liminality

Noun

liminality (countable and uncountable, plural liminalities)

1. The fact of being on the border of, or in between, two states.
   • Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of...2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 2
2. The state or quality of ambiguity which exists in the middle stage of certain events or rituals (such as a rite of passage or a society-wide revolution), during which the participating individual or group no longer holds its pre-ritual status but has not yet attained the status it will hold when the ritual has been completed.
   • The second way Novalis seeks to repotentize his thought is by striving to evoke feelings conducive to liminality.1998, Joseph Frederick Bailey, Theorizing night vision: Novalis's "Hymnen an die Nacht.", page 209