Limit and Exuberance

Chapter 1

(Draft 31/07/22)

Eugenio Trías’ metaphysical project activates a lost Kantian path that conceives the limit in
terms of exuberance. This is the vector of thought along which the most general project of
Trias is set in motion here, and, thus, the argumentative prism through which scrutinize and
diffract Trías’ key philosophical sentence: “being of limit that recreates”. With this
expression, Trías enlivens an idea that has rarely—if ever—been the cornerstone of modern
and postmodern continental philosophy nor the leitmotif of current realisms and
materialisms: the idea of limit.

Today’s philosophical indifference regarding the notion of limit might seem rather surprising,
for the question of thinking the in-itself—locus and site par excellence of today’s continental
debates—seems to be, above all, a question of limits: isn’t the epistemological finitude of
critical philosophy reflective of the limits of human knowledge? Isn’t Kant arguing that we
know there is an in-itself, but that limits with respect to our cognitive capacities lie in the way
it is reconstituted through our intuitions and categories? And isn’t today’s realist quest for
exploring or even cultivating the in-itself a quest for thinking beyond the limits of thought?

One could nevertheless do the reverse reasoning: why focusing on the notion of limit in a
context aiming precisely for overcoming and sorpasso? Wouldn’t the activation of a lost
Kantian path surreptitiously imply the reactivation—or even the reinforcement—of the limit’s
restrictive vocation, and thus the possible reinvigoration of anthropocentric habits of thought?
Why then attend to the notion of limit today? And why through Eugenio Trías? How does his
philosophical project re-interrogate those questions that modernity and postmodernity had
taken as definitively settled by Kant? Could the task of addressing Trías’ limit as a form of
exuberance—a term he rarely used—offer new lines of flight regarding today’s realist and
materialist discussions around the frictions between thinking and being? In brief; why the
limit, why Trías and why now?
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 2

1.1 - Activating a Kantian Lost Path

Interrogating the Kantian limits of thought without reanimating dogmatic forms of

metaphysics is certainly one of the most prominent projects of 21st century continental
philosophy. The promise impelling many to embark on such an expedition is as alluring as it
is controversial: the exploration and cultivation of ontological lands located beyond
subjective jurisdiction, and thus allegedly capable of offering us considerations of being that
are void of external impregnation. Among the various philosophical projects reinvigorating
the possibility of thinking or even knowing the enigmatic customs of these overseas lands,
perhaps no one has received more attention in today’s continental thought as Quentin
Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism. For almost two decades now, the refreshing lexicon
and audacious arguments deployed in After Finitude have contributed to the flowering of
various philosophical agendas unfolding under a common horizon: the re-interrogation of a
whole set of questions that (post)modern continental philosophy had taken as definitively
settled by Kantian thought, particularly that of correlationism, “the idea according to which
we ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term
considered apart from the other”1.

Considering this question as a pending question has implied a radical turn with respect to the
20th century’s continental philosophies; by no means its metaphysical temperament would
have been at ease within the epistemological fold of the phenomenological or linguistic
projects singularizing their decades. However, the intrepid vocation of contemporary realisms
is perhaps not entirely incompatible with the prudence characterizing the modern tradition of
thought that also nurtures most—if not all—the last century’s proposals; after all, isn’t the
most essential trait of modern philosophy the requirement of preceding any reflection about
being with an elucidation regarding the locus and site from where this metaphysical taking
off can be considered? And, aren’t the various strands of today’s materialisms and realisms
particularly compliant in this regard, and thus, “all entirely at odds with so-called naive
realism”2?

It is in the wake of Kant that modern philosophy can be conceived as the critical philosophy
that is today in question: a philosophy embracing the notion of limit both in the ordine
cognoscendi and the ordine essendi, thus constituting it as the more or less silent basis around

1
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.
2
Bryant; Srnicek; Harman, Speculative Realism, 7.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 3

which most modern and postmodern forms of correlationism are grounded. Ascribing limits
to the ambitions of pure reason is indeed the leitmotif of Kant’s Critique. It is through them
that the adventurous and dogmatic propensions of traditional philosophy are fenced and
confined, corseted within a scaffolding praised as the cornerstone of all judicious
explorations. A task necessarily including, in Kant’s saying, the rationalist metaphysics of
cartesian lineage, whose affirmation of the substance or the monade aims at inferring absolute
knowledge without previous scrutiny of our cognitive structures. But if Kant’s critical gesture
does not fray within the absolute relativism to which skeptic empiricism leads to, this is
because the restrictive vocation of his limits’ inauguration is counterbalanced by another
inauguration: the activation of a human subject that no longer finds the order of nature, but
makes it.

The intimate connection between both inaugurations—a limit confining the world’s givenness
and a human subjectivity actively constituting this very world, perhaps conforms, from Kant
and Hegel to Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the first and fundamental question of a philosophy
that becomes rigorously methodical. As big question marks hanging from the borders of what
can be said and known, critical philosophy considers metaphysical queries in relation to an
ascending path meticulously traced according to the subject’s capacities and scopes: a route,
itinerary or trajectory carefully leading to the limits of what can be comprehended, the limits
of what we are in so far as subjects of thought and knowledge. Conceived as Kantian
synthesis of apperception, as Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of conscience and self-conscience,
as Heideggerian priority of the sum over the cogito or as locus and site where the world’s
limits coincide with the limits of what can be logically said (Wittgensten), the subject holds a
decisive role with respect to reason’s metaphysical expeditions: it marches along its
methodological hike by gradually cultivating the entire ambit of what can be proposed while
projecting or even identifying itself with that very ambit. This itinerary can perhaps be best
characterized if conceptualized as a staggered and interlaced progression that is at some point
abruptly interrupted. In Kant, for example, the transcendental subject ascends from the
transcendental aesthetics to the ambit of the pure concepts of the understanding, a solid
progression that is necessarily aborted when, in leaning into overseas lands, a fourfold of
antinomies obscures or befogs the way. Also Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit
notoriously invokes a progression—consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion
and absolute knowledge, whose arrival at the borderline where all finitude dissolves provides
in this case carte blanche to further metaphysical expeditions. Even Heidegger draws upon
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 4

this ascendent logic, orchestrating a progressive path where Dasein moves from its modes at
hand to the limit where all possible projection and comprehension cesses, the limit of a world
that becomes “my world”. Or Wittgenstein, who step by step deepen in the conditions of
possibility that, always from within the limits of language, circumscribe the logical space
from where one can say sensical propositions and beyond which only silence must reign.

What can I know? What can I project and comprehend? What can I propositionally say?
Beyond its multiple variations, the question is always the same: “What can I attend to from
my finitude?” It is a question about the power of cognition. But a cognition always rooted
here, always anchored in the locus and site that I am. How far does this power go? Where lies
its limit? Is it possible, under conditions that must be scrupulously determined, to overcome
and traverse this confine? Can we cross the borders circumscribing what can be
phenomenologically known, existentially comprehended or propositionally said? Already
operative in Kant but significantly accentuated in the last century, the treatment of these
questions by most of Western philosophy seems to be traversed by a tragic temperament:
either the increasing rigor and severity of the various proposed pathos requires, at some point,
to stop and interrupt any cognitive expedition—and thus fetichize an abscence that can never
be fulfilled (late modernity), or the very idea of a pathos is entirely canceled out, falling
instead in the cynical playfulness propelling the fragment, the collage or the pastiche—and
thus giving up the task of significantly attending any philosophical demand even before
lifting sails (post modernity).

This tragic character is in fact the tragic character of Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of
Correlationism. With this term Meillassoux notoriously disqualifies the claim that “it is
possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another”3.
This impossibility is indeed what propels late modernity’s insistence on a being that is
absence, but also what nurtures post modernity’s ironic contempt for any method claiming
powers of legitimation. In its Kantian roots, correlationism might perhaps be best defined as a
question of limits; by proscribing any knowledge of the thing-in-itself (weak model) or by
claiming also that it is illegitimate to even think it (strong model), correlationism “confines
itself to thinking the limits of thought, these functioning for language like a frontier only one
side of which can be grasped”4. The tragic temper of this confinement seems to emerge thus
as the inevitable consequence of Kant’s critical project.

3
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.
4
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 41, (my emphasis).
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 5

Fatigued by a philosophy that is critical at the price of being in perpetual crisis, the
ontological turn of the last decades has cultivated a “passion for the real” that is
pronouncedly indifferent to the linguistic or existential correlations animating most of last
century’s philosophy. Perhaps the significant differences mediating between the multiple
proposals of today’s realisms can be read as variations of a common musical theme: the
radical suspension of Kant’s twofold inaugural gesture, that is, the mise en question of a limit
that confines and restricts our thinking in light of a human subjectivity that is granted with an
almost indisputable privilege in the making of the world. Circumventing the
tragic—tragicomic?—valences of postmodernity would thus not merely imply the
decentralization of human subjectivity; it would also require to think of this very
decentralization in connection to the cancellation, or at least, the reformulation, of the
restrictive vocation characterizing the Kantian limits of thought.

And this is what seems to be at work, for example, in the Spinozist and vitalist projects
dissolving these very limits through a “vibrant matter” of human and non-human assemblages
(Bennett); or through a “chaotic real” that is previous and independent of how it is organized
by human categories and bodily habits (Grosz); or through a “geology of natural history” that
is always the ground and condition of human subjectivity rather than merely the object of
human reflection (Grant); or through a “malleable real” whose formation and deformation of
neuronal connections refuse to envisage the least separation between brain and thought
(Malabou). But dissolving the Kantian limits of thought is not the only strategy aiming today
at bypassing the anthropocentric vocation of critical philosophy. An almost opposite gesture
is also at work: the multiplication of these very limits, the extension of our human finitude to
non-human beings and fleshes. For example, in the various philosophies invoking the notion
of “object”, discrete and eclectic compounds of human and non-human affiliation, individual
entities that withdraw from all access yet remain somehow manifest (Harman). But Kant’s
limits are also today being meticulously crossed, that is, identified and scrutinized in order to
be carefully traversed. For instance by invoking the solar extinction inferred by a scientific
naturalism whose nihilism offers the passkeys of the in-itself (Brassier); or by conjuring up a
speculative materialism according to which mathematics provides us with the primary
qualities of being, that is, with an absolute form of knowledge that interrupts the
correlationist circle (Meillassoux).

Dissolving, multiplying, crossing; today’s philosophical expeditions towards

non-anthropocentric forms of subjectivity seem to be conceived and deployed in connection
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 6

with how—and how much—the limits with which Kant sealed the thing-it-itself can be
altered and manipulated. But, isn’t the tragic temperament characterizing late and post
modernity still at work in these endeavors? Does the multiplication of limits within
non-human lands offer an alternative with respect to a critical philosophy whose crisis
springs precisely from its insistence on what is absent? Is the humanless in-itself that is
allegedly reached by the philosophical instrumentalizations of scientific and mathematical
practices filling with hope and fertility the empty lands with which critical philosophy
systematically culminates its itineraries? Does the dissolution of limits undertaken by today’s
vitalisms and monisms adequately accommodate human and non-human singularities? And,
perhaps more importantly, is it possible to envisage in Kant’s confining maneuver the
possibility—or at least the horizon—of a limit whose mechanics are more vivid and
vivacious, more buoyant, more dynamic? Can we imagine and cultivate notions of the limit
that are not based on restriction and constraint, notions that are more actively, more
affirmatively and even more exuberantly at work regarding today’s quest for overcoming the
tragic temper of modernity and postmodernity’s interlacement between epistemological limits
and human subjectivity?

It is certainly surprising that, despite being somehow present or at least thematized in most
philosophies after Kant—including of course today’s realisms and materialisms, the limit
itself has rarely been conjured up as cornerstone and leitmotif, or as one of those conceptual
suns around which a philosophical proposal usually dances and circulates. Its role and
conceptualization tends instead to be rather peripheral, marginal. It is at best traced and
reported as in passing, as if its presence was accidental or expendable. And perhaps what
nurtures this apathy towards the limit is the prevalence of an attitude that treats the latter
primarily as an epistemic device of restriction or negation: the idea of the limit might
certainly be invoked as a logical, epistemological and even linguistico-logical instrument of
confinement, as the red light of thinking or knowing, but very rarely this idea gains
affirmative traction from ontological lands. This is indeed rather surprising; if the gesture of
Kant is, above all, a gesture of limits that turns upside down the history of thought by
departing from the metaphysical realisms driving most—if not all—philosophy before him, it
would seem reasonable to assume that one of the crucial paths emerging from Kant’s
radiation field would circulate and cultivate—rather than circumnavigate—that very novum,
the very notion of limit itself.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 7

Eugenio Trías’ most general project consists in activating this lost path. Trías’ ontology is
decisively Kantian. But not perhaps in the way in which Kant would have wished. Trías
conjures up—with decisive nuances—Kant’s notorious distinction between the in-itself and
the for-us, but rather than pitching camp in any of both instances, his philosophy flourishes
from the limit mediating between them. It is a philosophy of the limit, or, as Trías insists, of
the “being of limit that recreates”.5 Being, limit, recreation. Three terms signaling the three
turns of the reflexive spiral through which Trías’ proposal takes its most general form: the
ontological turn, the topological turn, and the philosophical turn. Three dimensions
accommodating within this philosophy of the limit three interlaced conceptual pairs:
being/nothingness, sameness/alterity, unity/multiplicity. This triplicity of dualisms might
certainly sound deceiving at first sight: shouldn’t the ternary vocation of a limit consist
precisely in a radical departure from any binarism or dialectical oscillation? How are we to
conceive these tensions—and the notion of tension itself, in light of a philosophy claiming to
be a philosophy of the limit? What matters in those pairs is the punctuation mark, the oblique
slanting line, the slash. What matters is to know in all its radicality what that mysterious sign
of opposition and concordance offers and accommodates with respect to the terms that it
(dis)joins. “The philosophy of the limit”, tells us Trias, “is, in this sense, the radical denial to
all binarism (or to all dualist philosophy)”6. Difference frequently seems to be dualist, but it is
often its most diabolical adversary, its single profound adversary. This is why we must take
seriously the decisively anti-dualist character of Trías’ philosophy of the limit. Yet, there is
no wish for demolition or even for deconstruction in this proposal. What is set in motion is a
constructive recreation; the reformulation of classic and modern philosophical traditions by
and from displacing their cornerstone, by recreating them in light of an idea that is always
present in them but always asided: the limit.

This displacement, nevertheless, does not simply entail a cartographic or locational shift of
the notion of limit within a given landscape of positions, as for example in today’s realisms
and materialisms; Trías does not aim at dissolving, multiplying or crossing the limit, but at
reengineering the very mechanics of the limit. An endeavor to which Trias embarks from
radically affirmative coordinates, or, as I would like to argue, from exuberant coordinates.
And it is precisely in this conceptual move where lies the most subtle and dramatic point of

5
The original Spanish is “Ser del límite que se recrea”.
6
“Mi filosofía del límite es, en este sentido, el desmentido radical a todo “binarismo” (o a toda filosofía
“dualista”)”
Trías, La Razón Fronteriza, Kindle Edition
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 8

encounter with Kant’s metaphysical project. Thinking of Trías proposal as the activation of a
lost Kantian path does not only respond to the fact that his philosophy finds a propelling
motor—certainly not the only one and by no means a destination—in the passionate
cultivation of a gesture that is thoroughly Kantian: the inscription of limits between
incommensurable dimensions. There is another reason, a reason that is, in fact, much more
subtle, much more silent. In a rudimentary and certainly incomplete manner, almost as a
specter or as a strange phantasmagoric breeze, some of the traits characterizing the
affirmative and spacious mechanics of the Trías’ limit can be seen slipping through the folds
of Kantian architecture.

1.2 - Transcendental Janus

Setting oneself the task of disclosing affirmative or spacious dimensions in Kant’s notions of
limit might certainly seem the result of a hasty thought. Isn’t the Kantian gesture precisely
looking for retention and constraint, for contention? Isn’t Kant’s inscription of limits within
the activity of pure reason aiming at framing or domesticating the latter’s faustic desire for
progress and enlargement? Before distilling the connection between Kant’s and Trías’
conceptualizations of the notion of limit—and the possibility of a form of exuberance
associated with the latter, let us listen and attend to the two meanings that common language
spontaneously accommodates with respect to the limit: “Limit (1) always means something
that restraints us, or that holds a limiting character. [...] But limit (2) means something that, in
a certain manner, incites and excites our coping skills, or that tests our power and potential, or
that traces a sort of horizon [...] in reference to which we can expose (and therefore,
experiment) our freedom, or the free use of our capacity to choose.”7 Limit thus, understood
as circumscription and enclosure, but also as the evanescent line of a horizon or an ideal
asymptote. Two models that Trías’ philosophy assumes and incorporates, but that by no
means suffice to accommodate the specifical turn with which his proposal attends to the
notion of limit. Two models that, nevertheless, find accommodation in Kant’s differentiation
between Grenze and Schranke. Despite this technical distinction preludes and presages Trías’
turn, one might be tempted to consider it as holding peripheral relevance in Kant’s

7
“Límite (1) significa siempre algo que nos restringe, o que tiene carácter limitante. [...] Pero límite (2)
significa también algo que, en cierto modo nos incita y excita en nuestra capacidad de superación, o que pone a
prueba nuestro poder y potencia, o que traza una suerte de horizonte [...] en referencia al cual podemos
exponer (y experimentar, por lo tanto) nuestra libertad, o el libre uso de nuestra capacidad de elegir.”
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 9

architecture; it is not until the friendly lines of the Prolegomena—rather than the previous
and more overarching Critique—, that the mechanics propelling both terms are unveiled8:
while Grenzen “always presuppose a space that is found outside a certain fixed location, and
that encloses that location”9, Schranken “are mere negations that affect a magnitude insofar as
it does not possess absolute completeness”10.

Contrary to what the Critique’s silence in this regard might suggest, the Prolegomena’s
Grenze/Schranke’s distinction is not a vain technical pirouette. By equipping their mechanics
with cognitive dimensions, Kant’s Prolegomena provides both terms with a metaphysical
relevance that was already at work in Kant’s Critique, although their distinction was not
explicitly stated there. In its active involvement of a heterogeneous outside, the notion of
Grenze concerns the speculative reason and it is thus positively fixed in between meta and
physis; it is equivalent to what Trías refers as the first cotidian understanding of the limit, a
limit that determines and circumscribes an enclosure subsisting in virtue of this restrictive
operation. Instead, in its attention to an homogeneous magnitude, the notion of Schranke
concerns sensibility and the understanding under its empirical use, sliding thus only through
physis, whose extension it negates; it responds to what Trías refers as the second popular
understanding of the limit, a limit that invokes a horizon or evanescent line that meekly
recedes according to the power or potential of what it contains.

Cognitive sciences embody this limit’s approach. In their instrumentalization of both

sensibility and understanding, “the expansion of insight in mathematics, and the possibility of
ever new inventions, goes to infinity; so too does the discovery of new properties in nature
(new forces and laws) through continued experience and the unification of that experience by
reason”11. Kant associates the cognitive development of mathematics and natural sciences
with pure incrementality: both disciplines are considered as homogeneous fields of
knowledge that are void of an outside. Their modus operandi is purely additive: they aim at
extending known experience into an area not previously experienced so as to arrive at a
conjectural knowledge of something unknown, yet open to empirical confirmation.
Consequently, since nothing lies beyond them, their limitation takes the form of mere
negation, a barrier, a force of pure restriction that Kant defines with the term Schranke; in

8
In fact, Kant had long held this distinction, since it appears in the earliest extant set of metaphysics lecture
transcripts, Herder’s notes from 1762-4 (28:33-4).
9
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:352.
10
Ibid.
11
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:352.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 10

their incremental format, both fields of knowledge remain always incomplete, since, rather
than being circumscribed by a heterogeneous outside erecting positive and necessary borders,
they are limited by a negative power that designates only the furthest point that a cognitive
domain has reached so far, the current—and thus contingent—edge of its extension. The
notion of Schranke invokes thus the figure of a sliding mark measuring a variable magnitude,
a temporary obstacle that one can indefinitely push further away if the winds are favorable.
No behind, no positive resistance. Negation, thus, but also provisionality, displacement; the
well known destiny of a receding horizon, indetermination. Resistance and volatility. In brief,
limitation, Schranke.

However, Kant assures us that a “peculiar fate” draws human reason in one species of its
cognition12. A fate that is certainly diabolical, sinister; it demands reason to pose questions
which it is necessarily incapable of replying to, questions that are metaphysical in nature,
questions whose answers cannot gain traction with experience (physis), since they inquire
what is not experience (meta). Dissatisfaction and frustration, but also reiteration, insistence.
Pure reason’s “peculiar fate”. Conversely to mathematics and natural science, the
metaphysical nature of psychology, cosmology and theology—the transcendental
ideas—constitute a cognitive domain that is sieged by a positive outside: “something lies
beyond”. Thus, instead of being provisionally circumscribed by Trías’ allusion to the second
popular understanding of the limit, that is, by limitation, by Schranken, by sliding marks that
are relentlessly pushed back at every new scientific discovery, transcendental ideas are firmly
sieged by Grenzen, limits. By determining what they enclose (physis) in relation to what they
do not enclose (meta), the notion of Grenze can only be understood in light of the totality
within which we are inscribed. Limits (Grenzen) are thus not limitations (Schranken); rather
than scrollable negations of a single homogeneous domain whose extension is indefinite,
limits are positive and fixed distinctions between two entirely heterogeneous domains: the
sensible and the intelligible, the objects of empirical cognition and the things in themselves,
loyal commitment to the sensibility’s forms in light of the understanding’s concepts and the
faustic striving for absolute completeness.

However, and preparing the terrain to Trías’ approach to the limit, Kant’s Grenzen not only
acquire positive and constitutive powers with respect to Schranken, but they also become
thematic entities per se: in the same way that lines both trace the borders of a spatial surface

12
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Avii
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 11

and exist as items of the spatial realm, Grenzen both trace the confines of pure reason and
constitute objects of pure reason. In Kant’s words: “setting the boundaries [Grenzen] to the
field of experience through something that is otherwise unknown to it is indeed a cognition
that still remains for reason from this standpoint”13. Thus, in light of Kant’s notion of Grenze,
limits become entities in themselves that are cognizable—not just inferable—, but, at the
same time, their determination cannot be elucidated by attending to one single cognitive field,
since their constitutive nature consists precisely in assuming the positive yet ineffable
existence of an heterogeneous world lying behind them. This is inevitably problematic, since:

“How does reason proceed in setting boundaries for the understanding with respect to both
fields? Experience, which contains everything that belongs to the sensible world, does not set
a boundary for itself: from every conditioned it always arrives merely at another conditioned.
That which is to set its boundary [Grenze] must lie completely outside it, and this is the field
of pure intelligible beings. For us, however, as far as concerns the determination of the nature
of these intelligible beings, this is an empty space, and to that extent, if dogmatically
determined concepts are intended, we cannot go beyond the field of possible experience”.14

Setting the limits (Grenzen) of pure reason is thus problematic because, in contrast with
mathematics and the natural sciences, they cannot be set just from the empirical domain,
since there is now something positive lying outside of the realm that is being limited: the
thing-in-itself. However, there is something extraordinary with respect to Kant’s positive
notion of Grenze and that is crucial in order to understand Trías’ being of the limit: rather
than being a pure device of restriction (Schranken), its mechanics both separates and connects
the two domains that it considers. Limits thus join and disjoin, or more precisely, limits join
what they disjoin. A doubling gesture, ambivalence. Obverse and reverse; the bicephale
mechanics of the Roman god Janus. Ianus, from ianua, the Latin for door. Beginnings,
passages and transitions, gates and endings. Limits. Constraint and restriction, but also
connection, relationality. The Kantian Grenzen. In its twofold vocation, Janus doubles into
two opposing faces, two visages looking over here and further there, in and out. Obverse and
reverse; an ambivalent—amphibian?— bicephaly that by no means is mistakable with a
neutral in-betweenness; rather than indulging into an indifferent suspension between two
realms, Janus takes sides in decisively administering their pressures and frictions. In Ovid’s
words: “by grasping a staff in his right hand and a key in his left, Janus stood sentinel at

13
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:361.
14
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:360.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 12

Roman archways, and it seems reasonable to suppose that [...] the heads facing two ways are
to be explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who kept his eye on
spiritual foes both before and behind, and stood ready to bludgeon them on the spot”15. Both
before and behind, forwards and backwards. A head with two faces, unity and multiplicity,
simultaneity, selfness that is difference.

In this frontier articulation, the notion of Grenze invokes the twofold mechanics of a
transcendental Janus. As the Roman god, Kant’s limits also double in two faces that are
nothing but obverse and reverse of the same, selfness that is difference, or, to put it better,
pure selfness distinguishing itself. In their differential sameness and autoreferential
difference, limits are determined as elements of contiguity by the transcendental ideas. Since
the ideas “make the progression up to these limits [Schranken] necessary for us, and have
therefore lead us, as it were, up to the contiguity of the filled space (of experience) with
empty space (of which we can know nothing—noumena), we can also determine the
boundaries [Grenzen] of pure reason”16. It is precisely in the determination of this
“contiguity” that Kant’s Grenzen are irreducible neither to pure alterity nor to pure identity,
since it is in contiguity that something meeting something else does not entail something
knowing something else. In contrast thus with the notion of Schranke and its limitation of an
homogeneous progression, Kant’s Grenze is itself in its differentiation, that is, it is unifying
selfness of that which, in itself and by itself, by its differentiating power, separates and splits.

Something thus extraordinary occurs with respect to the mechanics animating the limits of
pure reason: Kant's Grenze certainly prevent the sensibility and the categories of the
understanding from accessing the object in itself, but, at the same time, in their Janic
vocation, in their differential sameness and autoreferential difference, the Kantian limit also
prevents the empirical realm from remaining solipsistic or enclosed in itself. Consequently,
the limits of pure reason are certainly bicephale in nature, but, as occurs with Janus, their
bicephaly is asymmetrical; rather than comfortably doubling into two identical, equivalent or
even balanced sides, the notion of Grenze inevitably needs to distinguish its obverse and
reverse in light of the heterogeneity of ambits that it (dis)joins; how otherwise could the limit
account for the abyssal distinction of the two only possible domains of reality? And, if it aims
not just at separation but also at connection and relationality, how could the limit maintain a
neutral form of in-betweenness and its associated externality with respect to both ambits?

15
Ovid, Fasti, 389.
16
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:354, (my emphasis).
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 13

Kant insists: in contrast with Schranken, the notion of Grenze not only separates, it also
connects17. And thus, reason, by expanding until its (Janic) limits without traversing them,
can positively cognize this correlation. But, isn’t this the role of transcendental ideas? Aren’t
they also providing us knowledge about the relation between intelligible beings and
experience, yet without traversing any limit? And, if this is the case, shouldn’t then they be
associated with the Kantian notion of Grenze? The limits of pure reason, are, in fact, in their
Janic vocation, locus and site of the transcendental ideas: “Natural theology is a concept of
this kind, on the boundary [Grenze] of human reason, since reason finds itself compelled to
look out toward the idea of a supreme being, not in order to determine something with respect
to this mere intelligible being, but only in order to guide its own use within the sensible world
and to make use of the relation of that world to a freestanding reason as the cause of all these
connections.”18 The determination of the limit between objects of experience and things in
themselves is made possible by—and thus it is intimately connected to— the analogical
cognition of the transcendental ideas, which do not transgress the limits of pure reason
precisely because, in their attention to relationality, they settle on the limits of pure reason19.

1.3 - Liminal Exuberance

By understanding Grenzen as entities per se that not only confine but also contain, Kant
comes near to—or at least insinuates—some aspects characterizing Trías’ formulation of the
limit. If the transcendental ideas can settle “on the limits” of pure reason is because, far from
being a restrictive device or a receding horizon, the limit is also—and specially—conceived
as an ambit in itself, or, as Trías’ affirms with respect to his own project, as a fragile an
oscillating isthmus, as the territory that the ancient Romans referred to with the term “limes”.
This is of extraordinary relevance in Trías’ proposal. And despite Kant seems to take some
steps in this direction in order to accommodate the transcendental ideas by both thickening
the limit and granting it with a Janic character, the Grenze’s alleged positive vocation is
always derivative from its restrictive power: “to deny positive benefit to this service of the
Critique would be as much as to say that the police provide no positive benefit because their
chief occupation is merely to check the violence that citizens have to fear from other citizens,

17
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:354.
18
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:361, (my emphasis).
19
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:357.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 14

so that each can go about their business peacefully and securely.”20 By invoking a relational
dimension between what they distinguish, Kant’s Grenzen become Janic entities per se that
provide positive cognition regarding noumena-phenomena relations, but always in virtue of a
previous act of negation: the strict confinement of pure reason, a gesture thus always tied to
reason’s cognitive or expressive possibilities.

Trías’ philosophy invokes as well the restrictive powers of the limit. Appearance never
exhausts reality. But this limit is now a limes; terrain of cult and cultivation, of circulation, of
acculturation. Ambit that not only resists and opposes, but that, primarily and foremost, offers
inhabitation, affirmation. It is difficult to ignore the lyric and conceptual force blossoming
from the Roman imaginarium that Trías conjures up:

“The limes, as it is well known, was a territory susceptible of being inhabited and cultivated.
It was of course oscillant and shifting, insofar as it was a correlative extreme in relation to
other two spaces and ambits: the one composing the “own world” that was the space and the
domain of the Empire; and the external space, adverse, situated in the outskirts of the limes,
in which were coming closer and approximating those that, in its foreigner condition, only
could be recognized, from inside the Empire, for its barbaric mode of expression (so that their
languages sounded as onomatopeyas, bárbars, berbers, tartars…). But the limes had its
amplitude, its vastness, regardless of how narrow, fragile and oscilant it was. And, above all,
it possessed also its possible inhabitant, the limitrophe, who according to the word’s
etymology (trofeín, to nurture) was the one nurturing herself from the fruits that were
cultivated in the limes. Something that assumed that this territory could be an object of
cultivation (and cult).”21

We should not be surprised by the passionate narrative with which Trías invokes the
limitrophe inhabitability of the limes. It is hardly possible to overemphasize its relevance in
Trías’ philosophy: once considered in its Roman rather than Euclidean sense, it is viable to

20
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxv
21
“El limes, como bien se sabe, era un territorio susceptible de ser habitado y cultivado. Era desde luego
oscilante y movedizo, en la medida en que era un término correlativo en relación a otros dos espacios y
ámbitos: el que componía el “mundo propio” que era el espacio y dominio del Imperio; y el espacio externo,
adverso, situado en el extrarradio del limes, en el que se acercaban y aproximaban los que, en su condición de
extranjería, sólo podìan ser reconocidos, desde dentro del Imperio, por su barbárico modo de expresarse (de
manera que sus lenguas sonaban a onomatopeyas, bárbaros, bereberes, tártaros…). Pero el limes tenía su
amplitud, su vastedad, por delgada, frágil y oscilante que fuera. Y sobre todo poseía también su posible
habitante, el limítrofe, que según la etimología de la palabra (trofeín, “alimentarse”) era aquel que se
alimentaba de los frutos cultivados en el limes. Lo cual daba por sentado que éste podía ser objeto de cultivo (y
culto).”
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 15

envisage—without metaphor and hand in hand with its Janic vocation, the oscilant and
fruitful amplitude of the limit, the possibility of its buoyancy, of its fertility, of its opulence
and profusion. But, also and most of all, it is possible to envisage a promise of exuberance.
Of a liminal exuberance. Exuberans, exuberis: the exteriorization (ex) of fruits or udders
(uberis). Proliferation and profusion, opulent nutrition, but also excess and surplus, or, as
Bataille jubilantly exclaims, “the luxurious squandering of energy in every form!”22.

Bataille considers beings according to the amount of energy that they squand rather than
retain. Expenditure over preservation, waste over accumulation; while Bataille’s
discontinuous entities calculate in order to preserve themselves and remain in their finitude,
their shift towards a state of continuity with the world implies to affirm themselves by being
exuberant: the deployment of a movement of expenditure that is pointless, without any form
of calculus, and, above all, without any possibility of accumulation. I would like to argue that
this type of movement is precisely what, in its oscilant and mixed effervescence, the Roman
Limes might suggest, but also and above all, what Trías’ reengineering of the limit invokes. A
movement affirming that the limit can be more than a conceptual or mathematical asymptote,
or than the evanescent line of a horizon. Or than a fence and confine. Or that it can excite and
stimulate something else than the modern oscillation between the fear of erring (Kant, but
also Wittgenstein), and the Faustic wish, that nobody as Hegel took to its utmost
consequences, for trespass and overflow. Such swinging seems to fall short of Trías’
ambitions. What thus offers the affirmative character of the limes to a philosophical context?
Trías replies: a locus and site from which question the restrictive mechanics conventionally
ascribed to the limit and consider the possibility of deploying a systemic yet open thought, an
open systematicity. Is it viable to overcome the methodic rigidity of modern rationality
without celebrating the cynicism of postmodernity and its enthronement of the fragment, the
collage and the puzzle? Can we brandish a renewed wish for a universal systematicity that
aims at hosting what it conceives rather than at revealing what belongs to what? How to think
of a limit that offers rather than captures, that conceives rather than delineates, a limit whose
affirmative vocation neither rigidises itself in dogmatic certainties nor dissolves in the ironic
banalities of the postmodern project? And, why and how to think of this as a liminal form of
exuberance?

22
Bataille, The Accursed Share, 33.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 16

1.4 - Being of limit that recreates

This is, to put it in one sentence, or in a single slogan, the philosophical proposal with which
Trías attends to these questions. What does this affirmation announce? It “highlights, in its
immanent and spontaneous reflexion, each one of [its] members as possible interlaced scales
of a reflexive progression (in spiral)”23. Every scale accentuates each one of the concepts that
Trías conjures up in his philosophical sentence: being of limit that recreates; being of limit
that recreates; being of limit that recreates. These three modulations nurture and propel three
turns in Trías’ reflexive spiral. We have already mentioned them: the ontological turn, the
topological turn, and the philosophical turn. They all address the limit as limes, the limit in all
its thickness and vastness, or, as I would like to argue, in all its exuberance.

In the first turn, Trias ontologically embraces the limit’s Janic nature by thinking of the limit
as relating to something that appears and is given, but also and necessarily as relating to
something else, something that in fact can’t simply be negated, since its negation would
inevitably imply the limit’s immediate suppression. Thus, and conversely to Kant, for whom
“the limit belongs as much to what is within it as to the space lying outside a given totality”24,
in Trías the limit belongs to something and refers to something else. It belongs to something,
to the world, to what is given, to what he defines as the Appearances Enclosure, and refers to
something else, to the Hermetic Enclosure, something that can be thought but not
known—and thus can only be (symbolically) referred—, something that for us is nothing, but
a positive nothingness, a nothingness that cannot be negated. In the ontological turn, the limit
is thus limit in between being and nothingness, it “is limit in between that of which is limit,
or in relation to that which is said and declared (the being, which is for this reason being of
the limit, which is given to experience in the existence) [...]; and it is limit in reference to its
shadow, which is the nothingness, which needs to be thought in and for itself”25.

The limit belongs and refers: it belongs to the Appearances Enclosures while refers to the
Hermetic Enclosure. It is exposed in the former and indisposed in the latter, shown as far as it
can be manifested in the former, withdrawn up to where it can be sheltered and guarded in the
23
“[La esencia relativa a esa idea filosófica y a su posible propuesta,] destaca, en su inmanente y espontánea
reflexión, cada uno de los miembros de la frase como posibles escalas entrelazadas de una progresión relfexiva
(en espiral).”
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
24
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4:361,
25
“Es límite entre aquello de lo cual es límite, o en relación a lo cual se dice y declara (el ser, que es por eso ser
del límite que se da a experiencia en la existencia; y en la prueba del límite en la que el sujeto se constituye
como sujeto fronterizo); y lo es en referencia a su sombra, que es la nada, la cual debe ser pensada en y por sí”.
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 17

latter. Kant’s static notion of Grenze is thus vectorized, inclined; in its asymmetric reflection,
Trias’ limit neither doubles in an obverse and a reverse that in their pure external negativity
are equally “belonging”, nor does it promote a Hegelian reflection where both extremes are
identical in the contradictory negativity and same speculative impulse that presages and
prepares Hegel’s concept of the absolute. In its belong/refer vocation, Trías’ reflection is a
failed reflection, distorted, a reflection whose extremes are not specular and that thus shows,
as occurs in the Roman Limes “a fundamental asymmetry integrated within the limit itself.”26
In the ontological turn, the being of the limit is presented as time, as passage between two
vanishing points; its locus of departure (matrix) and destination (end or target) withdraw in
the nothingness of the hermetic enclosure, leaving the being in a state of suspension among
two forms of nothingness, a state that is, in fact, a state of exuberance: pure passage, pure
movement from vacuum to vacuum, pure ex-ubiris, pure “exteriorization of fruit or udders”
whose abundance and opulence does not consist in exceeding or crossing any limit; contrary
to Bataille, for whom exuberance is transgresion27, the liminal exuberance that is at play in
Trías’ ontology consists in not crossing this very limit, since it is precisely the limit what
sustains the pressing nothingness propelling what it is, what passes, what happens, lo que
pasa28. In Trias, the excess and surplus characterizing any form of exuberance would thus not
consist in having more than what is needed, but in having something when anything can’t be
needed.

However, if we fully embrace Trías conception of the limit as an asymmetric and integrative
limes, how could we speak about the limit in terms of a duplication or duplicity of
enclosures? Shouldn’t we consider the limit, in its vectorized and thus inclined vocation, as
an enclosure in itself and by itself, a Frontier Enclosure? And wouldn't then be more adequate
to speak about an interplay of pressures circulating within a triplicity of enclosures rather
than about the repetitive opposition between two of them? Trías assumes all these questions
by conceiving the Frontier Enclosure as locus and site of reason; a renovated reason, a
Frontier Reason, a reason whose categorial fabric is suspended—as documented by the
vertigo of human experience—between being and nothingness, between the astonishment for
a being that appears and the passion for a nothingness that can only press and compress.

26
Trías, Ciudad sobre Ciudad, 89.
27
Bataille, Eroticism, 43.
28
The Spanish verb “pasar” has a twofold meaning that is particularly suggerent in this framework: it both
means to move and to happen.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 18

If, in the ontological turn, the limit is said or declared of the being, a being of the limit that
recreates, in the topological turn the limit is conceived as limit of itself, limit quoad se. The
limit is here no longer limit between or limit of, but it “is only limit; it is absolute and
reflexive limit; it is pure limit, limit from itself to itself, limit of the same: limit as limit”29.
Trías proposes here a radical inversion of our thinking habits: rather than conceiving the
being of the limit, we are now compelled to conceive the being of the limit. This demands to
think of the being as belonging to the limit—rather than the limit as belonging to the being—,
and thus, to consider the limit as locus and site—as topos—of being. What does this shift
entail? It impels us to perform an acrobatic gesture: to go beyond the limit without traversing
it. The key to decode such an enigmatic proposition lies in the term “beyond”; we should not
think of it as referring to something that is sheltered and guarded on the other side of the
limit, as if the limit would be external to it. For, wouldn’t this insist in conceiving the limit as
limit quoad nos, as limit belonging to the being and referring to the nothingness? And
wouldn’t this keep us circulating within the ontological scale of Trías’ reflexive spiral?

In the topological turn the metá of the meta-physis instals itself beyond all human
temperament—and thus beyond all being—by invoking a liminal ambit considered as
absolute; an ambit loose and absolved from anything else—from being itself, an ambit that
thus subsists beyond the triplicity of enclosures of the ontological scale. Or that traverses the
three of them, or that offers them verticality. Or that constitutes their ground and foundation.
Just that this foundation, or this absolute, is not ontological. It founds the being from the
limit, that is, from differential sameness and self-referential difference, from pure movement
resting in itself, a rotatory movement, a movement that constitutes the limit as being itself in
its differentiation, and the movement through which the being's triplicity of enclosures is
spread out. Thus, if in the topological turn the being of limit conjures up the notion of
exuberance in a liminal valence it is because the limit here is nothing but exteriorisation,
radical offer towards the outdoors, pure gesture of offering, a gesture necessarily void of
being, for its triplicity of enclosures is precisely what is topologically grounded. Exuberance
here invokes an excess that, again, does not transgress or cross any limit, for limit, in the
topological sphere, is not approached as limit between or as limit of, but simply as limit, as
the movement characteristic of something (the limit) that is itself in its differentiation; there is
no place from where envisage its possible crossing and no place where to land once allegedly

29
“El límite es sólo límite; es límite absoluto y reflexivo; es límite puro, límite de sí a sí, límite de lo mismo: es el
límite en tanto que límite.”
Trías, Los Límites del Mundo, 259.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 19

crossed. It is precisely because the concept itself of crossing cannot be even considered, and
thus, no calculus or speculation can be at work, that the limit is here exuberance, an
exuberance whose liminality consists in providing the being’s topos, the hinge and rotation
where being takes place. Or, as Trías calls it, pure light-space, transparency, the topical
substance that would surround us if we imagine ourselves embedded within the luminous
porosity of a glass sheet; in it, the decisive distinction between obverse and reverse that
constitutes this glassy surface is absorbed—(dis)joined—by the crystalline permeability of its
thickness: pure movement, pure liminality which is thus itself in its differentiation while
“determining and specifying those derived notions, from it emanated, that are Sameness and
Alterity, or Identity and Difference”30.

Constituting the light-space as the topological—rather than ontological—absolute of the

philosophy of the limit is perhaps the gesture of greatest dramatic tension in Trías’ proposal.
It is the reason's most daring inference. And a decisive departure from Kant’s Critique. But it
is a departure that is consistent with Kant’s most significant move: the inscription of limits by
reason on reason. Trías’ departure from Kant is thus, paradoxically, a Kantian departure from
Kant; the philosophy of the limit radically intensifies and reformulates Kant’s limit by
deploying it towards its exterior through an ontological triplicity of enclosures and towards
its interior through a topological monism of light-space. The dynamic vocation of this
onto-topological condition, which overlaps and interconnects the ontological and topological
scales of the reflexive spiral, precludes and anticipates the decisive third turn from the
topological to the philosophical sphere. What does this last turn imply? And where does it get
its momentum from? Trías replies: “The internal and immanent rotation of that transparency
[trans/parecer] of sameness and otherness around the limit reveals, thus, an internal
movement, an immanent spin, making everything turn and revolve around the limit, which is,
in this philosophical proposition, limit in relation to the one and the multiple; to its resting in
itself and in its own self-movement”31. If in the ontological turn the limit is said of the being
and in the topological turn the limit is said of itself, in the philosophical turn the limit is said
of everything. All things turn and rotate around that juncture and hinge. The “being of the

30
“Es éste el que determina y especifica esas nociones derivadas, de él dimanadas, que son la Mismidad y la
Alteridad, o la Identidad y la Diferencia.”
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
31
“El giro interno e inmanente de esa trans/parencia del mismo y otro en torno al límite revela, pues, un
movimiento interno, un giro inmanente, que hace que todo ronde y dé vueltas en torno al límte, que es, en la
proposición filosófica, límite en relación a lo uno y a lo múltiple; a su reposo en sí mismo y su propio
auto-movimiento.”
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 20

limit that recreates” announces, in this philosophical turn, the eternal recreation of the same,
“of the same limit that in virtue of its internal reference to its own alterity, it is always
catapulted to an endless movement, or that had no beginning and will have no end”32. In
virtue of that spin around itself, the limit always returns. And, in each of the turns that the
limit produces around itself, its sameness is altered and alternated. And with it, everything,
the world, the being, the limit itself. All turns, all swirls and departs in each variation of the
same, of the same limit, which finds in this principle of variation a recreation always
renovated of the same. In this third turn, Trías reflexive spiral deploys itself in all the
neighbors of what he defines as the frontier city, recreating its liminal vocation in its
aesthetic, religious, politic or ethic fields.

An ontological triplicity of ambits and a topological monism of transparency. Being-time and

light-space. Or being of limit and being of limit. Trías’ onto-topological philosophy affirms as
the cornerstone of its systematicity something as peripheral as the notion of limit. Yet, isn’t
Trias’ ontology radically anthropocentric? Isn’t the very act of focusing on the limit between
the for-us and the in-itself an act that in fact confirms and consolidates their correlation? And
isn’t this insistence the most unequivocal symptom of a philosophy assuming the
impossibility of considering each term apart from each other? Perhaps the question should
then be posed as follows: Is there something more correlative than the concept of limit? Trías
reply is unambiguous: “The limes is, whichever way you look at it, a co-relation (in between
three enclosures)”.33 “A correlation”, he continues, “that does not admit to be forwarded to
any ulterior condition”.34 Trías’ ontology is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of
Meillassoux’s claim according to which correlationism “maintains the unsurpassable
character of the correlation so defined”35. Just that, in Trías, this unsurpassability is only
ontological. Or only insofar as the limit is “limit of” or “limit between”, limit belonging to
the world, to the Appearances Enclosure, while simultaneously referring to the enclosure of
what transcends, the Hermetic Enclosure. Or limit seen from bottom to top, as arriving to it,

32
“Del Mismo límite que, en virtud de su interna referencia a su propia alteridad, es siempre catapultado a un
movimiento sin fin, o que no tuvo comienzo ni tendrá jamás fin”.
Trías, El Hilo de la Verdad, Kindle Edition.
33
“El limes es, se lo mire por donde se lo mire, una co-relación (entre tres cercos).”
Trías, La Razón Fronteriza, 329.
34
“Quería decir con esa afirmación que esa co-relación del limes noa dimite ser remitida a ninguna condición
ulterior.”
Trías, La Razón Fronteriza, 329.
35
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 21

as ascending or rising up to it with the hope that, once climbed that ladder or method and
installed oneself within that very edge or limes, it could be possible to peek into a certain
“exterior”. However, at the precise moment when this exterior seems to bloom before our
eyes, all ontological thinking slips. As all late modernity, Trías’ ontology is a tragic ontology
because it is a human ontology. “An ontology is”, affirms Trías, “always a phenomenological
ontology. It constitutes the absolute depuration of all experience, promoted from within
experience itself”36. However, unlike late modernity, Trías’ speculative endeavor does not put
its full stop here. The topological turn offers a new speculative ambit, an ambit claiming to be
located beyond being, for it is not the limit of the ontological framework that is being
surpassed here, but the ontological framework itself. And then, what emerges “beyond all
tragedy is the joyful radiance of a great crystal, of a great glass, of a pure transparency which
I call light-space”.37 One can thus affirm, think, and know beyond being. But this does not
entail to disclose the in-itself—which remains entirely veiled to the cognitive regard, but to
expose the locus and site where both the in-itself and the for-us are set in motion.

How are we to understand this onto-topological gesture? Isn’t the exclusive accommodation
of human reason within the peripheral nature of the Frontier Enclosure or limes making of
Trías’ ontology a radically anthropocentric ontology? Yet, if the topological turn aims at
installing itself beyond all ontology, isn’t then this move necessarily pitching camp beyond
everything human? And how can we conceive the articulation between the ontology’s
triplicity of enclosures and the topology’s monism of transparency? How to think of the jump
or the passage between both, between being-time and light-space, between human and
non-human, between being of limit and being of limit? And, above all, to what extent
thinking about being once the luminous ambit deploying its triplicity of enclosures has been
exposed can alter the very conditions and possibilities of thinking being? What can be gained
with this onto-topological gesture?

Considering these questions certainly demands to deploy Trías’ onto-topological gesture in

detail in order to enliven its mechanics in light of their relationality with human reason. But
since the notion of exuberance is posed as the spine along which Trías conception of the limit
differs from the tragic vocation of modernity and post-modernity, this liminal form of
36
“La ontología es siempre ontología fenomenológica. Constituye la absoluta depuración de toda experiencia,
promovida desde dentro de la propia experiencia.”
Trías, Los Límites del Mundo, 225.
37
“Lo que surge más allá de toda tragedia es el risueño resplandor de un gran cristal, de un gran vidrio, de una
transparencia pura a la que llamo espacio-luz.”
Trías, Los Límites del Mundo, 232.
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 22

exuberance will need to gain more resolution and detail. The concept of cornucopia will play
a crucial role.

Bibliography

BATAILLE, Georges. Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1986 [1957].

BATAILLE, Georges. The Accursed Share, New York: Zone Books, 1988 [1967].

BRYANT, SRNICEK, HARMAN. Speculative Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, 2011.

KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781].

—Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Gary Hatfield. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004 [1783].

MEILLASSOUX, Quentin. After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2011
[2006].

OVID. Fasti, trans. James George Frazer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959 [12].

TRÍAS, Eugenio. La Razón Fronteriza. Barcelona: Destino, 1999.

—El Hilo de la Verdad. Barcelona: Destino, 2021 [2014].

—Los límites del Mundo. Barcelona: Ariel Filosofía, 1985.

—Ciudad sobre ciudad. Barcelona: Destino, 2001.

Table of contents

- Introduction

- Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance

1.1 - Activating a Kantian Lost Path

1.2 - Transcendental Janus
Chapter 1 - Limit and Exuberance 23

1.3 - Liminal Exuberance

1.4 - Being of Limit that Recreates

- Chapter 2 - The Onto-Topological Cornucopia

- Chapter 3 - Beyond Thinking and Being

- Chapter 4 - Sybilline Objectivity

- Chapter 5 - Stellar Multitudes

- Conclusion