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.
