THRESHOLDS, SOGLITUDES

Special issue edited by

Tatjana Barazon, Docteur en Philosophie de Paris IV-Sorbonne

THRESHOLDS, SOGLITUDES

This is an invitation to meditate on thresholds, the space where we enter a house and where we leave it, it is where we don’t dwell. The threshold designates the passing from one state to another, from the inside to the outside, or the point where things start to become different. A threshold is a step to overcome, a passage in itself, a moment of opening significant in anthropology of rituals, a hyphen that separates and unites at the same time. Nevertheless, in philosophy, the threshold also expresses the human condition itself, a state that we never leave, a state we should not even try to overcome because it concentrates our whole being. The threshold would then be a “zone” as Walter Benjamin calls it, a space where man evolves, always “in between”. On the threshold of the other, as in Martin Buber’s thought, or always on the verge of becoming as Henri Bergson describes “the creation of the self by the self”, the state of the human condition is on the threshold of being. The Hegelian becoming also is a threshold, the overcoming of the self in a dynamic momentum.

In order to introduce the threshold as a technical term in philosophical vocabulary, we suggest the theme of “soglitude”, taking its etymology from the Italian word soglia for threshold and the consonance of the solitary state of the human condition, a loneliness however that always leads to another world, another being, or matter, or even colour. Forever on the threshold of the other, the other person he encounters or the other world he discovers, man is always in between things, interacting and creating a symbiosis with the world in which he evolves. The state on the threshold, the “soglitude”, could well be the deep tonality of the human condition itself. Not a temporary state but rather the expression of the passing and becoming all in one, the movement and the stillness, the link between time passing and the moment that escapes us.

More than a call for papers, this is a call for meditations. From all corners – philosophy, social sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine, poetry, literature or other – we invite you to give your liminary (or “soglitary”) point of view.

Abstracts shall reach us by December 15th 2008 and be approximately 500 words long. Authors will be notified by January 15th. We expect your papers that will not exceed 10 000 words by March 30th 2009. The articles will be submitted to a reading panel. We accept submissions in French or English.

Please send your submission to the following address: soglitudes@gmail.com or c.memorielles@celat.ulaval.ca

For further information, please visit the Web site: http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm