Transgression

by Chris Jenks

Transgression is truly a key idea for our time. Society is created by constraint 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 lie.

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 Hegel and Nietzsche and the increasing preoccupation with transgression itself in Baudelaire, Bataille and Foucault. The second half of the book looks at transgression in action in the East End myth of the Kray twins, in Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the spectacle of the Situationists and Bakhtin's analysis of carnival. Finally Jenks extends his treatment of transgression to its own extremity.

Genres: Reference

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Chris Jenks is a Sociologist, and has previously occupied the positions of Vice Chancellor and Principal of Brunel University London; and Pro-Vice Chancellor and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College University of London, UK.

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the chapter about the Kray Twins in particular, especially delving into the passive appreciation and the celebration of them by the public.

[Marian Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Jenks provides a rather good cursory survey over the different typologies of transgression in culture ranging from theatre, philosophy, art, sociology, and criminology, he fails to reflexively contemplate the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon which has arguably become the ruling principle of twentieth and twenty first century cultural life, even permeating through into popular culture. In particular, he spends too much time setting the foundations of our philosophical tradition which has enabled the transgressive imperative,spending pages at a time elaborating Hegel's historicism, and his successor Alexander Kojeve. This seemed irrelevant. I would have preferred less of this and more personal analysis of the transgressive. He fails to connect the seemingly disparate aspects of transgression in culture,failing to show how they relate and what they reveal about said culture. He does not comment on the inherent value of the transgressive aesthetic. From my background knowledge of the author, he writes on a heterogeneous array of subjects from sociology to biology and as such, not being specialised in any one area, he seems to collect facts. This is what he has done here. He seems to have an encyclopedia open and ready for him to glean the various strands of culture which manifest the transgressive which he then cuts and pastes into a book, not altogether coherent. There are deeper questions behind the transgressive aesthetic that need to be addressed beyond a simple acknowledgment of its use in cultural forms.Good for the novice intellectual for an introduction to different names, and ideas but terrible for the theorist who needs a little more to sink ones teeth into.