Jean Luc Nancy

'On the threshold' taken from 'The Muses' (p.57)

On the Threshold 

‘So we have entered there where we will never enter, into this scene painted on a canvas. All at once, there we are. We can’t exactly say that we have penetrated there, but neither can we say that we are outside. We are there in a manner older and simpler than by any movement, displacement, or penetration. We are there without leaving the threshold, neither inside or outside- and perhaps we are, ourselves the threshold, just as our eye conforms to the plane of the canvas and weaves itself into its fabric.’

Giorgio Agamben

AGAMBEN, G. (2000) Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

'The face is the threshold of de-propriation and of de-identification of all manners and of all qualities -  a threshold in which only the latter become purely communicable. And only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.'

'Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.'

Seamus Heaney 

From the poem 'Markings' in Heaney's book of poems 'Seeing Things' (1991). The New York Times Book Review said that it "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven."

                            II

You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

The spade nicking the first straight edge along

The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

To mark the outline of a house foundation

Pale timber battens set at right angles

For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

Or the imaginary line straight down

A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

Stuck in the other.

                             III 

All these things entered you

As if they were both the door and what came through it.

They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.  ...