Liminality, Temporality, and Feminine Excess: Reflections on the Panel “Transitionality, Illusion, and Play”, with Associations to Claudia Rankine and Adam Phillips

Seligman, Schoen, and Troise (this issue) each emphasize the “other”—temporal—dimension of transitional space, performing what may be thought of as liminality in action, leading me to associate to the writings of Claudia Rankine (a keynote speaker at the conference1 where this essay was first presented), and to the use of near literal metaphors that emerge across Black feminist texts depicting the stalled time, foreclosed spaces of the ‘Middle Passage,’ and the excessive traumas borne by the Black womb. Such hauntings echo within psychoanalysis: in its erasures of feminine, its silencing of the vaginal signifier—erasures which, in turn, reverberate in Adam Phillips’ conference keynote (this issue). Though explicitly an homage to psychoanalysis’s unpredictable, excessive effects, Phillips’ implicitly summons the feminine. The author concludes that by means of the spatializing vaginal signifier, psychoanalysis figures an aperture for courting feminine excess, bearing disruptive liminality and temporality, and opening onto a nondual field of transformation, beyond patriarchal grasping.