Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

What does atristic transgression look like in 2025?

The Japanese poster for David Cronenberg’s 1991 movie adaptation of Naked Lunch.

When I first read William Burroughs Naked Lunch in my early 20’s it had a profound effect on me. I was aware in theory that you could write whatever you wanted, but had not truly assimilated the fact that a creator could make something so free, so idiosyncratic, and so unmoored from morality and the normal patterns of fiction. It was thrilling and inspiring to read, and to contemplate it’s implicit message that you yourself - your mind, personality and experience - were the true artistic product, and that you could transmit that directly to the reader by cracking your skull like an egg and pouring the contents onto the page. In the case of Burroughs - who led an extreme life and was a very bad man - the transmission resulted in a book that was vulgar and obscene to the extent it was still the subject of obscenity trials and bans decades after publication. But revisiting the book for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, it has me thinking about what constitutes shocking art in 2025.