Transgressing the Taboo: A Comparative Analysis of Bataille’s and Freud’s Theoretical Approaches

Taboo is a Polynesian word whose original usage is no longer current amongst modern language.1placeholder The closest one comes to understanding the word is through its opposite, “noa”, meaning “common” or “generally accessible.” One can deduce thereon that “taboo” denotes an inviolable sense of sacredness, an unapproachable something that finds expression in the primacy of restraint and prohibition. The word suggests on the one hand the “consecrated”, the “sacred”, and on the other, the “uncanny”, the “dangerous”, the “forbidden”, and the “unclean”.

The precise origin of the first taboo cannot be traced, but it is widely believed that such practice predates, and in a way anticipates, the establishment of prohibitions relating to religious and moral matters. In Totem and Taboo (1913), an influential work on the subject, Sigmund Freud suggests that taboo restrictions, contrary to religious or moral restrictions, assume an authority that is not “based on any divine ordinance,” nor does it fall into a system that “declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity.”2placeholder Most of the taboos reveal an exclusive character by virtue of their influence on a certain group of people – to those outside the group the taboos are meaningless and absurd, generating only a minor interest to the effects of which they are largely impervious.

Citing Freud’s book as one of the main sources that informed his thesis on the coupling of taboo and transgression, Georges Bataille acknowledged the difficulty of marrying his discourse with a logical line of thinking.3placeholder It is believed that Bataille read Totem and Taboo repeatedly in 1927, preferring it to The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), which he did not read until 1932, as the fundamental text that elucidates the basic tenets of psychoanalysis.4placeholder In later years, however, this reverence would come to be mixed with a lingering scepticism of the text’s analytic relevance with regard to Freud’s heavy reliance on disputable and occasionally esoteric historical data. The part about the taboo against cadaver, for example, betrays, according to Bataille, Freud’s “superficial knowledge of ethnographical data.”5placeholder The taboo was prevalent amongst many primitive cultures and most prominently in the Māori, whose people believed that the evil spirit of the dead body would be transferred onto whomever that came into contact with it.6placeholder Naturally, the implementation of the taboo instilled a fear in the hearts of the people, which effectively separated the living from the dead. Bataille noticed that Freud’s was an interpretation that stressed the “primal necessity of erecting a protective barrier against excessive desires bearing upon objects of obvious frailty.”7placeholder Taboo’s marked contiguity with transgression was sidelined in the text, although Freud did touch on the matter when drawing on an ancient superstition that automatic punishment would befall those who committed a forbidden act: this fear of automatic punishment has evolved overtime into the affective state of guilt that attends our momentary lapse of judgement, and yet it is a behaviourist trait that is not as immediate or natural to the neurotics as the urge to transgress.8placeholder

Another notion that is indirectly linked with this nexus is “emotional ambivalence,” which Freud designated as one of the more common responses of the humans when in face of a taboo. A pathological form of emotional ambivalence is central to the aberrant behaviours of obsessional neurotics. When it is displayed by the mentally stable, the ambivalent attitude might still be interspersed with traces of the pathological. A typical example for this is the “obsessional self-reproaches” of the mourners, who attribute the blame for the unfortunate circumstances to no one but themselves. Nothing will rid them of the guilt-ridden conscience, their ears deaf and eyes blind to the evidence that tells a very different story about the deaths. Once protracted beyond a certain period, the guilty conscience is at risk of degenerating into a vicious condition which Freud likens to being in love: “[…] where there is an intense emotional attachment to a particular person we find that behind the tender love there is a concealed hostility in the unconscious.”9placeholder

In Bataille’s Erotism (1957), this emotional ambivalence is given a more proverbial name, “anguish”, which Bataille defines as a feeling that shows “man’s refusal or withdrawal in face of the blind surge of life.”10placeholder Life is composed of the cyclical movement of reproduction and death. The exhaustion of life’s resources inexorably brings about its own demise. It follows in Bataille’s main thesis that human beings are well aware of the biological process and, certain that any fight against their destinies will be pointless, can only react in an instinctive, but ultimately provisional and futile, repulsion. The acknowledgement of one’s powerlessness following the paroxysm of anguish might not be peremptory enough sometimes, depending on the person’s depth of understanding, to refrain one from mindless prodigality: there is in every human heart an insatiable desire, Bataille observes, for that which “imperils our life.”11placeholder

According to German experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, the majority of the early taboos recorded in history claim their origins in an “objectified fear of the ‘demonic’ power which is believed to lie hidden in a tabooed object,” which in time developed into a “force with a basis of its own, independent of the belief in demons.”12placeholder The authority it finally assumes is something resembling an established law, as most evidently evinced in its impact on the formulation of a person’s moral conduct or, to a certain extent, a society’s at large. Whereas the taboo injunction might not always pose an effective means in saving us from potential danger, its main function of keeping in check the whims of human heart allies it with the maintaining of societal equilibrium. On the other hand, taboo cannot exist without its opposite: the desire of breaking the taboo.

Taboo and transgression are the two irreconcilables that can never cancel out each other: which of the either comes first and engenders the other is, indeed, a question that is only too embedded in the causality dilemma to warrant a definite answer. In Bataille’s thesis on the dualism between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, which are the formalized terms for the living and the non-living, the profane and the sacred,13placeholder taboo is the boundary that constitutes the limits of a finite existence. The breaking of a taboo joins one with the realm of the heterogeneous, yielding a foretaste of death. To attain to true heterogeneity, one needs to remove the taboo, and a taboo removed automatically invalidates the reality of transgression. Normally, a transgressive act occurs when it, according to Bataille, “suspends a taboo without suppressing it.”14placeholder Bataille conceived transgression as a social phenomenon that comprises two essential forms. The first is an organised transgression, such as religious festival, ritual or sacrifice, that has been the integral part of various familiar social sectors and whose “frequency – and the irregularity […] do not affect the intangible stability of the prohibition since they are its expected complement.”15placeholder With an impaired capacity, the organised transgression soon begins to disintegrate, the result of which is a more volatile transgression that is instigated by the “unlimited urges towards violence,”16placeholder such as war, revolution and orgy, movements that usually call for more rigid prohibitions against its function.

It would be unthinkable to live in a future where the need of these prohibitions was finally triumphed over, for human beings, in principle, could never return to their animal past. But it is also true that all taboos are irrational at their core. Symptomatic, according to Freud, of the early stage of obsessional neurosis, the practice of taboo lacks any assignable motive, being maintained by an internal necessity and thus easily displaceable, occasioning an urge for deviation.17placeholder When Totem and Taboo was released, authorities and scholars especially of the anthropological and psychological communities discredited the book as lacking a tenable basis in relevant disciplines. Cultural anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, for example, derisively compared the deconstructing of Freud’s thesis to “breaking the butterfly on the wheel.”18placeholder Kroeber argued that a major problem with the text was Freud’s use of ethnographic data that were considered questionable or even unverified by the specialists of the field. The “events” that Freud cited in illustration of the theory that the original taboos were the products of an unconscious fear of incest or endogamy – like the Oedipus complex or the self-sacrifice of the tribal leader – were not typical phenomena that produced any observable, far-reaching effects. Freud wrote the book a few years before the outbreak of WWI, obviously with the object of highlighting the important contribution of psychoanalysis to the scientific development of ethnography, but his positivist approach and an “all-or-none attitude” that characterised his reasoning ultimately limited his scope of exploration, which was then shorn of the advantages that science, Kroeber felt, may have given to the work of justifying the source. Kroeber did not write off the psychic factor underlying the long tradition of taboo – a factor that does not always lend itself to hard evidence – and yet throughout Freud’s essay this revolutionary discovery is hedged about by too much intuitive conjecturing, and too little meticulous investigating.19placeholder

That Totem and Taboo was not a flawless work did not escape Bataille when he formulated his own disquisition, which turned out to be another famously flawed authority on the subject. Jacques Derrida, one of the most enthused and devoted readers of Bataille, was baffled by the author’s insistence on subjecting the theorisation of taboo and transgression to a Hegelian dialectical system, which means that when reading Bataille one must “interpret Bataille against Bataille, or rather, must interpret one stratum of his work from another stratum.”20placeholder It was Bataille’s position that neither taboo nor transgression should gain the absolute upper hand as both are as much in a condition of interdependence as they are at variance with one another. “The taboo is there to be violated,” Bataille states in Eroticism. Conversely, without the taboo, “it would be a return to violence, to animal violence.”21placeholder To reduce the play of the two practices to dialectics, as the discourse of the subject unfailingly does, implies enforcing stability to an essentially fraught equation wherein intensity and anguish dominate the spirit. It also runs counter to what was called an “opening to limitation” – namely the violent exposure of limitations that emerges from lived experience – that is central to the intrinsic mechanism of taboo and transgression and to Bataille’s philosophical argumentations.

Despite the tangled issues within their respective theses, Freud and Bataille were amongst the early thinkers who shed light on a subject whose underlying affinity with myth and primitive imagination had long conveyed a false impression of something appealing more to collective fantasy than to modern sensibility. As revealed in Totem and Taboo, the ancient people’s unwavering faith in the imperative of the taboo linked the understated power of the unconscious with social life. Bataille echoed Freud’s observation by conceiving the foundation of society as that made stabilised by the unstable interplay between interdiction and infraction. The prevailing set of norms and values, laws and orders, are, in truth, sourced from the individual consciousness of the collective, whose preference for reason belies a tendency towards infantile feelings and impulses. Expanding on Freud’s view of taboo as an emblem of our ambivalence towards clashing values, Bataille pointed up the inevitability of violence when human emotions break through. This incessant tug-of-war between taboo and transgression constitutes only one facet of a long history of conflicts that human beings have been plagued with and have continued to try to grasp with so far no definitive results – the reason, Bataille suggests in Literature and Evil (1957), ultimately boils down to the immutable dichotomy between life and death: “Humanity pursues two goals – one, the negative, is to preserve life (to avoid death), and the other, the positive, is to increase the intensity of life.”22placeholder