1

The Erotic Child of Bataille and Foucault

by Amie Zimmer
...the State, by making children a burden to their parents,
kills them indiscriminately before they are born.
- Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

i. Introduction
This paper takes seriously Foucaults conceptual heritage to Bataille regarding limitexperiences and transgression, engaging specifically with the eroticism and sexuality of the
child. For Bataille, a limit-experience is an experience on the edge of limits; a limit experience is
a place where divine horror and divine ecstasy meet, where rules are broken until a place beyond
all rules is reached. Foucault calls this place "the point of life which lies as close as possible to
the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme. Transgression, Foucault
defines, is the action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the
flash of its passage, but perhaps also the flash of its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely
that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses.1 The relationship between limits and
transgression is complex; transgression crosses and recrosses the line or norm which forces it
back into its place in the horizon of the uncrossable.2 The somaesthetic edgework of limit
experience tests the limits of ordered reality, wrenching the subject from their subjectivity in this
moment of transgression.3 The child, I will argue, is inhibited from this capacity to transgress to
their own peril.
Analyses of taboo/transgression (Bataille) as well as the forces of normalization and systems
of knowledges (Foucault) are the mechanisms through which both thinkers work to show how
society, culture, and even government reinforces and perpetuates a certain image of the
sexualized child which hinders the way that children can be seen and as Foucault will
emphasize how they can be listened to in a productive and necessary way.4 Foucaults
engagement with limit-experiences through a particular heritage to Bataillian thought is, I aim to

Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. & trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (Oxford: Basil Blackwel1, 1977), p. 33-4.
2
Ibid., transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short
duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.
3
My working definition of the somaesthetic is that which foregrounds the role of bodily experience in aesthetic
experience.
4
Culture, for Foucault, is the consensus of public opinion. Also, by productive I mean producing something, a
relationship between two individuals.

show, a positive prescriptive from which we can think through his discussion of the parrhesiastic
act of truth-telling in his last lecture series, the Courage of Truth.
For both thinkers, erotic acts are the transgressive acts which walks toward the limit only to
be pushed back in their place by norms and taboos. Eroticism is the transgressive quality proper
to this analysis because it is, I think, that which the child is most denied; in other words,
sexuality is the horizon of the uncrossable for the child. I argue that this denied horizon functions
as a denial of subjectivity; specifically, the truth-telling subjectivity Foucaults last work calls
for. In order to get at a conclusion suggesting why and how the child should be considered in
their own particular subjectivity, we will first try to understand and utilize the two thinkers
conceptions of why this hasnt already been the case, including the philosophical and cultural
choices which have perpetuated it. In so doing, we will see the self-same impulses and trajectory
of philosophical thought between both thinkers when it comes to advocating for childhood qua
childhood, outside of normalizing forces and constraints.5 I will first elaborate on and explain
Foucauldian parrhsia and suggest that 1. Foucault is calling for a subjectivity involving a
particular conception of truth-telling, and 2. that children are denied this parrhsiastic potential
central to this new subjectivity, and thus denied their subjectivity proper. I will then discuss
transgression in the work of Bataille as a means of situating it as a tool by which to productively
discuss subjectivity. Then, I will move to using these conceptual tools to talk about societys role
in reinforcing and rebuilding the walls which children cannot cross through the horizoninhibiting mechanisms of psychologization and sexualization. Foucaults prescription, I
conclude, is and can always only be a soft prescription: he tells us who to listen to but not what to
deduce.
ii. Foucauldian Parrhsia: Importance of Truth-Telling and New Subjectivities
Foucault turns from analyses of conditions of subjectivization itself in his earlier works to
individualistic conceptions of the subject in his latter lecture courses. From power mechanisms to

An attempt to explain the relationship between Bataille and Foucault, and their philosophical attractiveness to one
another, is mediated by mutual attempts at getting at both a non-systematic way of doing philosophy, and their
rather unconventional or unprecedented views of philosophys definition as well as its role. For Bataille, philosophy
is systematic and thus confined within its own limits. Thus, though he seems at times to be a thinker who distances
himself from philosophy (by claiming to not be doing philosophy at all) it is important to bear in mind his
motivation for writing in the first place: his spurn of philosophy as such and desire at some level to change it. For
Foucault, the role of philosophy since Nietzsche has been not to deliver transhistorical truths, but rather, to diagnose.
In a Nietzschian vein, both Bataille and Foucault can be seen as heeding the call of philosophy to understand the
limits of human subjectivity and imagining other forms of existence by ways of passing through current forms.

a generative account, The Courage of Truth details the capacity for a particular type of truthtelling as what allows for individual subjectivities to be conceptualized and embodied. Parrhsia
is an act between individuals, and the domain in which the act of truth-telling is effective, is in
the individuals soul, the psukh. Foucault traces the shift from Hellenistic or democratic to
contemporary parrhsia, and the objective changes. Where the aim of the parrhsiastic practice
was once useful advice in this or that particular circumstance, when the citizens are at a loss and
are looking for a guide who may enable them to escape danger and be saved, its objective has
now become less the citys salvation than the individuals thos.6 A parallel exists between
Foucaults chronological trajectory from the conditions of subjectivization in his earlier works to
individualistic conceptions of the subject in his latter, with the history he tells here of the move
of parrhsia from a condition for Greek democratic functioning to our contemporary
understanding of it as an element of individuated subjectivities embodying unique aesthetics of
existence. Understanding what Foucault means by an aesthetics of existence becomes clearer
when considered as a somaesthetics of existence; in other words, the subject Foucault seeks is a
particular kind of truth-teller who tells their truth from their individual bodily existence, and not
from a categorical existence. What this means is that the truth of a monk differs from that of a
clergy member, despite the fact that both might have a similar metaphysical framework which
circumscribes their belief in the same God. An aesthetic existence is a token of a metaphysical
type of existence. Parrhsia is the conceptual tool which allows us to understand tokens and not
types: particular embodied subjectivities and not frameworks.
In the first lecture of the Courage of Truth, Foucault lays out two kinds of parrhsia: first is
the pejorative sense initially employed by Aristophanes that then proliferated throughout
Christian literature. Parrhsia in this sense was defined as the act of saying everything coming to
mind serving the cause, passion, or interest the individual was defending. The parrhsiast then
appeared as the impenitent chatterbox, someone who cannot restrain himself or, at any rate,
someone who cannot index-link his discourse to the principle of rationality and truth. The
second sense involves telling the truth without hiding any part of it, without hiding it behind
anything.7 It is not about speaking without reason, but telling all while remaining bound to the
truth. To this Foucault adds two more conditions: 1) that the truth is the personal opinion of the
6

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collge de France 1983-1984, ed. by Frdric Gros and
trans. by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2011), 65.
7
Foucault, Ibid, 9-10.

person speaking it, and 2) that it is acknowledged as being what the speaker thinks. In other
words, the parrhsiast is bound to this truth and admits to this bind.8 I think of the artist or writer
who literally signs off on their work in a signature as an example of this binding made manifest,
as if a book or a painting were a type of contract. The subject must be taking some kind of risk
concerning the relationship with the person to whom he speaks: For there to be a parrhsia, in
speaking the truth one must open up, establish, and confront the risk of offending the other
person, of irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be
extremely violent. So it is the truth subject to risk of violence.9 It is this second definition, I
argue, which gives an account of a particular subjectivity of the future for whom Foucault is
advocating.
From Bataille, Foucault inherits the idea that the limit experience is birthed out of paradox, a
notion which Bataille himself inherited from Baudelaire. For Foucault, the importance of
paradox is to break the unity of subjectivity in order to find a non-dialectical philosophical
language.10 Non-dialectical philosophical language would be for Foucault the transgressive
moment that shows the absence of the sovereign subject of the self, where the sovereignty of the
self is a power relation that in itself must be rethought or changed. That Foucault is committed to
the idea of desubjectivation, or at least to desubjectivity in the sense of being able to see what
was there in the world before the constitution of a particular historical subjectivity, seems right:
his idea that language loses itself in its own limitations is key and abets this insight. Bataille is
the ideal candidate to turn to when Foucault wants to break with theories of the subject, but we
must use this early notion of desubjectivization to situate Foucaults position in his last lecture
series, the Courage of Truth, where his concern with subjectivity is on the level of individual
care of the self.
What does this mean for subjectivity and the responsibility of the person to cultivate and make
a place for transgression, and what would this look like? We will see that it is not so much a call
to commit violent acts for the sake of transgressing itself, but recognizing our role in reinforcing
taboos in children and the very real effects of such reinforcement. Why is thinking about
8

Ibid.
Ibid., and to add to this definition, on p. 64: Parrhsia now appears, not as a right possessed by a subject, but as a
practice whose privileged correlate, its first point of application, is not the city or body of citizens which has to be
persuaded and led by it, but something which is both a partner to which it is addressed and a domain in which it is
effective.
10
Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, 48-49.
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transgression useful in the formation of new subjectivities Foucault is eager to describe and
instantiate? For Foucault, the self is constituted as a self in very particular ways, and has strayed
from such constitution, also, in very particular ways. His last lecture series at the Collge de
France, the Courage of Truth, is significant for this very reason. Its here where Foucault
elaborates on the originally Cynic practice of truth-telling, parrhsia, as a vessel for
understanding a much different, contemporary understanding of cynicism seeking not necessarily
to be a political or anti-political movement writ large, but rather, as a methodology of selfunderstanding by and through self-truth-telling.
iii. Lessons from the Perverted: Thinking Childhood With Bataille and Foucault
For Bataille, transgression isnt a violation per se, but doing or wanting to do the opposite
once a particular rule (or taboo) has been implemented.11 The child may naturally transgress by
saying or doing something an adult might not. But rather than being forced to examine the ways
in which transgression reinforces preconceived notions of the sacred, the child is instead
excused, as a being that is not subject to the scrutiny of violations. The child, he says,
understands that she is like [her mother], so that [she] moves from a system outside it to one
that is personal.12 The transgression of the child, then, does not deny the taboo but transcends
it and completes it.13 In other words, there is something particular about the way the child
transgresses opposed to the adults that should be heeded. Speaking directly about children in
Eroticism, Bataille says:
We do not take long to forget what trouble we go to to pass on to our children the
aversions that make us what we are, which make us human beings to begin with. Our
children do not spontaneously have our reactions. They may not like a certain food and
they may refuse it. But we have to teach them by pantomime or failing that, by violence,
that curious aberration called disgust, powerful enough to make us feel faint, a contagion
passed down to us from the earliest men through countless generations of scolded
children.14
For Foucault, contemporary attempts to decipher sexuality by translating or describing it with
language use the wrong methodology. Its not translation, but the outpouring that leaves us
spent (i.e. unable to speak) that is the method proper to uncovering and understanding the realm
11

For Foucault, this is the language of normalization.

Martin Jay, The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and Foucault, in Constellations, V.2 No. 2 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), 309.
13
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986)
63.
14
Bataille, Eroticism, 58.
12

of human sexuality. I think this outpouring can mean anything that doesnt come up against
linguistic description, as psychologic pathologization is want to do. In this place, desire,
rapture...ecstasy become continuous rather than suffer from linguistic parsing.15 In other words,
Foucaults serious engagement with sexuality and the erotic cannot be understood nor effectively
appropriated without understanding and using the methodology proper to it in the first place; and
for this, Foucaults conceptualization of transgression makes sense only in light of Batailles. We
will now look at how transgression becomes a part of Foucaults methodology for understanding
sexuality.
Transgression for Foucault is not necessarily just that which transgresses the societal or
cultural norm, but that which operates in a world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning
in the sacred. That is, transgression is that which we are only able to recognize the sacred
through, by recognizing its opposite: that which the sacred is not.16 The concept of the sacred is
empty and non-linguistic; perhaps intuitive recognition of its violation (its transgression) is all
that actively works toward its conceptual rebuilding. This is why it is the outpouring of
sexuality and not its linguistic description which is proper to its method of truthful
understanding. It is only through excess, the transgression that goes too far and thus exceeds
convention, that the absence of the sacred is seen.17
Thinking the relationship between limits and transgression for Foucault requires that the
relationship be detached, and thus absent from, ethics as well as from the scandalous and the
subversive; but why?18 If, as he says, the subject is trying to keep language at arms length, then
so too are ethics, the scandalous, and the subversive, kept at bay.19 And if what Foucault
ultimately seeks is new forms of subjectivity, what we can see in A Preface to Transgression is
a description of sorts of the future subject he imagines; he says that transgression will find its
place in culture in the future.20 In other words, it will find its place in our childrens lives, in our
childrens childrens lives, and will be cultivated by subjects who keep language at arms length
during processes of conceptual translation. I don't think he is telling us to not speak, but rather,
that the experience must speak first and through language, must be bound to it in meaningful
15

Foucault, Preface to Transgression, 29

Ibid., 30.
17
Ibid., 31. Foucault says this absence is the high region where Bataille is able to take us.
18
Ibid., 35.
19
Ibid., 39.
20
Ibid., 33.
16

ways, and not parsed or mutilated by it. Bataille, too, talks about the future, the future of
laughter:
The utterance, the last word of such a sovereign subject is always accompanied by laughter.
Laughter is the joyful s/laughter of subjectivity. Laughter is summit (excess) and decline
(exhaustion) of thought and the movement in-between, the movement of communication that
pushes Nietzsches freeing of the subject past sensible appeals, and that suspends the work
(meaning) of the Hegelian master-stroke dialectic.21
Like the erotic experience, laughter waits upon chance, upon a particular person and favorable
circumstances.22 So too do both laughter and the erotic experience undergo a summit (excess)
and decline (exhaustion). For Bataille, both do more than symbolize transgression, but incarnate
it.
Bataille and Foucault are not interested in disputing or disproving the truth or non-truth of
certain claims, but questioning in a sense what our reactions have to say about objects, taboos,
culture, and population. The pervert like the neurotic was created in time only when certain
ideologies of truth made these categories possible, and not before. Bataille himself, often
dismissed as a pervert, a pornographer, or both, by philosophers and non-philosophers alike, is a
testament to the fact that philosophys limits are inscribed and closed by prescriptive language,
regardless of whether those limits are discussed or challenged.
For Bataille, power is not recognized unless it is in excess, in the act of transgressing either
the norm or a taboo which then prompts our learned reactions- i.e. to be horrified, nauseated, or
disturbed. Where Bataille stresses the significance of excess which can force our thinking or
rethinking of the sacred/profane distinction, Foucault stresses the effects of normalization, the
power and control that could or might be excessive but isnt generally thought of as being so. A
sovereign king could be seen as having an excess of power which the subjects fail to realize
because of their having been accustomed to such power.
In Abnormal, Foucault applies his genealogical method to childhood sexuality, concentrating
especially on the mechanisms of power employed by psychoanalysis: The guarantee that one
would find the parents-children relationship at the root of everyones sexuality made it
possibleeven when everything seemed to point to the reverse processto keep the deployment
21
22

Jay, 283-4
Jay, 290 and Bataille, Eroticism, 23.

of sexuality coupled to the system of alliance.23 In his transcribed interview, The Politics of
Sexuality, Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, and Jean Danet, discuss the issue of child sexuality
from the perspective of political legality. For Foucault, the criminalization of child sexuality
serves only the traditional prohibition and to stress in a new way, with new arguments, the
traditional prohibition on sexual relations without violence, without money, without any form of
prostitution, that may take place between [adults] and minors.24 In this situation, children are at
the mercy of the irony within which they find themselves circumscribed: psychoanalysis has
prevented us from going back to a time where children were not believed to have sexuality at all.
So sexuality is granted, but in a controlled and specific way: We psychologists or
psychoanalysts or psychiatrists, or teachers, we know perfectly well that childrens sexuality is a
specific sexuality, with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its
specific drives, and its own latency periods.25 In other words, the sexuality of the child is
something they themselves have, yet its limits are defined by others.
This presents a problem for both thinkers. In Bataille, we can analyze how the prescribed
sexuality of children is to some degree what really catalyzed the reception of Batailles own
work as perverse, and even pornographic. In the Story of the Eye, the child protagonists not only
recognize their sexuality but claim it as their own, to the continued scandal and dismissal of and
by the public, the philosophical community of readers included. Foucault says:
[Children] are not believed. They are thought to be incapable of sexuality and they are
not thought to be capable of speaking about it. But, after all, listening to a child, hearing
him speak, hearing him explain what his relations actually are with someone, adult or not,
provided one listens with enough sympathy, must allow one to establish more or less
what degree of violence if any was used or what degree of consent was given. And to
suppose that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and incapable of giving his
consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.26
Understanding or beginning to understand the significant role of children in the works of both
Bataille and Foucault to a large degree involves recognizing how both thinkers comments on
children, sexuality, and especially the relation between the two, can be engaged with more

23

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality vol 1 (London: Penguin, 1998) 113.

Foucault, The Politics of Sexuality, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984,
p. 274.
25
Ibid., Foucault, The Politics of Sexuality, 276.
26
Ibid., The Politics of Sexuality, 284.
24

seriously and critically when we attempt to think of their thoughts outside of the prescriptive
narrative of child sexuality as related to the law, taboo, and psychoanalysis.
iv. Conclusion
There are three analyses of relationships at play as we begin to think of the child in relation to
transgression: 1) the relationship of the child to self and world, 2) the relationship of adult to self,
others, and law and 3) the relationship of child to law. We can and should start thinking of the
ways in which the childs transgressions (the acts for which his parents hold him culpable) differ
from the adults, held culpable instead by the law and very different taboos. Bataille and
Foucault each show us that the sexualization of the child has prevented their claiming of a
particular kind of subjectivity, inhibited from its potential of being a Foucauldian truth-telling
subjectivity. In light of this argument, a covert conclusion is that philosophical reception to
Bataille as a perverted thinker is in fact proof of the very sort of sexualization of the child that
needs to be dispelled. If this is convincing, Batailles projects and intellectual contributions can
be recuperated by philosophy.
Ill turn to the first conclusion: this paper does not attempt to make claims about what
childhood sexuality is, but merely that it has been created in a particular way which must be denaturalized. I call not for a liberation of childhood sexuality itself, for there is no sexuality to
liberate in the Foucauldian framework I see this work to be upholding, but rather, a liberation
from discourses of childhood sexuality, particularly its psycho-medicalization and
pathologization. I believe Foucaults latter work can and should be thought of as prescriptive, but
in a particular way. The soft prescription is the allowing of the child to be his/her own self, to
speak truth to power and be heard without the normalizing force of psychologizing discourses
acting as a pushback into the horizon which limits transgression and the breakthrough of/to
subjectivity. The movement of the self which seeks to cross the limit of fortified discourses
cannot successfully do so without a change in those very limits and the impetus to diagnose and
normalize. Foucaults diagnosis of psychologization shows the criterion which seeks to
undermine the childs assumption as a subjectively autonomous being. Parrhsia is the condition
of such autonomy, but requires an act a bind between speaker and listener.
The second, more implicit conclusion, is the implication of this framework on Bataille as a
serious philosopher, and particularly a philosopher of and for the child. In the least, Bataille
provides the conceptual vocabulary of limits and transgressions which Foucault appropriates in a

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more far-reaching critique of normalization techniques. At most, Bataille exemplifies the

parrhsiastic relationship with the child, albeit in a complicated way. If one of the implications
of this reading, and really, Foucaults work more generally, is that certain discourses prevent a
particular and unique embodied subjectivity from existing as they would, without the stigma and
pushback of normalizing powers and the labels they prescribe, then Bataille, too, must and
should be read against the label of a pervert or pornographer. The Story of the Eye is a resistance
to psychologization and a celebration of the autonomous subjectivity of the child. As the author
of his own texts, the analogy is of course complicated, but retains philosophical merit when read
in light of Foucaults soft prescription of sexualitys de-naturalization.