Bataille and transgression

Bataille is a Western thinker, who he has a bit of the Catholic tradition in him, too. It isn't easy to explain transgression, but it has to do with one's relationship with one's Superego. Bataille likens it to "sinning". To try to give you some idea, if one just conforms with what one has been taught to do, since childhood, one can be very moral, but one does not encounter the sacred. To have a fresh encounter with the sacred one has to go against the grain of what one has been taught is right since childhood. It's not a matter of going against one's conditioned ethics on principle, or in the abstract. To the contrary, what one is really doing is challenging one's limitations. It can be very easy to be "good" in a passive sense. But there is a kind of goodness that transcends this passive sense of being good. By being "bad" (that is, using active, rather than passive energy), one goes beyond all earlier, naïve conceptions of goodness -- especially goodness as passive compliance to one's authorities and their demands. One discovers a different way of looking at the world. The experience that allows the world to open up to you more than before is related to the sacred.