Grenzwesen : espace, frontière, symbole chez Georg Simmel

The starting point is the definition of man as "Grenzwesen" that Simmel gives in his last book, Lebensanschauung: "the border being which has no border". This definition has both metaphysical and ethical value. The first thesis that I develop concerns, therefore, the strategic significance of the concept of border for Simmel's work to the point of providing the very key to understanding his philosophy. In this notion, in fact, converge not only the metaphysical and anthropological instance of his thought, but also the epistemological and aesthetic ones. The question of the border represents, thus, the nervous terminal of the Simmelian intellect (Nervenleben!) and constitutes the very unity between its philosophy and its sociology. If, from a metaphysical and epistemic point of view, the notion of border supposes the dualism between being and value at the origin of the conflict between life and forms, from an anthropological and sociological point of view this notion implies the experience of space, with the dialectic between connection and distinction, proximity and distance that accompanies it. In the light of the spatial character of the experience, the genesis of the symbol is interpreted in the variety of its forms: from money as an economic-social symbol par excellence to the work of art as an aesthetic-artistic symbol. In both cases, the symbolic device does not appear only as a dynamic of positioning and crossing borders, but also stands out as a paradoxically autonomous formation: expression of a social inter-agency, animated at the same time by a conjunctive and dissolving energy.