Transgression by Chris Jenks instant download

Transgression by Chris Jenks instant download

‘TRANSGRESSION is an edge-work – a self-challenge to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic categories that order disciplinary life in the arts and sciences. Jenks’ strategy is to tip the canonical order/disorder problem off its Durkheimian and Hegelian legs into the vortex of excess, eroticism, violence, madness, serial crime and carnival opened up by Bataille and the Surrealists. The result is a fast-moving narrative that recovers the sociological significance of Artaud, Rimbaud, Debord and Bakhtin whose anti-modernity was the transgressive force that launched our more established postmodernity.’ John O’Neill, York University, Canada ‘Now that the late twentieth-century infatuation with transgression as an end itself has lost much of its power, it is time to explore the sources and weigh the consequences of its disturbing appeal. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from philosophical, literary, anthropological and sociological discourses, Chris Jenks soberly measures their exuberance for transgression against the horrors of contemporary instances of violent excess. Not since Stallybrass and White’s classic The Politics and Poetics of Transgression has so much pressure been put on this fascinating and troubling concept.’ Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley Transgression is truly a key idea for our time. Society is created by constraints 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 – whether physical, sexual, natural or moral – lie. Our preoccupation with transgression is at the same time a search for limits, which are affirmed by the very act of crossing them. In this fast-moving study, Chris Jenks ranges widely over 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