Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC

Link –Transgression

Transgression requires law—we should recognize that it can only occur in the presence of law establishing the possibility of sacred moments that push subjects beyond the limit of utility. We only break the law because it’s there—the aff’s push for decreasing legal surveillance undercuts their strategy by blunting the desire for privcacy and rendering it tame

Transgression is ordinarily seen as the breaking of (a) law, or, the breaking of taboo. It is usually some form of extreme situation or behaviour. To transgress is to step outside the norm, and such stepping out requires punishment in order that the law holds. Transgression cannot, then, be separated from law, or notions of law - it is not in the act, but the illegality of an act that transgression lies. As Bataille writes, ‘evil is not transgression, it is transgression condemned’ (Eroticism, 127; OCX, 127), and this condemnation is the process whereby evil comes into existence. Similarly, if there were no transgressions, we would not need law - so law/taboo and transgression are bound up from the start, such that the origin of the distinction becomes unclear. But transgres- sion is not simply doomed to fall within the boundaries of law, as it ‘does not negate the taboo, but surpasses and completes it’ (63; 63, trans. mod.). Transgression is both more and less than the break- ing of a taboo or law - more because it goes beyond simple crime, less because it does not conclusively break or break with law/taboo.

In earlier societies the realm of taboo was clear - what was sacred was known and organized, and the transgression, in the form of the festival and/or sacrifice constituted the site of sanc- tioned transgression, but according to Foucault, modern society lives near to transgression; as it lives in the death of God. We now have ‘profanation without an object’, and, he asks, ‘profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred - is this not more or less what we may call transgression?’ (Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, 30). In fact, we are close to an originary state, with the possibility of transgression (as with Bataille’s view of sacrifice) opening on to something ultimate: ‘the death of God does not restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it’ (32). At one level, the world seems to have transgressed - we are all transgressors now. At another level, we are being shown that our existence is made up of, and by, transgression. As Bataille has it, ‘organized transgression, together with prohibition, forms a unity which defines social life’ (Eroticism, 65; OC X, 68, trans. mod.). At this stage it becomes less than clear whether transgression is really ‘outside’ of any- thing. Foucault writes that the line (law, taboo) that transgression crosses is always already crossed - i.e. the law is broken before it exists, and through its existence, whilst transgression is caught within law:

Transgression, then, is not, finally, as black is to white, the prohibited to the permitted, the outside to the inside, the outcast to the sheltered space of the domicile. (...) Transgression does not oppose anything to anything, does not make anything slide in the play of derision, does not seek to disturb the solidity of foundations I... ] it is the measure beyond measure of the distance that opens at the heart of the limit, and traces the flashing line that brings it into being. (‘Preface to Transgression’, 35 trans. mod.)

Foucault completes the thought of Bataille on this point, through a reading I would agree with, but that Bataille does not necessarily completely intend. There is plenty of evidence which suggests that transgression is a ‘good thing’ and, above all, that it is a choice. Bataille writes that ‘eroticism, like cruelty, is premeditated. Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind taken with the resolution to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour’ (Eroticism, 79-80; OC X, 82 trans. mod.). Perhaps the way to unite the more voluntaristic version with the more ontological one is to say that they feed into each other so that the will to transgress is only a ‘will’ inspired by the existence of law, but once under way, transgression will be recalled as individuals lose themselves in sovereign moments.

Link – USfg Focus

Demands on the other obscures our own desires and creates the state as the only institution capable of doling out enjoyment --- they can never escape the framing of the USfg as the central agent

Lundberg 12 --- ‎Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public, Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka

A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is by definition a hysterical politics. The hysteric is defined by incessant demands on the other at the expense of ever articulating a desire that is theirs. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysteric’s demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion toward one’s desire: “the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered on the object, insofar as this object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.”43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their de mands. On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand. Thus, “as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!” At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students’ call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its framing of the master. The fundamental problem of democracy is not articulating resistance over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire.

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