Transgression with Others

Abstract

In this and the next chapter, I focus on politics not psychology, even as this distinction is more academic than real. The politics are aimed at mitigating the effects of the borderline experience of freedom, such as the tendency to see freedom in the language of all or nothing as well as the tendency to see others as barriers to my freedom, even (or especially) if some of these others are barriers I cannot live without. While I refer frequently to borderline thinking about freedom when proposing the politics I call “transgression with others,” the reader should understand that this and the next chapter have an agenda that is different from the previous five chapters: not to characterize the problem but to suggest how to solve it. In fact, there is no solution, only ways of living and thinking that make the borderline experience of freedom less intense.