Liminal Places and Non-Places

The paper intends to analyse the relationship between place and border starting from the meaning of the border as limen (threshold, step through which one enters a domain) and as limes (line that circumscribes and de-limits a territory). If the first meaning indicates the possible openness to the relationship with the elsewhere and the outside, the second, on the other hand, refers to that which allows the subsistence (and essence) of a territory or an entity to be contained and de-limited, protecting it from the danger of the unlimited (the Greek apéiron). In this twofold sense, the border becomes the very essence of the place understood as the sphere of the human ethos, i.e. of a sojourn in which the experience of one's own border—and of one’s own end—is always also the experience of contact and hospitality with the other from oneself. Starting from this connection, an attempt will therefore be made to contrast the liminal places and their landscapes, in which—according to Heidegger’s interpretation of dwelling—it is possible for humans to dwell on Earth as mortals, with the “non-places” typical of the homogenous and uniform space of globalisation, with reference to Marc Augé's anthropological analyses.