APATHEIA AND TRANSGRESSION IN VISUAL ARTS: CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

The concept of transgression, referring to disobedience to the law, has gradually extended until including all types of deviation from correct or communally accepted behaviours; with time, it has expanded as any breaking of individual or collective limits, In fact, etymologically, to transgress means to “go beyond”, “pass”, although it should be established that its connotations have always been negative: illegal, prohibited, and licentious. (Julius, 2003) Within the implications of transgression there are four primordial senses: denial of truths conceived as doctrines; violation of beliefs, conditions, or censured or labelled situations such as taboos; offences against people, either against them physically, their property or their engagement, and exclusion of physical or conceptual limits; within the latter, there are anarchic conditions, not so much in the political sense as in the condition of disconcerting or incoherent attitudes. Paul Valéry, in his text on the principles of anarchy, speaks of the littleness that an individual can reach as he self-destroys as a person under the pressure of joining and binding to society’s needs, conventions and obligations, generating for himself effects of hypocrisy, stupidity, and rapine around the limited demonstrations of acceptance of thought and expression of sensitivity.