Wo ist die Grenze? Begriffs- und problemgeschichtliche kritik

Abstract

Current discussions about borders often do not take into account what Hegel already developed as a totalizing dialectics of the boundary: Concepts as de-markations include not only the delimited, the ‘de-fin-ed’, but also the externally marginalized. They constitute in themselves a narrative sovereignty about the Own, the Other, as well as about the very distinction between them. Any discourses on boundaries or limits, any conceptual definitions have always ‘othered’ something from themselves and absorbed this in themselves. So whoever is asking about the ‘Where’ of the boundary has already established it. In this paper, the dialectics of the boundary is elicited from the history of concepts and problems. Then, the ‘modern’ solution of the boundary is discussed using Hegel as an example. ‘Postmodern’ discourses of liminality as in Bhabha, however, occasionally tend to level out this dialectics, whereas a phenomenological understanding of the boundary as threshold (“Schwelle”) by Waldenfels can reflect the dialectics successfully.