inherent transgression

is (i.e. Carnival, organizational illegality, etc,) the unwritten, obscene, subversive underside to public law which reveals that society is held together by far more than some all-encompassing law.

inherent transgression is that operation by which an ideology captures us not directly but only through its apparent overturning or opposite: The deepest identification that holds a community together is not so much an identification with the Law that regulates its 'normal' everyday rhythms, but rather identification with the specific form of transgression of the Law, of its suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with the specific form of enjoyment)' (28). The idea derives from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his understanding of the way societies required periodic fetes and festivals, the upending of social conventions that is, instituted days in which the usual social roles were reversed although, as Zizek argues, Bakhtin's mistake was to present only an 'idealized' version of these transgressions (64). However, this idea is also consistent with Zizek's own understanding of the way ideology works today through our distance from it our 'interpassive' belief through another, our apparent scepticism towards society's prevailing values. Some examples of this less 'idealized' form of inherent transgression that Zizek points to throughout his work include such things as the 'lynching parties' of the Deep South, where the white population was held together by their shared but denied complicity... the famous 'Code Red' of the film A Few Good Men, which permits certain 'illegal' actions in particular circumstances (63)... and even the small acts of dishonesty and compromise that Havel sees as contributing to the hold of Communism in his famous essay 'The Power of the powerless' (8). The important ambiguity here perhaps left slightly unexplored by Zizek is the way that, if this 'inherent transgression' means that there is no way out of the system, that every transgression is recuperated, it also means that the Law is 'not-all', that it can work only through its other. As Zizek asks: 'Where does this splitting of Law into the written public Law and its underside, the 'unwritten', obscene secret code, come from' The answer is from the incomplete, 'not-all' character of public Law itself: explicit, public rules do not suffice, so they must be supplemented by a clandestine, 'unwritten' code aimed at those who, although they violate no public rules, maintain a kind of inner distance and do not truly identify with Vesprit du corps' (63-4). In this regard, the notion of inherent transgression is also caught up in the relationship between the 'masculine' logic of a universal proved by an exception and a 'feminine' universality as itself exception.

inherent transgression, n.Definitions

inherent transgression