Frontiers of Thought Out of the Margins

Abstract

This essay discusses the apparent inconsistencies in the cultural anthropologists’ understanding of the two categories, “marginality” and “liminality,” which far from being antithetical to each other always entail each other. More precisely, I argue that the notion of marginality and liminality, which can be summed up as a perspective on the world, allows and develops a new way of thinking about education, politics, literature and, above all, the institutions of learning such as the modern university. Literary and philosophical texts, from Plato to Boccaccio, from Bacon to Vico, which take us to the “frontiers of thought,” to the most profoundly critical and creative questioning of our knowledge and values, propose a paradigm of marginality and liminality as the horizon within which our knowledge can be steadily reconfigured, rethought, and thus opened up to the future.

Notes

1. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, A World at Play: A Study of Boccaccio's ‘Decameron’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

2. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

3. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

4. These doubts about cultural elites stand at the center of the research by Serge Lang. Cf. the recent volume, Scienza e democrazia, ed. Marco Mamone Capria (Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici) (Naples: Liguori, 2003).

5. Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's ‘Zarathustra’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), x.

6. For a discussion of this point, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).