ABSTRACT
The threshold, which Roberto Marchesini contrasts to walls that block passage, facilitates voyage and exchange. Nevertheless, it is not the means for direct, untrammeled movement but for a dialogue that enjoins self-questioning and active respect for the other as cardinal virtues. Marchesini's concept of the threshold resonates with the central place it has in Giorgio Agamben's writings and with the way that it is taken up in Jacques Derrida's thought, but Marchesini theorizes it much more specifically in terms of nonhuman animals. Every technology liberates humans from particular conditioning, but in parallel defines and necessitates increasingly sophisticated thresholds of attention. For this reason, technological humans don't have to be more moral than Paleolithic humans, but they have to be more attentive to these thresholds if they don't want to extinguish themselves, and they must therefore have a more complex and more efficient behavioral system for the braking of aggression.
