Limitation as excess: A reappraisal of transgressive aesthetics in Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps

Abstract

ABSTRACT Transgressive aesthetics’ unrestrained extremity has been problematised by post-Cold War capitalism, via their shared reliance upon unregulated desire. Amanda Filipacchi’s Love Creeps reframes transgressive excess through limitation, accounting for transgression’s contradictory position within twenty-first century capitalism. The novel’s expression of transgressive aesthetics relies upon a fundamental paradox: constriction simultaneously intensifies textual depictions of sexual desire. This apparent incongruity informs the novel’s response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture. Initially, the article considers Filipacchi’s depiction of desire within a transgressive aesthetic context – beginning with definitions of transgression, before considering how the novel’s innovative use of limitation reformulates perversity and extremity to respond to twenty-first century capitalism. Love Creeps’ decoupling of content from consequences, via the subversive potential it aligns with limitation, is then reconnected to twentieth century uses of transgressive aesthetics, establishing the intensity Filipacchi produces as a contemporary innovation of this legacy. I argue Filipacchi’s counterintuitive use of limitation recalibrates transgressive aesthetics in a way that accounts for the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, presenting an extremity that is furthered by the very limitation that intuitively should diminish it.