Things at the Edge of the World

Abstract

This chapter describes things at the edge of the world as sites at which events of reversal and transformation take place. It looks at three examples of reversals: people's experience of the sun; the nonhuman animal; and that of the other human, which is divided into three—the sexual other, the stranger, and the enemy. In each case, a thing that begins as an object of experience becomes the site of an event of reversal and transformation in which not only the subject is implicated in an unexpected way but the world, or a part of it, is poised for restructuration and for the proliferation of new chains of possibility. The chapter then suggests that the entire domain marked by these events of reversal and transformation is generated by the combined operation of three different phenomena. These include (1) the primordial constitution of selfhood, (2) variable modes of identification with that self, and (3) the projection of modes of otherness consistent with one's manner of self-relatedness.