Part 1: On the Limit in Kant
Liminal Space, Liminal Time, Liminal Literature
The following series of pieces are based on lectures I gave at Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy during the Winter semester of 2025. These written versions have been edited to make them suitable for readership here.
I’ll first discuss some broad thoughts on the limit and the liminal, specifically in popular culture. Then I explore Kant’s distinction between Grenze and Schranke in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. This is followed by an extended engagement with a note from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and it’s possible connection with the sublime in the third Critique.
In this series we’re going to be thinking through the limit. We’re going to be thinking it in terms of all the problems it gives rise to such as what is a limit? as well as where is a limit? And other, more entrenched philosophical question such as how do we think the limit of the limit? Where does the limit end and something else begin? These are questions I pull from Geoffrey Bennington’s text Kant on the Frontier and specifically the Appendix, “On Transcendental Fiction (Grenze and Schranke)”. Pushing off from Bennington’s overarching thesis, we can ask after the frontier between a limit and a boundary: how should we describe this frontier? To put this into a more simplified form that will echo throughout this series: is the frontier between the limit and the boundary itself a limit or a boundary?
These thoughts lead us to engage an aporia. And it’s this sense of being lead to an aporia, to the limit of what the limit itself is, that serves as a possible meaning of continental philosophy (if it has a meaning or “definition” that we can pin down).
Just as a starting point, I’m going to suggest that a defining feature of continental philosophy is that it holds within itself a confrontation with the limit of philosophy. Or, to put it differently, the site of the limit of philosophy has the name “continental philosophy.”
In this series I hope to unpack this thought alongside the historical facet of the continental tradition, that it contains (or let us say, that it gives us) certain thinkers who themselves were preoccupied with the limit. Indeed, we will be interested in those moments where the tradition seems to encounter aporias, and this means: difficulties and inhibited pathways. The main thinkers I have in mind here are Kant, Heidegger and Derrida. In the first parts of this series we are going to see how Kant came up against a limit by means of trying to think in/at/on the limit itself, and then later, in another series, how this was inherited by Heidegger and Derrida.
But I want to start by laying out a few etymological stakes of the word “limit” and some examples from contemporary pop (internet) culture just to give a more general picture of the limit and to ease us into Kant in Part 2.
The word “limit” comes from the Latin word, “limes”. This pertains to borders, boundaries, and pathways between plots of land, lines between different areas. It is associated with the lines demarcating the inside and outside of the Roman Empire, for example. The word is comprised of another Latin word which lay at its root, namely, “limen” and this means “threshold”. It also somewhat recalls our modern English word “limb” although this has a different etymology deriving from the old English, “limu”, but we can see a certain connection here if we construe a limb as an appendage that marks the extreme outermost edge of the body.
Now (and we’re going to linger with this) the word limen is where we get our English word “liminal”. And the word liminal also refers to the intermediary threshold between territories or spaces. We might also hear the echo of the sublimis or subliminal here and its derivative, “sublime”, which we’ll be looking at later in this series in more detail. The sub-liminal is that which lay under the liminal, that which lay underneath the limen, the threshold. And yet weirdly, this other word so tied up with it, sublime, transgresses this meaning to become the opposite, namely, not that which stays under or within the limit, but that which goes above and beyond it, that which is elevated above the limit; an interesting switch to keep in mind.
Another term related to this is the ancient Greek πεῖραρ (peirar) which some will already recognize from the more familiar philosophical ἄπειρον (apeiron), which means unlimited or boundless, infinite. Peirar refers to the crossing of rivers as well as the finite or that which is bounded, as in peras: goal and extremity, perhaps closer to what we mean when we say telos; that something has a telos means it has a peras, a defined, de-limited, finite end toward which it unfolds.
But let’s turn back to the liminal for a second since I think we can pull a few things out that will help set us up.
I’m going to draw on an example from popular internet culture which might seem a bit cute, but I think it helps to prepare us for engaging in a deeper interrogation of the limit and its relevance; it helps to bring it closer to us, since it’d be easy for us to ask, what’s the point in writing such a series on the limit? Hopefully this example will help to open onto the viewpoint that thinking the limit isn’t only a niche, technical pursuit but also bleeds over into the wider cultural imaginary.
So, my main example is of course liminal spaces. The liminal retains its Latin meaning here: at the threshold, on the border, the frontier etc. But when you see the type of imagery that people provide to “demonstrate” a liminal space, it’s often just a picture of an empty space: a space minus us. Now, for sure these are always eerie images, they give a sense of the uncanny, but I’m not sure they are really indicative of the profound philosophical stakes that we can draw from liminal spaces. The reason for this is that because the liminal refers to the limit—as in, the boundaries, the borders and frontiers which de-limit what something is—a liminal space would be a challenge laid down to what it means to be a space at all. That is, the liminal expresses a challenge to that which is de-limited, and in this case what is de-limited is space, such that a liminal space would be a space in which space itself is faced off against or confronts its own limit.
So what would this type of space look like? Perhaps it couldn’t ever really look like anything, and it certainly wouldn’t be merely a space void of people since this is still a traditional space that exists in some way and is delimited as a space. Instead, understood as a challenge to what space is, I think a truly liminal space would be comprised of a question of orientation, the question of “where?”. So this perhaps wouldn’t look like anything but would rather describe the point at which one becomes disoriented as to where one is, or where a space is.
In this regard, and forgive me for drawing on another pop internet culture example, a better example of a liminal space would be the idea of the “backrooms”. For those who haven’t heard of this, it’s basically this idea that one could clip out of reality like in a video game and end up in some non-place called the backrooms which do not really exist anywhere. The backrooms are void, not only of people, but of any sense of place: they’re void of orientation. It isn’t only an isolated image of an empty space but the positing of a thought. And so for this reason, I think the backrooms represent a profound questioning of the space we find ourselves in, the idea of the backrooms forces us to confront or to challenge what it means to be in a space in the first place since they are seemingly nowhere. In other words, they confront us with the question, “where?”: where are we?…where is this space? And the reply is, “I don’t know”. At that point we are on the limit of space itself, not really “in” a space at all but on the border of a space, on the frontier of what space means.
This also prompts us to draw on another term related to limit which is “limbo”. To be in limbo originally meant to be at the threshold of hell. As Heidegger says in his lectures On the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, to be held out in limbo is to be on the edge, to be at the threshold of where we are. Limbo is like a liminal space in this connection because it challenges the meaning of orientation. Instead of being a mere depiction of a space, it posits the question of the limit: to be in limbo is to be in a situation where one is confronted with the question of “where?” Thus it’s for good reason that limbo is often associated with ghosts and floating in the popular (Christian) imaginary.
Now, we find this sense of the liminal expressed in a variety of mediums, not only images on the internet. We find it in music, film, writing etc. In this connection, I’ll give two other, more concrete examples; one from music and one from literature.
In music, I think the liminal is expressed well by the English duo Autechre. Hopefully some of you have heard of them if not listened to them. For those who haven’t, they make electronic music that diverges from the grid of syncopated drum beats, they create programs that are generative of extremely complex patterns of sound. That’s the best I think I could do to describe Autechre without actually playing a piece of their music. But for our purposes they demonstrate a challenge to what music is by pushing it up against its own limit. For this reason, often when I show Autechre to people the immediate response is that this isn’t music. My thought on this is that this is precisely what makes it interesting in terms of the liminal. And so when the statement is made about them not really being music, I think they’ve been successful, their music is liminal in the sense that it lays down a challenge to what the discipline of music is.
But because the medium is different from the image, this challenge is of an altogether different species than that of liminal spaces. I think what’s caught up in this is a challenge to time, to how time is marked by the duration of sound and how this guides us in organizing time. Autechre work at the border of this marking of time with sound, showing how time sometimes stops or sometimes speeds up or at other points changes entirely or turns inside out or goes backwards. They mark time with sounds in a way that challenges how we organize time; their music challenges the phenomenological limits of how we experience time. Maybe we will one day describe Autechre’s music as a sort of liminal time.
The other example I want to give is from literature: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. It’s a “story”—and we have to put this word in quotation marks which already indicates the limit confronted in this book—about a house that measures more on the inside than the outside. So there’s a thematic challenge to space, to what space is and how interior spaces work, indeed, it is a deconstruction of what “house” means. But on top of this it isn’t just a straight story. It’s a text with multiple typographically interesting elements: colored text, different fonts depending on who’s talking, weird footnotes that lead nowhere, commentaries on commentaries, pictures, other documents spliced into the text, backwards text, puzzles: it’s a book that contains a multiplicity of other books. So not only do we have a confrontation with the limit at the level of the content, the story, the challenge to what interior space is in terms of measure, but also we have a confrontation with the limit of what a book can be. Is it a novel? I’m not sure we can answer that without giving a whole new account of what this word “novel” means and what a book is in the first place. So, again, we might one day describe this text as a liminal writing or liminal literature.
Now, I don’t bring these examples up just for the sake of it. I actually think they help us unlock an encounter with the limit and prepare us for how this encounter is condensed to a fine point in continental philosophy. These are just examples, but continental philosophy (or as I hope we’ll be able to see by the end of this series) is nothing other than the challenge to the limit per se. This idea of challenging the limit, of a practice like music or literature questioning what their own disciplines are, this idea permeates in continental philosophy at a level that causes one to tremble. Continental philosophy contains a key question and is in some respects nothing other than a series of attempts to pose (and sometimes even to answer) this single question: where is the limit of philosophy?
So just as Autechre’s music may be called a liminal time and House of Leaves may be called a liminal literature, continental philosophy could equally be called a liminal thinking. It pushes up to and challenges the limit of what it means to think philosophically, precisely through the medium of thinking. Indeed, the liminal space of philosophy—the limit of philosophy posed as a question—is continental philosophy.
In the next installment we’ll be moving onto Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and specifically the section, “On Determining the Boundaries of Pure Reason” where we shall have our first encounter with the limit in its philosophical garb.