Liminal Spaces: Reflections on the In-Between

Abstract

In a political present increasingly marked by bigotry and violence, the need to establish spaces where minority voices can be heard, and where alternatives can be articulated, has become ever more urgent. What kinds of places and spaces, this essay asks, make possible a true encounter and dialogue? What kinds of places and spaces allow us to challenge the binary structures and divisiveness that so fundamentally mark our current political discourse? In an attempt to offer some tentative reflections on this topic, I turn in this paper to Plato's Symposium and Luce Irigaray's critical reading of that text. Might Plato, I ask, offer useful tools for challenging and resisting a contemporary political discourse defined by simplistic binary thinking? And can he provide resources for thinking about space in terms that transcend simple dichotomies between here and there; inside and outside; us and them?