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?

Keywords:

• Plato
• Irigaray
• space
• liminality
• between
• dualisms
• love
• Diotima

Notes

1 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philox (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 6.

2 Mariana Ortega, “Exiled Space, In-Between Space: Existential Spatiality in Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas Series,” Philosophy & Geography, 7, no. 2 (2004): 27.

3 Plato’s Republic famously opens with Socrates’ descent from Athens to the port in Piraeus (see Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom [New York: Basic Books, 1991], 327a). The Symposium instead begins with a movement of ascent, as they are walking “up” to Athens from the port. If the movement of descent at the opening of the Republic foreshadowed Socrates’ emphasis on the need, on the part of enlightened rulers, to descend back down into the famous cave to liberate and enlighten their fellow men, here the emphasis on ascent foreshadows the culminating speech of the dialogue, namely Socrates’ speech, where Diotima elaborates the ladder of love as precisely the ascent from bodily beauty to beauty itself, or the idea of beauty. In both cases, philosophical thought is located in motion, between here and there, on the path (ascending or descending) from one place to another. A lot could also be said, of course, about the fact the both dialogues are located in relation to a harbor – a place that more than most signifies liminality and boundary-crossing, both between the familiar and the foreign, and between the two elements land and water. It is worth noting that water has a unique capacity to provide a path between lands, connecting continents, but also keeping them apart.

4 Plato, “Symposium,” in Plato’s Erotic Dialogues: The Symposium and the Phaedrus, trans. William S. Cobb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 176e.

5 Ibid., 201d.

6 For an extended discussion of the ways in which the French salons transformed the very notion of the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Note, however, that feminist and decolonial scholars have criticized this book for not grappling enough with the ways in which the salons were reserved primarily for educated people from the upper classes.

7 For an interesting discussion of the queerness of salon culture, and especially the literary salon of Natalie Barney at 20 rue Jacob, see Katarina Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl, 2007).

8 Plato, “Symposium,” 202e.

9 Ibid., 203d.

10 Ibid., 204b.

11 Plato, “Apology,” in Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 20d–23b.

12 Drew A. Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 47.

13 Plato, “Symposium,” 175a.

14 Luce Irigaray, “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, ‘Diotima’s Speech’” [1984], in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 20.

15 Rachel Jones, Luce Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (London: Polity, 2011), 89.

16 Plato, “Symposium,” 206b.

17 “My art of midwifery is in general like theirs [real midwives]; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth”; Plato, “Theaetetus,” in Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 150b.

18 Luce Irigaray, “Sorcerer Love,” 27.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 33.

21 Irigaray, “Sorcerer Love,” 27 (original emphasis). And keep in mind, here, that it is not even Socrates speaking, but Apollodorus, who recounts the story as it was told to him by Aristodemus. And ultimately, of course, only Plato is speaking.

22 Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 121, 139 (emphasis added).

23 Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London: Continuum, 2002), 34–44.

24 Peg Rawes, Irigaray for Architects (London: Routledge, 2007), 10.

25 Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 70.

26 Rawes, Irigaray for Architects, 37.

27 A longer version of this paper would have to grapple with the ways in which Irigaray’s own philosophy has limitations in terms of its capacity to think the in-between. The most obvious of these involves a robust thinking of non-binary gender identity, as well as a nuanced reflection on mixed-race-identity – neither of which Irigaray ultimately gives us. For an example of how to broach these issues with reference to Irigaray’s body of work, see Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, In-Between-Bodies: Sexual Difference, Race, and Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).