Hum Stud (2012) 35:347349 DOI 10.

1007/s10746-012-9240-2 SPECIAL ISSUE

Short Editorial Introduction: Transcendence and Transgression

Ronnie Lippens James Hardie-Bick

Published online: 6 June 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Transcendence, the condition of being that is outside or beyond, is an essential characteristic of Sartres philosophy. In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre makes an important distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Being-in-itself refers to being that simply is what it is and refers to all non-conscious being that can be dened by its essence. It exists independently in-itself. The other type of being posited by Sartre, being-for-itself, describes self-conscious beings that are distanced from being in their unique ability to question their own existence. Unlike being-initself, being-for-itself has no xed or essential essence to determine its character. In this category of being existence precedes essence and as a consequence human beings cannot escape the freedom of choice. As conscious beings that are able to stand back from themselves, to contemplate their surroundings, assess, question and negate being, Sartre maintained that human beings are free to dene and create their own life projects. Consciousness is transcendence. Regardless of the situation, human beings are always free to reect on their possibilities of being-inthe-world. It is impossible to escape this ontological freedom. Human beings are transcendent beings. They surpass being by being perpetually beyond their immediate situation and live their lives in a constant process of negation, indeed, of becoming. Much existentialist work has focused on transcendence for understanding how human beings are more than just part of the natural world. As Ernest Becker argued in Escape from Evil (1975), human beings are on the cutting edge of evolution: he is the animal whose development is not pregured by instincts, and so he is open to becoming what he can. This means literally that each person is already
R. Lippens (&) J. Hardie-Bick Centre for Social Policy, Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs ST5 5BG, UK e-mail: r.lippens@crim.keele.ac.uk J. Hardie-Bick e-mail: j.p.hardie-bick@appsoc.keele.ac.uk

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somewhat ahead of himself simply by virtue of being human. Aside from Sartre and Becker, writers such as Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Heidegger, and, prior to the twentieth century, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have all contributed to this debate and commented on how human beings have the imagination and creativity to look beyond their present situation. Indeed, human being harbours the potential for the constant transgression of that which at any particular point is. Any such point is a mere moment of transgressive becoming. Transgression, however, does not only come about through transcendent reection, invention or creation. All life has transgressive potential. All life depends on it. Transgression is primordial. That which in life emerges, emerges in and through transgression. Becoming here is a matter of matter. It is something of the body. There is no coincidence that in a textbook such as Jenkss Transgression (2003) much if not most of the explication and discussion goes into the more or less earthy, slimy, viscous dimensions of emotional life as it rushes through veins and glands. This is the terrain of scholars such as Bataille and Bakhtin. Becoming here is about passionate life. It is life. In this perspective, transgression is the process whereby being matters forth, so to speak, vitally. This is a point well developed in what could be called vitalist philosophy which, in a way, is yet another sprout from the Spinozean-Nietzschean tree of becoming. Already Henri Bergson, in his Creative Evolution (1907) made the point that it is life itself that transgresses that which is, quite creatively so (and not merely adaptively, as a Darwin would have assumed), becoming ever anew in the process. Life has a forward thrusting, indeed lan about it, as Bergson claimed. Life actually is that innately transgressive e transgressive thrust. Later deleuzoguattarians would pick up this thread, focussing on the rhizomatics of transgression. The contributions to this issue each deal with these twin notions of transcendence and transgression, and the tensions between both, to some extent. The scene is set, if you wish, in the rst contribution. In his piece on the late modern form of life par excellence (which has the desire for and will to absolute control over emergence at its heart) Ronnie Lippens outlines three images of radical sovereignty which, he argues, were already noticeable in the post-war work of painters such as Jackson Pollock (Nietzsche type 1: radical transgression), Mark Rothko (Nietzsche type 2: radical transcendence), and Paul Rebeyrolle (Nietzsche type 3: creative transformation). Steve Hall argues that in order to be able to transcend advanced consumer capitalism it is necessary to engage in a traumatic encounter with the Real, that is, with the indeterminacy that is embedded in the matter of life itself. Without such transcendental materialism political subjectivity may not hope to elude the narcissistic trap which neo-capital has prepared. In his paper on the bourgeois transcendent self Tony Kearon shows how the high modern bourgeois engendered a culture of production whereby the bourgeois self sought to differentiate itself from transgressive others by projecting an image of civic virtue and reformist philanthropy. In a late modern culture of consumption and experience the bourgeois transcendent self hopes to achieve such differentiation by symbolically constructing itself as culturally and experientially omnivorous, and by opposing itself to less than adequate univores.

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Stephen Lyng focuses on edgework, i.e., voluntary risk-seeking and riskexploiting transgressive behaviour. Lyng argues that existentialist-inspired notions such as hermeneutic reexivity may be able to shed a brighter light on the phenomenon than notions that refer to processes of detraditionalization in a reexive modernity. James Hardie-Bick explores the work of Ernest Becker on the nature of evil. At the heart of Beckers work is the thesis that evil is that which results from the typically human desire to transcend mere mortality and achieve immortality instead. In exploring the connections between Beckers work and other bodies of thought and literature (e.g., existentialism) Hardie-Bick in a way re-introduces this crucially important but somewhat ignored theorist to a wider audience. In his paper on nineteenth century parricides, Phillip Shon argues in an existentialist vein that the commission of such killings is to be understood not so much as the consequence of severe pathology but, rather, as an act that is embedded in the offenders chosen life project. And nally, in a postmodernist-inspired exploration of what he terms the shadow (i.e., the reication and xation of human relationships) Bruce Arrigo suggests the gure of the stranger (i.e., the promise of yet-to-be-unleashed potential) as a way of transcending ultramodern transgressions and harm.

References
Becker, E. (1975). Escape from Evil. New York: The Free Press. Bergson, H. (1911) [1907] Creative evolution. New York: Henry Hold and Co. Jenks, C. (2003). Transgression. London: Routledge. Sartre, J.-P. (2003) [1943]. Being and nothingness. London: Routledge.

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