The Paradox of Vessel:the Irreversibility of Separation

At first glance, it is a container, something designed to hold, carry, or preserve. But if we look closer, a vessel is not just what it contains. It is also the boundary it asserts, the division it introduces, and the relation it sets between interior and exterior.Before the wall, there is only undivided space. Space without name, without polarity, without interior or exterior. It is not yet a vessel. It is not yet positive or negative, not yet defined. The wall is the first cut, the primal act of division. By raising it, we create categories that had no existence before: inside and outside, full and empty. What was once unity becomes structured, ordered, named.

This act cannot be undone. Even if the wall collapses, the thought of separation remains. Once there is an “interior” and an “exterior,” the scar of that naming persists. Connection is possible, but not unity. For unity to exist again, the very concept of separation must be dissolved.

In art and design, positive space is the object, the form, the matter. Negative space is the emptiness around it, the silence that makes the form legible. But the distinction is unstable.

The inside of a vessel is negative until something is poured in. Then it becomes positive. The outside of the vessel may seem empty until we realize it gives the vessel its very shape. In that moment, the outside becomes form.

Positive space can be negative space from another view. Interior and exterior switch depending on perspective. Yet, once named, the polarity never disappears. The play between them may shift, but the division is inscribed in thought.

A vessel is defined by its wall. This wall separates, but it also relates. It marks a threshold between what is held and what is not. Without this line, there is no vessel, no distinction, no form.

But the wall is not innocent. It is the cut that both creates and wounds. It allows for relation, yet at the same time it fixes the categories of interior and exterior. Once drawn, these categories cannot be forgotten. The boundary is both origin and betrayal.

We imagine ourselves as vessels, containers of thought, memory, and feeling. We picture an internal world distinct from what surrounds us. Yet this metaphor is too narrow.

Like vessels, we are porous, permeable, responsive. What seems internal is constantly shaped by the external. Language, grief, joy, noise, energy, force, all pass through us. What is inside becomes outside when we speak it. What is outside becomes inside when we carry it.

We are not sealed containers. We are in constant exchange with the world. And yet, the cut of selfhood remains. Once the boundary is drawn ;once there is a “me” and a “not-me” , unity is lost. We live inside the cut.

Vessel is not an object. It is a relationship born from division. It mediates space and defines presence, but only by marking a line that did not exist before.

The vessel teaches us this: boundaries are not just thresholds of becoming, they are also scars of separation. They are the edges where meaning begins, but also where unity ends.

To understand the vessel is to accept this paradox. That what divides also connects. That what enables also wounds. That true unity can only appear if the very concept of separation is dissolved. Until then, we remain vessels, shaped by both what we hold and by the wall that holds us apart.

Phenomenology makes this point palpable. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that to touch the wall from within is already to be in relation to what lies beyond it. Interior and exterior are not absolutes but reversible orientations. The wall is porous in perception, but this porosity does not erase the cut. It only reveals its dependence on embodied relation.

Deconstruction sharpens the same paradox. As Derrida shows, “interior” is only intelligible because of “exterior.” Each side depends on its opposite for definition. The wall seems to guarantee separation, but it also undermines it. What is excluded haunts what is enclosed. Still, even if the categories are fragile, they remain categories. Once drawn, they cannot be erased, only destabilized.

Psychoanalysis underscores the irreversibility. Lacan’s mirror stage shows that once the subject recognizes itself as distinct, the dream of primal unity is lost. Winnicott’s transitional object confirms that every boundary oscillates between “me” and “not-me,” but the line is never forgotten. The wall grants identity, but it wounds. It both enables and scars.

Eastern philosophy offers another possibility, though from my position it reads less as rescue than as radical counterpoint. Nishida’s concept of basho holds interior and exterior within a larger unity. Taoism sees the wall as useful only because it makes emptiness possible: the bowl’s essence is in its void. Buddhism goes further, insisting that interior and exterior are empty concepts, existing only in relation. From this perspective, unity is never lost, because separation was never ultimately real. But to me this raises the problem: if the illusion is so deeply woven into thought and perception, can we truly abolish it, or only recognize its emptiness intellectually?

Even in spatial theory, the irreversibility shows its force. Sloterdijk describes how every wall generates new spheres of dwelling. Lefebvre exposes how the interior and exterior divide is political. The wall organizes power as much as space. Here again, the wall is not neutral. It multiplies worlds, divides bodies, structures life.

Thus the vessel remains a paradox. It produces difference by dividing, but it also generates relation. To push through its wall is not to restore primordial wholeness, but to confront the impossibility of returning there. True unity cannot be achieved by reconnecting parts. It requires the abolition of the logic of parts altogether. Unless separation itself is conceptually dissolved, unity remains out of reach.

The vessel teaches this: that every wall is at once origin and wound, condition and betrayal. To dwell within it is to live inside the cut. To abolish it is impossible without abolishing the very categories by which we think. And yet, unless that abolition occurs, what was once unity can never be recovered.

Citation

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception. 1954.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967.

Laozi. Dao De Jing. 4th c. BCE.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.

Nishida Kitarō. An Inquiry into the Good. 1911.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres I: Bubbles. 1998.