Abstract: The fascination for the extreme communicated by travel narratives bears witness to the cultural valorization of risk-taking in postmodern societies. This phenomenon, which psychiatry connects to a certain way of being in the world–or which anthropology explains as the imaginary of a relationship with death, is described by many travelers as the crossing of the double limit that separates humans from a reality that exceeds them and from the part of the unknown that they seek to discover in themselves.
