SOURCE: Guerlac, Suzanne. “Bataille: The Fiction of Transgression.” In Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton, pp. 11-37. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Guerlac explores various readings, and misreadings, of Bataille's notion of transgression.

I write for whoever, upon entering my book, would fall into it as into a hole, and would never come out.

—Georges Bataille, in M. Surya, Georges Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre

If there is a single term poststructuralist theory could not do without, it is “transgression,” inherited from Georges Bataille. Bataille elaborated a notion of transgression most explicitly in L'Erotisme (1957), an essay that reworked material from a previously unpublished piece, “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” and that harks back to a study of “erotic phenomenology” projected as early as 1939. But eroticism is only one modality of transgression, which refers us to an experience of the sacred, the “motive force” of...