Transgression(s)

Modern Western culture has always had its dark side, its internal other. More traditional societies see taboo and transgression in terms of actions, ritual and social regulation, while modern, rationalist, capitalist, ostensibly secular societies imagine that deeply troubling rule-breaking has been quashed by legal, medical, military and political control. Peculiarly, and perhaps paradoxically, the belief that since some unspecified time in the recent past ‘anything goes’ in pluralistic democracies reinforces the formal controls. Whilst this twin removal of transgression can never be complete, transgressions have found their principal domain in cultural and/or artistic productions (i.e. in terrains that seem freer), and in this, France has always been a key location for the unseemly, the erotic, the deadly, the dirty. On occasion it is encouraged, at other times it is subject to prohibition. From D.A.F. de Sade through surrealism, via erotic imaginings in all forms and formats, through the unspeakable and monstrous, from the 18th century to the end of the 20th, and even in the strange philosophies in and around‘theory’, transgression permeated avant-garde creation. But is this still the case? How do we process this history now? Are there new ways of addressing a ‘canon’ of transgressive art and actions? What and where is transgression in French and Francophone culture now? Aside from a resurgence in French experimental and horror cinema, it seems a fallow time for shock, repulsiveness and explicitness. But humans live by rules, conventions and taboos, and these require the possibility of transgression. The critical repression of transgression’s importance has been countered in recent conferences in Britain and Ireland, but is this just nostalgia for a lost paradigm? Who cares about transgression? Equally, who benefits from saying that it is no longer possible? Lastly, please note that simple depiction of rule-breaking is not as interesting as transgression in both content and form.

For this issue, possible areas of interest could be:

Transgression and subversion; transgression and the avant-garde; horror; contemporary horror films; illegality; extreme politics; countercultures; eroticism; border crossings; the right to be offended; grotesque; biotechnology; [no autofiction]

Please send abstracts of 400 words by email to the Irish Journal of French Studies guest editor Paul Hegarty, phegarty@french.ucc.ie, by 1 December 2011. Completed papers must be submitted by 1 May 2012.