![]() ![]() The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. Liminality, transitions and the politics therein Russia's idiosyncratic policies of reckoning with the violent legacies of its predecessor, the USSR, and its ongoing engagement in the war in Ukraine serve as illustrations of both lines of inquiry pursued here. ![]() Accordingly, it applies the optic of liminality in order to reorient the thinking of politics in the moment of transition via two examples, that is, transitional justice and the transformation of contemporary warfare. This chapter critiques the narrow transition paradigm in the study of international politics. Comparative Politics and International Relations (IR) tend to focus on states in transit, generally understanding politics through an institutionalist lens and thus lacking the depth of the internal meanings of transition as experienced by the communities and people in question. What would it mean to think of political transitions through the concept of liminality? Liminality as advanced in cultural anthropology refers to the middle stage and consequent positioning of subjects in transition between socially established categories. The conclusion is that a) the world and people in general, are in a constant process of passage, of change, b) that liminality constitutes an important factor of individual and social development, c) and that society is marked by liminality. As illustration of liminal transition, there is presented the current mass media case in which there is mobilized the idea of persuading the consumers of media messages to adopt a behavior which represents a passage from lack of involvement to social, economic and political involvement/engagement. b) Afterwards, there is carried out a logical-semantic reconstruction of the concept and there is concluded that the practical articulations of liminality consist in going over three stages of the process of liminality: the ambiguous state, the adaptation to new norms, rules and values and the pre-integration. ![]() Subsequently, Victor Turner subsumes the meanings of the spiritual event of passage to a single-word concept " liminality " and talks about " liminoid " events. ![]() This existential event is theoretically approached by Arnold Van Gennep through the syntagm " rites of passage ". The semantic nucleus of the concept is represented by the action of spiritual configuration of events by which individuals are introduced in a transition state from separation to incorporation. a) There is first achieved a historical reconstruction of the concept. The method used in the study is meta-analytic. This study aims to clarify the meanings and the semantic articulations of the concept of liminality. Keywords: Experience, generational analysis, history of thought, imitation, liminality, Kant, Plato, schismogenesis, transition, transformation. It is argued that the neglect of liminality in philosophy and social theory but also in social and political life is a serious hinder to a fuller grasp of some of the most problem- atic aspects of modernity. Liminality helps to study events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institu- tions and structures. The usefulness of the concept of liminality is then demonstrated via a diver- sity of examples, including the analysis of intellectual “generations”. In order to point to the dynamics of liminal moments, the article introduces three complementary terms, namely “imitation”, “trickster” and “schismogenesis”. Abstract This article situates the concept of liminality within anthropology, philosophy and sociology, and underlines the connections across the disciplines by showing how the role of experience is crucial to a full understanding of the term, however applied. ![]()
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