[204] Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From
Prometheus to Pornography 329 (1996).
I have previously argued that the category "art" is defined by its
transgressive quality. See Amy M. Adler, Note, Post-Modern Art and the Death
of Obscenity Law, 99 Yale L.J. 1359, 1362-65, 1378 (1990).
[205] To Bataille, a transgression "suspends a
taboo without suppressing it." Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death &
Sensuality 36 (Mary Dalwood trans., 1986) (1957). Rather, "transgression
does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it." Id. at 63.
See also Mark C. Taylor, Desire of Law, Law of Desire, 11 Cardozo L. Rev.
1269, 1269 (1990) (noting that law and desire exist in dialectical
relationship to each other).
[206] Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression
in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews 29, 34 (Donald Bouchard, ed. 1977) (explaining Bataille)
[hereinafter Foucault, Preface to Transgression]. Foucault continues:
Perhaps
[transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to
the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to
bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its
harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it
marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to
obscurity.
Id. at 35.
[207] Shattuck writes that "lust for forbidden
knowledge" is at the root of human
curiosity: "Ancient and modern prohibitions on particular areas of
knowledge sometimes stimulate human curiosity more than they dampen it."
Shattuck, supra note 204, at 330.
[208] Foucault, Preface to Transgression, supra
note 206, at 35.
[209] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in
Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader 207 (E.T. Donaldson ed.,
1975) (The Wife of Bath's Prologue,line 525).
[210] Sigmund Freud, Taboo and the Ambivalence of
Emotions, in Totem and Taboo 802 (A.A. Brill trans., Modern Library 1938)
(1912). The desire to transgress a taboo resides in the unconscious; in most
cases, the conscious fear of violation outweighs the unconscious desire. Id.
at 799. Yet, the desire to transgress remains embedded in the taboo. Id.
I use Freud's work here in spite of the criticism leveled against
him in the context of child sexual abuse as described in Part I.
I should also note that my use of Foucault later in this Article further
complicates the question of Freud's validity here, since, as I explain in Part
IV, Foucault raised troubling questions about Freud's work on sexuality.
I grapple with these contradictions later in the Article when I consider the
relationship and ultimate harmony between the two readings offered in Parts
III and IV.
[211] Id. at 828.
[212] Part IV will address this question from
another perspective.
[213] Sigmund Freud, The Most Prevalent Form of
Degradation in Everyday Life 212 (1912) in 4 Collected Papers 203 (Joan
Riviere trans., Basic Books 1959) [hereinafter Freud, Degradation].
[214] Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics
of the Performative 175 n.19 (1997).
[215] See Freud's discussion of the dynamic
relationship between conscience and renunciation in Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and its Discontents 84 (1961).
[216] Freud, Degradation, supra note 213, at
213-14.
[217] This view is consistent with Freud's general
theory of repression, by which desires are driven into the unconscious but
never eliminated. Sigmund Freud, 5 The Interpretation of Dreams 577 (James
Strachey trans., 1913) (1900).
Because the contents of the unconscious are indestructible, they always
reemerge by "devious routes" into consciousness. J. Laplanche &
J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis 398 (Donald Nicholson Smith,
trans., 1973) (1967).
[218]
See
Butler, supra note 214, at 117.
[219] Id.
[220] Scheper-Hughes & Stein, supra note 49, at
186.
She also writes: "The 'child saver' investigators are themselves suspect
of playing out a child molestation fantasy." Id. at 189.
The "child is being beaten" reference in the first quotation is to Freud, who remarked, in a somewhat similar vein: