The Twofold Limit of Objects: Problematising Timothy Morton’s Rift in Light of Eugenio Trías’s Notion of Limit

1 Introduction: the undermined relevance of limits in OOO

The emergence of a new philosophical proposal usually implies a terminological renovation. This process does not necessarily introduce terms ex nihilo; in most cases, it simply centralises expressions with a formerly peripheral presence in the contemporary discourse. Husserl’s emphasis on “intentionality,” Levinas’ insistence on “otherness” and Deleuze’s focus on the “rhizome” are emblematic examples of how neglected terms can be brought to the foreground when new ideas arise. The emergence and consolidation of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in recent years is no exception: under its umbrella, the term “object,” once marginalised by a relational philosophical episteme, has been recovered as a central element in some of the most relevant philosophical debates.^[1]

However, the terminological renovation resulting from the rise of a philosophical alternative is hardly reducible to the centralisation of a single term. A plethora of related expressions arises around it, underpinning its conceptual power. New Materialism is a good example: although the notion of “matter” plays a central role, the term is conveniently flanked by expressions such as “entanglement,” “becoming,” “network,” “assemblage” and “process.” Amid this myriad of orbiting bodies, one shines with a particular force: “relation.” Its presence has been theorised by thinkers such as Karen Barad^[2] or Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, who invoke “a discursive practice centered on the creation of concepts in their relationality,”^[3] i.e. an affirmative relationality^[4] that precedes its terms.

OOO advocates for the opposite. An object is “anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces.”^[5] This radical withdrawal has led critics to define OOO as a metaphysics of absence, a metaphysics founded on a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things.”^[6] However, paradoxically, the centralisation of the notion of “object” has occurred without the systematisation of a term that is underexplored in philosophies associated with Speculative Realism and which seems fundamental to OOO: “limit.”

The term “limit” arises as soon as we think of an object as demarcated from its environment.^[7] In the case of OOO, the limit’s role seems even more decisive, since the object’s core is not just individual and separated but also withdrawn and inaccessible. The limit is actually present in OOO’s argumentation through the frequent use of liminal terminology by its thinkers: expressions such as “walled island,”^[8] “surface effects”^[9] or “encrusted qualities”^[10] are regularly employed in order to emphasise the “metaphysical abyss” that separates real objects and sensual objects within the quadruple object. To my knowledge, there is no systematic treatment of the nature of this metaphysical “wall,” “surface” or “crust” in the work of Graham Harman, something that is crucial in order to illuminate the combination of internal difference and unity that we observe in objects. The broadest development in this direction takes shape in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift, whose opening, suspense and closure account for the object’s birth, persistence and death.

The central argument in this article will be that Morton’s rift succeeds in explaining the radical difference that inhabits the core of every object, but that it fails to explain the object’s unification. The article will propose approaching this problem by way of Eugenio Trías’s notion of limit, the conceptualisation of which as differential sameness and autoreferential difference allows for articulating it as a territory of disjunction and conjunction rather than as a dividing Euclidean line.

Section 2 analyses the centrality of Morton’s rift in Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. Section 3 discusses the difficulties of Morton’s rift in accounting for the unified condition of objects in spite of their inner partition. In light of these criticisms, Section 4 briefly presents the philosophical work of Trías and then reconstructs his twofold notion of limit, particularly its territorial constitution and its conjunctive and disjunctive vocation. Section 5 first demonstrates that the core of Trías’s theory can be grafted onto Harman’s ontology with reasonable ease. Then, given this foundation, it proposes an object-oriented approach to the concept of limit, demonstrating that it constitutes an adequate alternative to Morton’s rift.

By way of conclusion, Section 6 discusses how the incorporation of a twofold theory of limits within OOO problematises the logical status of objects argued by Morton on the basis of Graham Priest’s dialetheism.

2 Hide and seek

The central principle of OOO is that objects have a unified reality that cannot be reduced to its parts or to its effects. Although the cosmos may be populated with an infinity of objects, they come in only two kinds: “the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience.”^[11] By no means does this distinction refer to two separate groups of objects, some being sensual and others being real. Instead, it differentiates between two modes of being – sensual and real – which are simultaneously present in all objects.

An object is therefore a unified entity which is withdrawn from all access (real object) yet somehow manifests (sensual object). Withdrawn and manifest. At the very same time. Withdrawn: objects retreat from all relations with other objects, enclosing themselves in a vacuum-sealed region that precludes any attempt at knowledge. Manifest: in spite of their radical distancing, objects allude to their inscrutable reality by appearing in the experience of other objects. Objects play hide and seek.^[12]

In OOO, the true duality does not lie between subjects and objects or between body and mind but between real objects and sensual objects. This duplexity is not the result of a transcendental condition that is external to objects. On the contrary, the difference between the real object and the sensual object is fuelled from the interior of every object. This point is particularly relevant. According to Timothy Morton, a threefold paradox arises: first, an object is at the same time itself and not itself; second, an object is at the same time present and non-present; and third, an object is at the same time part and whole.

An object is at the same time itself and not itself; it cannot be perceived but only perceived-as. Its appearance in the experiential field of another object is always a translation; it is always the result of paraphrasing the object in itself according to the structure of the perceiver. In consequence, and despite being one, the object in itself and the object as it is perceived are neither identical nor deducible one from the other but qualitatively different.

An object is at the same time present and non-present; its manifestation (presence) in the experience of another object is nothing but an allusion to a withdrawn realm (non-presence). Its apparition certifies its disapparition. Its register documents its absence. This mysterious voidness conforms an inscrutable domain that does not lie in any external Platonic world but inhabits the object itself. Objects withdraw, yet they appear.

An object is at the same time part and whole; an object’s composition is made up of other objects, which are parts of the former. However, at the same time, these objects are also wholes in themselves – that is, they can neither be reduced to the object they compose nor to the parts that compose them. We are confronted thus with a strange mereology: objects are wholes constituted by parts but also parts constituting other objects.

This constant interplay between identity and alterity, presence and non-presence and part and whole unveils, according to Timothy Morton, an ontological condition that resonates with Graham Priest’s statements that objects are cracked, objects are double-truthed and objects are dialetheic. Objects are “what they are and what they are not at the same time.”^[13] This twofold condition produces a rift between appearances and essences, the ontological centrality of which has been lucidly described by Morton in three steps: the aperture of the rift gives birth to an object, the development of the rift sustains an object and the erasure of the rift ends an object.

The rift underpins the object’s autonomy. The tension established by the separation between the real object and the sensual object accounts for all salient aspects of reality, without relying on any external environment. Time, space or causality pours constantly from the object itself, from its internal contradiction – that is, from the rift that arises between the real object and the sensual object. This duel is what makes objects “float, breathe, oscillate, threaten, seduce, rotate, cry, orgasm.”^[14] Morton’s rift makes it possible to explain reality on the basis of a single object, without requiring other entities in order to function. It is presented as a radical and permanent chorismos, an “irreducible gap between real and sensual objects”^[15] that makes objects into uncanny and unstable doubles.

3 The problem of unification

Morton’s rift succeeds in accounting for the object’s duality. It establishes an insurmountable abyss between the real object and the sensual object which effectively underpins the object’s irreducibility. Yet, irreducibility is inherently linked with unification: objects cannot be separated into parts without their essence being dismantled. If they could, objects would be reducible to their components, and OOO would not be able to explain emergence. Objects are therefore wholes without parts or, more aptly, wholes without parts whose mere addition would be able to account for the object. In OOO, objects are unified realities; as Harman affirms, “each object is a unified thing, despite its multitude of features.”^[16] In other words, “objects are units that both display and conceal a multitude of traits.”^[17] Ian Bogost also emphasises the unified condition of objects by replacing the term “object” with “unit operation.” Bogost’s use of the term unit is indifferent to the nature of what it names, but it emphasises the condition of being “isolated, unitary, and specific, not simply the part of a whole.”^[18] Like objects, unit operations are enclosed and unified systems – an entire universe’s worth.

However, how can an object be unified and at the same time split by a radical cut between its real object and its sensual object? How can an object be an isolated, single and specific unit and at the same time cracked by a profound and permanent rift? How can one be two?

Morton’s notion of “rift” illuminates the radical difference established within every object, but it fails to explain the object’s unicity. Morton affirms that “a cut between an object and its manifestation to other objects doesn’t mean that the manifestation can be anything at all.”^[19] In order to underpin this statement, Morton affirms that the violation of the Law of Noncontradiction (LNC) resulting from the object’s contradictoriness does not imply an ex contradictione quodlibet (ECQ). For him, the crucial problem in avoiding the possibility of an object radiating random manifestations is whether trivialism can follow from logical principles that are dialetheistically correct. In this sense, Morton simply writes that “there are good reasons for supposing that ECQ doesn’t hold just because LNC doesn’t hold,”^[20] and in a footnote he refers to Graham Priest’s In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, where the author explains these reasons. Whether trivialism follows from true contradictions is an ongoing open debate in which Priest’s theses have come up against solid resistance.^[21] However, it is not necessary to enter into this debate in order to signal Morton’s failure, which precedes the recognition of a hypothetical object’s contradictory condition. As soon as Morton states that an object is simultaneously p ∧ ¬p because there is a rift between essences and appearances, he is actually laying out, aside from the contradictory status of objects, two crucial points: first, that the real object (p) is that which the sensual object is not (¬p), and, second, that the summation (∧) of both constitutes an object (p ∧ ¬p). This assertion precludes the possibility of affirming the object’s immanent unification; it implies the absolute independence of the real object and the sensual object: if the former (p) has something to do with the constitution of the latter (¬p), then the real object (p) cannot simply be negated (¬p) in order to account for the sensual object of the same quadruple object.

The object’s unification is crucial for at least two reasons. First, in order to establish any fertile tension, dialogue or contradiction between two different elements, there needs to be a certain resistance among them, that is, a common ground where they can enter into friction; resistance between different elements implies that these elements have something in common. They cannot be completely transparent to one another, which is what absolute negation implies (p ∧ ¬p). Without the internal rub between the real object and the sensual object, and in order to account for the integrity of the quadruple object, OOO would need to rely on forces that are external to the quadruple object, drastically harming its autonomy.

Second, if the real object and the sensual object of the same object were completely irrelevant to one another, the different sensual objects related to one real object would not be consistent. Nor would there be consistency between the different sensual objects of the same real object perceived by different observers. The same real object could be arbitrarily perceived as a zebra, as a galaxy or as dinner – in other words, we would be unable to explain permanence, which would defy our most common experience.

Morton’s rift tells us only half the story. It brilliantly accounts for the abyssal difference between the real object and the sensual object, but it doesn’t explain how both elements avoid mutual transparency, that is, how they “resist” each other in spite of their radical distinction. Pure difference is insufficient: there can be no tension, duel or contradiction without resistance. Rather than full transparency, resistance paradoxically demands a certain affinity between the elements at play. Without it, the real object and the sensual object of any object just traverse each other as ethereal phantoms; their existence is mutually irrelevant.

The coexistence of the real object and the sensual object within a single object presents, then, a threefold requirement that challenges Morton’s rift. First, the real object and the sensual object must be radically distinct. Second, they must form a unified object. Third, the object’s distinction and its unification must be immanent to the object, that is, they must not be the result of any external force. As we have seen, Morton’s rift accounts for distinction and immanence, but it fails to explain unification.

This article proposes addressing this threefold requirement through the notion of limit. In spite of some scattered allusions, the limit has not been systematically approached in the context of OOO. This is rather surprising. In a theory of reality that privileges discrete objects over relational networks, it seems reasonable to assume that the notion of limit would enjoy a certain centrality. Although related terms such as “firewalls,” “surfaces,” “crusts,” “rifts,” or “abyss” are recursively used by OOO thinkers, only Ian Bogost and Tristan García have explicitly referred to the notion of limit.

Bogost’s book Play Anything does not approach the limit from an ontological perspective but in the context of play and fun. The limit is not a reductive and coercive fence but a fruitful and pleasurable tool. Its capacity to constrain is fundamental for at least two reasons: first, limits provide definition and therefore permit comprehension; second, limits make space for novelty by setting the convention from which invention arises. If fun “isn’t maximizing pleasure, but finding something new in a familiar situation,”^[22] then limits set the terms from which originality, in its double sense of original and originating, can take place.

In Form and Object, Tristan García briefly approaches the limit from an ontological register. For García, the limit is an object in between objects. It is contrasted with form, whose ontological brightness eclipses the limit: while a thing “can have as many limits as one wants it to have or as one discovers it to have,” one “does not choose its form.” The limit is contingent, and it is constantly subject to question; limits are plural, limits change, limits are dependent and limits are finite. Instead, García’s form is single, fixed, independent and infinite. The limit is nothing other than “an object that seeks to disappear in between two other objects.”^[23]

Neither Bogost nor Garcia articulate an ontological limit powerful enough to deal with the paradox of having, on the one hand, a “fundamental Rift between withdrawn essence and aesthetic appearance”^[24] (i.e. between the real object and the sensual object) and, on the other, the requirement of the object’s cohesion “in a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces.”^[25]

In spite of a different terminology, this challenge runs through the work of the Spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías (1942–2013). In Los límites del mundo, Eugenio Trías doubles the limit “in those two extremes that it determines, as that which at the same time joins and disjoins them.”^[26] By doubling the limit into an obverse and a reverse that frames an inhabitable space, the limit takes on a central role in his ontology, accounting on the one hand for the junction and disjunction of what remains withdrawn and what is manifested, while on the other maintaining the former’s absolute inaccessibility.

4 Doubling of the limit in Eugenio Trías

Given that most of Eugenio Trías’s work is likely unknown to an international audience, a brief clarification of its principal terminology seems appropriate. The aim of introducing Trías’s work is to make space, within the framework of present-day continental philosophy, for an approach that avoids the limit’s reduction to a negative and restrictive entity whose function oscillates between that of complete unification (Hegel) and that of complete separation (Derrida).

Trías’s ontological proposal opposes postmodern discourses. Following decades of postmodern criticism of the universal pretensions of enlightened reason, a number of voices in the late 1980s and early 1990s criticised postmodern discourses for being conservative (Habermas) or for their complicity with late capitalism (Jameson). However, according to Trías, the most remarkable downside of postmodern theses lies in the fact that “with them, the dinner guest is forever hungry and anorexic in relation to his philosophical demands.”^[27] Trías opposes postmodern thinking due to its lack of interest in orchestrating a proposal that takes on the big ontological questions which concern the human being. In Trías, this proposal gravitates around a single entity: the philosophical idea of the limit.

Trías develops his notion of limit in contrast with modern and postmodern philosophy. According to the Spanish thinker, one of the key characteristics of modern thought consists in having set, as a definitive methodological trait, the concept of limit as the horizon for any philosophical research. Modernity understands the limit as the red light of thinking; it indicates what is impossible by fixing a negative necessity in relation to the ambits of power and linguistic possibilities. The limit is thus not conceived as something but as the negation of something. This approach forces modern thinking to oscillate between the fear of erring (Kant and Wittgenstein) and the Faustian desire to exceed any limit (Hegel). In this context, the limit is understood as negation and contradiction, as a frontier between something and its other. Trías aims to move beyond this modern consciousness, while at the same time avoiding the postmodern enthroning of the fragment, the collage or the puzzle as the locus of being and meaning. The ironic deviations or unexpected combinations characteristic of postmodernity are set aside in order to understand the limit as a place of ontological affirmation. Despite being discarded by modern philosophy, the limit can be found in Kant (“Limitation is nothing other than reality combined with negation”^[28]), in Schelling (“Since the ground of the limit lies neither in self nor thing, it lies nowhere”^[29]), in Hegel (“The limit, besides referring to the unity and being the moment of negation in it, is also, as one, self-referred.”^[30]) and in the later philosophies of Heidegger (“Being is delimited against an Other and thus already has a determinateness in this setting of a limit”^[31]), Jaspers (“The word limit implies that there is something else, but it indicates at the same time that this other thing is not for an existing consciousness”^[32]) and Wittgenstein (“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”^[33]). It can also be found in the scientific tradition, in infinitesimal calculus or in the calculus of limits. However, it has never been considered in its radicality. It has never been conceived as the cornerstone of a philosophical proposal. By replacing its negative vocation with an ontological affirmation, Trías sanctifies the limit as the territory where first philosophy occurs.

Trías’s originality lies in replacing the usual Euclidean conception of the limit with a Roman approach. From this perspective, the limit is doubled and takes on thickness. Rather than being an infinitesimal line, it becomes a territory, a land and an occupiable space. The limit becomes the limes, the peripheral territory which, in the Early Roman Empire, marked the confines of Roman civilisation. Rather than a wall, the limes was a stretch of land, a narrow and oscillating strip that was inhabitable, susceptible to colonisation, cultivation and worship. The limes was an isthmus; it mediated between the Roman Empire and the tribes, between culture and nature, between civitas and barbarie and between law and anarchy. Between world and mystery. Its inhabitants, the limitanei, were not only Roman soldiers and their families but also members of two other collectives. First, all sorts of merchants were attracted by the territory’s character as a place of encounters. Second, certain Germanic tribes were hired by the Roman Empire to protect the border. Thus, in the long run, the limes became vibrant and eclectic poles of activity, although its horizon was always threatened by the radical otherness of the barbarian troops, whose incursions regularly altered and reshaped the “limits of the limes.” Thus, the limes was an inhabitable oxymoron, a space of junction and disjunction and an unstable land of conflict whose effervescent and compressed diversity could by no means take place within the clinical abstraction of the Euclidean line. Daring dwellers of the world’s confines, the limitanei inhabited the Roman Empire without occupying its interior; they were suspended in a liminal land that belonged to the civitas but referred to the barbarie. The limes was thus a suffocating and malleable territory, an unstable locus adjacent to yet withdrawn from the mysterious barbarian otherness.

This territorial understanding of the notion of limit – i.e. the limes – is the idea with which Trías will shift all philosophical problems. Although this variation includes areas such as ontology, aesthetics, ethics, politics and theology, in this article we are interested in one specific theoretical tool that can help us approach the coexistence of the real object and its sensual object in a way that meets the three requirements previously mentioned: distinction, unification and immanence. This theoretical tool is Trías’s ontological approach to the limit through a method that is twofold. First, in its moment of retreat, the limit unveils its intrinsic determinations, which are the coupling and the disjunction of the terms that it mediates. Second, in its expansive moment, the limit unfolds and projects three enclosures: the hermetic enclosure – that is, the transcendental region that withdraws and can be conceived but not known; the enclosure of appearing – that is, the immanent region that manifests and is present to our experience and the frontier enclosure – that is, a limes that belongs to the first enclosure while referring to the second. In opposition to Morton’s ontological rift, Trías’s limes is a dense zone of affirmation, constituting and mediating both previous enclosures, while simultaneously being the inhabitable locus of the human being.

5 The object and its limits

The ontological twinning of Trías’s limit pursues multiple aims, but it is relevant to us here for one simple reason: it approaches the limit simultaneously as a disjunctive and coupling device. In Trías’s work, the limit’s identity lies precisely in its inner alterity; its sameness consists in differing in itself and by itself, in being “itself in its radical internal differentiation.” This approach differs from Morton’s rift, the theorisation of which accounts for the abyssal distinction between essences and appearances, but does not account for the object’s required cohesion in order to constitute a unified reality. Trías’s strategy in laying out a notion of limit that simultaneously accounts for coupling and disjunction has three specific peculiarities which facilitate its incorporation into Harman’s fourfold ontological structure.

First, the limit is not understood as (1) the symmetric in between of two entities or (2) the solipsistic extreme of a single entity, but as (3) a vectorised element that belongs to one entity and refers to another entity. This belonging/referring structure has three consequences. First, the limit is not ontologically autonomous but depends on its belonger. In other words, it is its property: the limit is not an object with qualities but the quality/ies of an object. Second, the limit is not isotropic but anisotropic – that is, it is asymmetric, oriented and vectorised; it has a different relation with the two terms that it separates. Finally, in its “referring,” the limit announces to its belonger that, although it cannot be traversed, there is something beyond it. The limit does not provide any information about the specific content of that otherness, but it certifies the existence of that radical alterity. The intelligibility of this proclamation is relevant because it implies an indirect and analogue contact between the elements which the limit, in itself and by itself, separates.

Second, the limit reflects itself, and in this reflection it is doubled into an obverse and a reverse: it becomes a twofold limit. However this twinning is not specular (Hegel) but distorted. It produces two sides that are not symmetric and which refer to two completely different regions: the enclosure of appearing and the hermetic enclosure. These enclosures should also be seen as sieges – that is, they do not only delimit a certain space, but they also enact pressures, either as executors (enclosure of appearing) or as receivers (hermetic enclosure). This pressure implies a certain mutual recognition that results in a cohesive tendency between both enclosures.

Third, the tension established between the obverse and the reverse of the limit separates both sides and opens a third enclosure within the limit itself: the frontier enclosure. Thus, the limit becomes a limes: it is no longer an infinitesimal Euclidean line, but an effervescent inhabitable territory. Occupied by the human being, it is the territory of the symbol, understood, on the one hand, in its etymological register of “sym-ballein” and, on the other, in its artistic or religious conjugation. The limes is thus the locus of the recursive but inevitably failed attempt to penetrate the hermetic enclosure through the symbol by using what is manifested in the enclosure of appearing in order to refer to what withdraws in the hermetic enclosure.

However, in order to graft Trías’s twofold model of the limit onto Harman’s fourfold structure, we need to leave behind certain aspects of the former’s ontological structure. Three of these aspects, especially the last one, are particularly incompatible with OOO. They are the limit’s ontological single centrality, the assumption of the world’s existence, and the ontological privilege of the human being over other beings.

First, Trías’s philosophy conceives the being always as “the being of the limit.” Trías approaches the limit from an ontological and an affirmative point of view, but he also situates it at the centre of any philosophical reflection. Trías’s ontology primarily consists in making the limit, “scarcely thought of, into a true cornerstone.”^[47] However, OOO’s cornerstone is not the limit but the object. In OOO, to exist means to be an object: more specifically, to be an object’s interior. There is nothing outside objects. In consequence, although this work argues that the notion of limit is fundamental in OOO, it also maintains the notion of object as the cornerstone of OOO’s metaphysics.

Second, Trías defines the limit as the limit of the world. He is very explicit on this point, particularly in the title that he uses for one of his more emblematic books: Los límites del mundo [The Limits of the World]. According to Trías, the limit is “the line and frontier that permits mutual access between these two worlds and at the same time certifies their irremediable distance.”^[48] The limit is thus “a frontier territory that separates this world from the other world,”^[49] the locus “where two worlds are intertwined and come together, while simultaneously diverging and differing.”^[50] However, there is no world in OOO – that is, there is nothing exterior to objects, there is no trascendental environment, no general medium. This means that in order to graft Trías’s model of limit onto OOO, it is necessary to understand Trías’s ontological structure not as an external condition that lays the foundation for objects’ existence, but as interior to objects – i.e. immanent to them produced by every object in itself and by itself.

Third, Trías privileges the human being in relation to all other beings by considering that s/he is the only being inhabiting the frontier enclosure: “we [the humans] are the limits of the world, with one foot planted inside it and the other outside it.”^[51] Thus, according to Trías, the human is the limit itself, defining and circumscribing both worlds: from his/her limit’s inhabitation, the human “simultaneously contemplates what s/he seems to bid farewell to – home – and what s/he seems hopelessly attracted toward – the abyss.”^[52] It is a twofold tendency towards the outside (hermetic enclosure) and towards the inside (enclosure of appearing). As the single inhabitant of the limes, the human thus differs both from the animal, who only inhabits “this world,” and from the angel, who only inhabits “that world.”

The ontological singularity that Trías grants to the human being by positioning him/her in a specific locus (the frontier enclosure) is incompatible with the flat ontology professed by OOO, for which “all objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional.”^[53]

The tension between Trías’s human ontological privilege and Harman’s flat ontology is particularly relevant, since it might be a decisive objection for the purpose of grafting Trías’s theory of limits onto Harman’s fourfold structure. There is a very precise reason for this: in Trías, the limit is so powerful because it is the exclusive locus of a human whose ontological status has been privileged: the singular fact that the human belongs to the enclosure of appearing, while alluding to the hermetic enclosure, qualifies him/her to navigate between the two waters, although never invading the latter. However, since there is no ontological privilege for the human being in Object-Oriented Ontology, who is responsible for mediation once the limit has been secularised from Trías’s anthropocentrism?

In the light of Trías’s liminal ontology, and paying particular attention to this question, we propose an approach to the notion of limit in OOO that aims to constitute an alternative to Morton’s rift. The main benefit of the former over the latter consists in its capacity to account for both junction and disjunction. Its construction responds to five key categories: the limit’s structure (“belong to” and “refer to”), the limit’s performance (de-finire and per-cipere), the limit’s ontological status (real limit and sensual limit), the limit’s impermeability (blurriness and transparency) and the limit’s décalage (limes and pressures).

5.5 Décalage: the Limes and its pressures

In order to graft Trías’s notion of limit onto Harman’s fourfold structure, a liminal approach to Harman’s fusions and fissions is crucial. This operation demands the introduction of Trías’s limes, i.e. Trías’s frontier enclosure, one of the fundamental contributions of Trías’s theory of limits.

As we saw in Section 5.3, the real limit and the sensual limit, in their constitution as the exhaustive and unified set of real and sensual qualities, produce the different tensions that Harman refers to as space (RO-SQ), time (SO-SQ), essence (RO-RQ) and eidos (SO-RQ). However, this paper does not consider that these tensions are produced by real or sensual objects and real or sensual qualities but rather by real or sensual objects and real or sensual limits. The reason for this substitution lies in the fact that, as soon as the real and sensual objects are tensioned by limits and not by a mere group of qualities, this tension can be articulated through Trias’s belong/refer structure and is therefore capable of simultaneously joining and disjoining the real object and the sensual object through the performances of de-finire (real limit) and per-cipere (sensual limit). It is important to note that this replacement leaves the fourfold structure completely intact, as soon as the qualities acquire their liminal condition by the fact of being considered in their totality and unified by the object to which they belong as a single (real or sensual) mantle.

In Harman’s ontology these tensions are affected by actions of fusion and fission: while fusion affects space and essence by a process of allure and causation, respectively; fission affects time and eidos by a process of confrontation and theory, respectively. When Trías’s liminal theory is grafted onto Harman’s fourfold structure, the two fusions and the two fissions should be read, respectively, as closing and opening a décalage, a liminal zone between the real limit or the sensual limit and the real object or the sensual object. This liminal zone operates as Trias’s limes. For Trías, the limes is the frontier enclosure; and as an enclosure (i.e. as a cerco), it is not a Euclidean border line but a land of forces and pressures, a territory whose belong/refer structure simultaneously conjoins and disjoins the enclosure of appearances and the hermetic enclosure. However, in Trías it is the human being, in its limes’ inhabitation, who mediates this conjunction and disjunction, in the limes associated with the décalages established between the real object or the sensual object and the real limit or the sensual limit; what embodies this mediation is its performance as de-finire and per-cipere by conjugating the limit as contour or as silhouette. While de-finire operates through the tensions of essence (RO-RL) and eidos (SO-RL), per-cipere operates through the tensions of time (SO-SL) and space (RO-SL). In both cases, the relations between the real limit or the sensual limit and the real object and the sensual object are not that of pure adherence or pure distance; rather they are established as four different limes in which fusions and fissions occur by opening or closing this territory of pressures.

In each of the four cases – allure, confrontation, theory and causality – what occurs is the separation (fission) or union (fusion) between the real limit or the sensual limit and the real object or the sensual object. This process implies the engagement or disengagement of both limits with both objects, opening or closing a décalage that resonates with Trías’s limes and that represents the colonisation of Morton’s rift. Continuing with the spatial metaphor, under allure, confrontation, theory and causality, the limit is no longer an infinitesimal Euclidean line reducible to its obverse or reverse; rather it acquires thickness: the limit becomes a territory in its own right that occupies Harman’s ontography but that is vectorised by Trias’s belong/refer structure. Thus, under the two fissions and fusions, the limit becomes a limes, a narrow and oscillant strip that is inhabitable, susceptible to colonisation, cultivation and worship. It is a space of pressures, an area of junction and disjunction and an unstable land of conflict and resistance. However, in the two fissions and the two fusions, not all qualities are detached or attached to their object. For example, in most if not all cases of allure described by Harman, “the less essential traits of the object break free more easily into independent life, just as a planet’s outermost moons are those most easily liberated.”^[64] If the real limit and the sensual limit are the unified and exhaustive fabric made out of real and sensual qualities, the disengagement or engagement between the real limit and the sensual limit does not uniformly extrude or flatten the limit’s obverse or reverse side (real limit and sensual limit). Rather, it only operates with those particular qualities that are relevant: for example, in allure, those qualities that have become sensual objects in their own right.

In spite of its common territorial and autonomous condition, the limes developed here has three main differences from Trías’s frontier enclosure: it is not a constant condition; it is not uniform; and it is not exclusively inhabited by the human. Instead, the limes is an intermittent, scattered and variable widening of the object’s real limit or sensual limit according to the processes of fusion and fission.

Let’s look, for example, at the case of allure. In this case, the pressure responds to the objectification of certain qualities belonging to the unified and exhaustive set of qualities which constitute the fabric of the sensual limit. Under allure, the infinitesimal, flat and smooth limit becomes bulky and thick; its freshly opened inner space is inhabited by those qualities that have been converted into sensual objects in their own right. However, the limes still operates as a limit, with the peculiarity that it couples objects in a deeper and more robust manner. As in Trías, it does not provide access to what remains mysterious and withdrawn, it “makes no attempt to bring the hidden kingdom of objects into direct visibility.”^[65] Allure doesn’t entail penetrating the limit but rather separating an object from its qualities, that is, disengaging the adherence between the real limit and the sensual limit in order to open a space occupied by those specific qualities converted into sensual objects in their own right. These objectified qualities still belong to their own object and refer to another one, although in allure they invert this structure by pretending to belong to another object and referring to their original one.

Note that the reconstruction of Trías’s limit under the umbrella of OOO leaves the fourfold structure of objects completely intact. It conjures up a limit characterised by four formal principles.

First, the limit belongs to one object and refers to another; this belong/refer structure does not join and disjoin the real object and the sensual object through Trias’s ontological favouring of the human. Instead, it acts through the limit’s derivation as contour and silhouette and its performance as de-finire and per-cipere, which operate through Harman’s four tensions and their derived fissions and fusions.

Second, the limit is doubled into the real limit and the sensual limit; this twofold limit differs from Trias’s obverse and reverse side in two ways: first the limits are internal to each object and not a transcendental condition, and, second, they are not successive – that is, one does not chronologically or topologically follow the other.

Third, the limit is composed of the complete and unified set of real qualities in the real limit, and the complete and unified set of sensual qualities in the sensual limit. Rather than being a receptacle occupied by the human, the qualitative nature of OOO’s limit provides its performativity.

Fourth, the limit, under certain conditions, is spatialised. It expands or contracts as a limes according to the fusions and fissions operated in the four tensions produced by the relation between the real limit or the sensual limit and the real object or the sensual object.

None of these formalisations imply a change in Harman’s fourfold structure. The question is, now, whether this twofold theory of limits is an adequate response to the problems of unification presented by Morton’s rift. As we have previously mentioned, the coexistence between the real object and its sensual object under a single quadruple object presents a requirement that is threefold.

The first demand asks for disjunction. The real limit explicitly accounts for this by being modulated as a contour in relation to the object to which it belongs and as a silhouette in relation to the object to which it refers. The real limit com-presses its object by de-fining its specificity, by contouring its distinction, by providing its thisness. It disjoins the object “to which it belongs” from the object “to which it refers” by the lack of information implied in the process of converting the limit as a contour into the limit as a silhouette. The tensions essence and eidos are involved in this process, together with their respective fusions and fissions, which constitute the two limes associated with the real limit.

The second demand asks for conjunction. The sensual limit explicitly accounts for this by being modulated as a silhouette in relation to the object “to which it belongs” and as a contour in relation to the object “to which it refers.” The sensual limit ex-presses its object by capturing its manifestation from the other objects that are in our field of experience. It joins the object “to which it belongs” to the object “to which it refers” through the excess of information implied in the process of converting the limit as a silhouette into the limit as a contour. The tensions time and space are involved in this process, together with its respective fusions and fissions, which constitute the two limes associated with the sensual limit.

The third demand asks for immanence. The twofold limit described here is not the result of any external force, context or environment. It is not only topologically internal to the quadruple object in its limes spatial register but also constituted by its components: the exhaustive and unified set of its qualities. The limit is therefore radiated by the object, that is, the object “limits” (verb) rather than having a limit or being limited.

Under this view, the metaphysical abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is not constituted by a single ontological rift placed in between the real object and the sensual object but by a twofold limit that belongs to one of the two objects and refers to the other one while constituting a liminal space (limes) of pressures. Thus, rather than a “cracked” object which is dialetheic and double truthed, what we have is a unified object that is internally constituted by a set of com-pressions and ex-pressions – a liminal composite of forces operating within the quadruple object through a twofold operativity. The limit conjoins the real object and the sensual object by being modulated as a silhouette, while simultaneously keeping its radical disjunction by being modulated as a contour.

Morton’s rift resonates with Hegel’s understanding of the limit. The metaphysical abyss that separates the real object and the sensual object is a locus of contradiction and a paradoxical space in which an object both is and is not. Conversely, the object’s twofold limit builds on Trías’s understanding of the limit as a land of affirmation: it is not a mere negative border or frontier but an ambit of allusions and a territory of pressures.

6 Conclusion

The construction of a liminal approach within the framework of OOO in light of Trías’s ontology provides an adequate alternative to Morton’s rift, increasing the consistency of the overall theory. The fact that Trías’s twofold limit can be grafted onto the quadruple object with reasonable ease underpins the relevance of the notion of limit in OOO. In spite of its absent systematisation in Harman’s fourfold structure, the limit is revealed as a powerful conceptual tool: it accounts for the paradoxical relation of conjunction and disjunction established between the real object and the sensual object within the quadruple object.

The unified distinction conjured up by the twofold limit may also lead us to reconsider the dialetheic conception of objects argued by Timothy Morton on the basis of Graham Priest’s logics of contradiction. Morton writes that once a rift is located between appearances and essences within the object itself, “we shall have to accept some kind of paraconsistent, possibly dialetheic logic, the kind of logic proposed by Graham Priest, a logic that allows things to be what they seem, and not what they seem, simultaneously.”^[66] This point is crucial in Morton’s approach, because once this inherent instability is accepted, it is possible to understand objects as autonomous, without having to rely on processes or particles to underpin their existence.

However, if objects are unified, and if this unification is not the result of any external force, the sensual object and the real object of a single quadruple object cannot be completely transparent to one another; a certain friction needs to occur. This resistance takes place in the space of pressures opened up by the object’s twofold limit. In this light, being an object no longer implies being riddled with contradiction, i.e. having at least one thing in them (this is Priest’s and Garfield’s delta) “that is 'both in them and not in them.’”

In light of the preceding analysis, objects would not be what Priest and Garfield define as “inclosures,” in the sense of being both closed and not closed, that is, limited and not limited:

The first part is an argument to the effect that a certain view, usually about the nature of the limit in question, transcends that limit (cannot be conceived, described, etc.). This is Transcendence. The other is an argument to the effect that the view is within the limit – Closure. Often, this argument is a practical one, based on the fact that Closure is demonstrated in the very act of theorizing about the limits. At any rate, together, the pair describe a structure that can conveniently be called an inclosure: a totality, Ω and an object, o, such that o both is and is not in Ω.^[67]

As we have seen, objects are limited in a twofold sense: they limit in the real sense (real limit) because they have a specific thisness independent of the observer (contour) – an object is a rabbit but not an orange, and they limit in the sensual sense (sensual limit) because they have a specific manifestation that depends on the observer (silhouette) – an object is perceived-as rather than perceived.

In this context, the notion of limit becomes relevant not only because it permits us to articulate an adequate response to the problems of unification presented by Morton’s rift but also because it enriches a discussion of the logical status of objects. In this sense, a further development in this direction would permit us to construct an argument opposing the contradictory condition of objects defended by Priest’s dialetheism.