Grenzwertig im Dazwischen. Liminalität als DenkRaum

This article presents and discusses the concept of “liminality”, which was first formulated by the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. The “liminal” is a spatial figure of thought that explores in-between (social) spaces or states of mind, such as ritual thresholds and other places of transit, rites of passage, etc. It is connected to basic anthropological concepts such as the limen (borders, boundaries and limits demarcating the territoriality of human life), or transgression, and it is also related to Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space”. The liminal practices a (utopian?) art of becoming that claims to bypass or bridge dichotomies; on the other hand, it can also mean to be caught between cultural, social, and/or discursive frontlines in a rather catastrophic way (such as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis). The article, which is a first step into a bigger project, sketches some of these facets of “liminality” before proposing and investigating potential applications in the fields of literary and cultural studies: e.g. when it comes to the ghost apparitions and vampire figures of the literary fantastic, or to Area Studies (the Balkans and Central Europe as liminal spaces of culture/s and politics).