Search

This paper continues my work on the new Puritanical society in the United Kingdom where the characteristics of the christian cult of capitalism have been strengthened by law and culture. Now, to labour is the answer to a good life. The disabled, the unemployed, students, single mothers, all must baptised into the cult through the joys and pleasures of labour.Any activities that weaken that relationship are seen as excessive and criminalised. The more excess is criminalised the more scatological society becomes. As we regulate more and more so excess and decay becomes celebrated through an excretence of scatological culture. As a Bataillean character says in 'Divine Filth' , 'let us drink until we vomit'. The Cromwellian regulators desperately attempt to criminalise excess in all its forms. Drink, language, food, the erotic, sex, dance and decay. As governments create new boundaries to behaviour so everyday life responds with greater acts of non productive excessive energy. Sex for reproduction is good; sex for pleasure is an excessive waste and must be made a crime. Excess becomes the new crime and scatology the new satire of contemporary life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taboo and transgression have long been seen to be central points of discussion within criminology and more specifically cultural criminology. Bataille building on Nietsche before him , and followed by Foucault, grappled with the question as to what are the origins of limits and boundaries, taboos and transgressions, and how are these changing in late capitalist societies. What now limits social action and sexuality in a world of anti-social behaviour? It is from this debate that the notion that law forbids transgression 'but the fascination compels it.' (Bataille), moves us to an understanding that 'the initial moment of transgression…has a sublime and fascinating quality' (Bataille). In this paper I explore the continuing idea that terror is accompanied with intense pleasure, anguish and desire, and that 'organised transgression makes social life what it is.' whilst 'men and women know from birth that all pleasure is to be found in evil' (Baudelaire). I wish to examine the continuing quest in contemporary everyday life for 'jouissance', the erotic 'monstrous joy' that contains within it a 'radically violent pleasure' that Barthes often described and to further speculate on whether the secular state can create boundaries 'in the mind' or whether with the 'death of God' we are more and more moving towards a boundary- less existence ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]