get transgression back into our art. To examine what even constitutes transgression and taboo anymore, to think about what function it serves, to share our ideas on how to trigger real jouissance in our readers, instead of relying on burnt-out cliches which have lost their ability to the shock of the truly erotic.

So, I’m thinking about starting a zoom workshop, that perhaps could be turned into a re-occurring thing, where we brainstorm, try out ideas on each other, expand our ideas on what can be transgressive, our ethical concerns, etc.

If you are at all interested in this, please leave a comment below, or tweet me on twitter @remittancegirl.