ABSTRACT
YOu are on a threshold. The threshold of entering a book. And you have already crossed many before you arrived here; you have already dealt with many obstacles. It is impossible to say how many thresholds a book has: physical, psychological, economical, aesthetic, ethical, political, disciplinary, social, intellectual, cultural, temporal, and spatial ones (and all these on the levels of production, distribution, and reception) – the more you consider thresholds, the more of them you are aware of. Which is exactly one of the motivations for writing this book: to (re)think thresholds, to (re)think borders and limits, to (re)think the passage from one to the other, to pass through the passage, to stand still in and dwell upon the space between one and the other, between inside and outside, between here and there.1 Because that is where a threshold can be located – located in a non-place, an a-topos, a space between, borderline and middle simultaneously.2 A threshold – like a prelude – is a para-site: an undecided zone between inside and outside, neither here nor there, and, simultaneously, both here and there, both in and out. Inside and outside join and separate to form an undecidable play of perpetual displacement. The undecidability of the threshold’s identity eradicates any thinking in clear oppositions, any binary ordering. A threshold joins by separating and separates by joining.3 Furthermore, thinking thresholds means to abandon the idea that this ‘third term’ can ever be sublated by a dialectical method. The space between, the threshold, is the leaving of a remainder that cannot be thought within the framework of Western logocentrism, based on a dualistic logic; or, to state it more firmly, it is exactly what escapes this logocentric order. The book you are about to enter starts from the question: what does the preceding mean for our relation with music and spirituality.
