When French existentialists such as Sartre, de Sade or even to an extent Merleau-Ponty speak of absurdity they are referring to the inadequacy of logical explanation. This runs somewhat against Kierkegaard for whom anguish, despair and dread were equated with the sheer impossibility of rationality. Drawing from the significant repercussion of utilitarianism at the end of the nineteenth century, and the view of not only acknowledging but also trying to regulate irrational behaviour, Merleau-Ponty was prompted to exclaim that it was the special task of the twentieth century to devise a comprehensive way of explaining the irrational (Usher 1955).
This immediately begs the question as to what the special task of the twenty-first century might be. One possible answer lies with what the cultural historian Henning Eichberg (2001) calls a system of thinking contradictions. Not in the sense of oppositions, of course, since this was one of the methodological results of the structuralist project. Nor with the realisation that arguments harbour many contradictions which from being exposed can be smoothed over. This is the rationale behind dialectical reasoning. Rather, the framework for thinking in contradiction verges on what Edward Soja (1996) has referred to as trialectics. In short, this is a process of thought development which takes place in directions that sometimes converge, sometimes diverge and occasionally emerge but which are always open to radical otherness, to extreme alterity. This takes us beyond the conventional formulation of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to a perspective immediately concerned with a way of imagining ‘other-than’ alternatives. Similar, perhaps, to the popular adage ‘thinking outside the box’.

(Patrick Laviolette "Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport")