Unedited; please read forgivingly for I have transgressed.
God is described by Peter Bebergal as “the supreme referent” and the death of god, then, is the removal of this supreme referent. which gives rise to the question; what provides identity to the body without the existence of the supreme referent?
Transgression then is the interrogation of limits that exist symbiotically with prohibition and taboo. In that moment of transgression where be are neither and both the ocean and the beach, a moment in which meaning in language reaches its limits and fails, there is nothing but limit and the limitless.
Sexuality can only profane itself; there is no external object of profanation which can be desecrated by sexuality and therefore it does not have the ability to profane. Profanation needs an object and sexuality has no object. Sexuality is pure transgression which tests limits, defines new limits, but not in a contestive manner but in a way that eliminates the limit in a flash of phosphorescence on the beach while at the very same time defining the foaming outline of the new limit.
The ocean does not experience its oceanness by sitting on the ocean floor. It creates no new limits by being a millpond. It must experience its limitlessness through transgression of its limits but even in seeking new limits the ocean creates a limit through an implied search for the infinite referrant.
The key then, is to affirm the limit without God. And this is accomplished by transgression, which as we saw, is only what it is in context to the limit it seeks to transgress. This limit can only be known through transgression.
The transgression of limits is the interrogation of the very limits of the self.
This interrogation of the self, is an interrogation of the limit and a movement towards recapturing the self, without God. But this movement involves taking the self to the limit, which is where madness exists.
Transgression offers the hope for this finality, for by pointing out the limit, it exposes the possibility for the return of the Limit, the return of the sacred, without God.
Transgression is not then transcendence but limit within the body.
From: A Meditation on Transgression: Foucault, Bataille and the Retrieval of the Limit
