Within psychoanalytic formations, this “not quite/yet” has come to mark the concept of the subject as conditioned through becoming, emergence, the cuts and postponements around which subjectivation begins to take hold. What these hold in common, if differently, is a sense through which subjective certainty is displaced onto a ground in which ethical relations may be negotiated, rather than imposed, where new subjectivations become possible and new socials (structural formations; modes of sociality) made legible.

At the same time, the notion of the “not quite/yet” is also a foundational narrative in the episteme that structures our modernity: the project of liberalism and its multiple expressions through racialised states, fascisms, and in its worst realisations, genocides. In Hegel’s famous formulation, some are placed outside of history, at its threshold. And as Sylvia Wynter has taught us, such a rendition of liminality is not unique to our modernity, even if it is in this modernity’s wake that we all live, in the contradictions of its emancipatory project. The concept of the liminal is, then, perhaps best thought of as itself marked by liminality – its potentiality being determined by that which orders it, the kind of claim through which it is marked.

Without a concept of inherent good, and seeking to resist the traps of standpoint or identitarian epistemology, the annual Winter School asks how we might consider liminality, how we might abide by the threshold so as to re-imagine the ordering concepts for a “to-come” that might itself critically interrogate the grounds of what is presumed in “modernity”. Futurity marks the liminal, but so does the fade, the shading into the past, the ghost: a future past that haunts.

Inside this frame, we will think through and with questions that resonate with, or depart from, the following: What is the role of institution as concept? How does liminality shape practice? What might it mean to abide by the liminal? Is this similar to occupying a threshold? What implications does this have for our thinking of time, our thinking of the image, of subjects and subjectivations? Or, indeed, for our thinking of discipline, the antidisciplinary; the work of creating, techne? What, indeed, is liminal in thinking? And, why liminality, why does the liminal matter, why should liminality be made to matter?

The Winter School programme: