About This Event

In his Passagen-Werk – The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the threshold as an in-between zone, distinguishing it from the boundary, the nature of which is impermeable. A liminal space, the threshold, argues Benjamin, allows for changes, transitions, waves of motion, all linked to the etymology of the word Schwellen in German, or swell. Phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels observes that Benjamin, who comments in the same passage that we, in modernity, are increasingly lacking in experience of the threshold, does not mean that such liminality can no longer be experienced, but that it is not straightforward to encounter this in-between zone. Echoing Benjamin’s concern for the threshold as possibility rather than demarcation of sets of limiting binary conceptions, Waldenfels encourages us to move beyond opposites such as self/other, culture as one’s own/culture as ‘invaded’ by the stranger or intruder. We could add to these the unhelpful opposition between the human and the natural world that has made it all too easy to cast the latter in the role of a resource to be endlessly exploited for our gain. But how might we enter or re-enter this space of encounter? For Waldenfels, drawing on anthropological perspectives from which the human being has been viewed as a threshold entity, the important thing about re-thinking the idea of the threshold today is not to aim for universals or any manner of anthropological constant, but rather to think of it in terms of our many differing forms of relationality.

Ethically, aesthetically, epistemologically, linguistically, the notion of the threshold invites us to question how, at a time beset with the atrocities of war and a resurgence of societal fractures, with political exclusions and the rise of far-right voting patterns, with climate crisis and fears for the very conditions of life on earth, we might envisage spaces of dialogue and crossover, spaces whose interstices allow for new forms of criss-crossing and interaction. Our roundtable will address the idea of ‘a space of encounter’ as physical space, imagined space, experiential space, aesthetic space. We will ask our respondents to present position papers of no more than 5 minutes and then engage in discussion on how we might conceive collectively of these spaces. The audience will be very welcome to contribute to the general discussion.

The roundtable discussion might include, but will not necessarily be limited to, the following questions:

• How can discourses of knowledge – philosophical, cultural, political – help us re-define spaces of encounter in an age in which boundaries, walls and exclusions predominate, and are promulgated in the increasingly hate-driven speech of social media?
• How can the aesthetic give expression to liminality from an ecological perspective?
• How, in and through the arts, can new models of encounter alter our perception of the world we inhabit and the rigid demarcations – whether part of the coloniality of knowledge production or the hegemony of global capitalism – that have been thrust upon it?