Michel Foucault posits provocatively in the opening moments of his 1977–1978 lectures at the College de France that the transition from what he calls the “pastoral of souls” to the “political government of men”¹ poses a particularly difficult problem for thinking:

It should be understood, of course, that I will not try even to sketch the series of transformations that actually brought about the transition from this economy of souls to the government of populations…

It would be interesting to see how these series of insurrections, these revolts of conduct, spread and what effects they have had on revolutionary processes themselves, how they are controlled and taken in hand, and what was their specificity, form, and internal law of development. Well, this would be an entire field of possible research.²

This text assumes that there is indeed an “entire field of possible research” in the offing and this project endeavors to follow the exhortation from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man employed as the epigraph here and “slip into the breaks and look around.” I intend to take Foucault seriously in two important ways: first to posit that transition between subject positions is an identifiable phenomenon and second, in contradistinction to Foucault, to take up the “series of transformations” he identifies as the central point of inquiry of this effort.

Axiomatically, I am fairly comfortable in asserting that two objects cannot occupy the same “space,” and from that point of departure it is clear that if something like a master and a slave exist (as exemplar of oppositional subjects), they cannot in substance be “the same,” so therefore there must be a “space” between them. Alain Badiou, in his text Being and Event , approaches this imperative by asserting:

The central principle of this type is the Leibnizian principle of indiscernibles: there cannot exist two things whose difference cannot be marked. Language assumes the role of law of being insofar as it will hold as identical whatever it cannot distinguish.³

From that assertion it is therefore important to wonder at whether the space between these subjects is empty or is itself a “type” of subjectivity or is altered by its occupation by the subject in transition, however fleeting the moment. If it is the former the analysis in many ways becomes fairly simple: a subject goes from subjectivity a to subjectivity b with no discernible or describable content of Being in the transitional space from one existence to the other. The second option would seem to be of more complex nature in that if there is “something” between these subject positions that is more of a “thing” than “nothing,” then the challenge is to determine what makes up this place of transition and what becomes of the subject during the process. This represents one set of issues but there is an additional problem to consider that is closely related to the question regarding the “durability” of the transitional figure or space. The question is whether the figure that I reference with the title of this text (homo liminalis) is the “third figure” in the room or whether it represents the place “between” figures that are more traditionally understood, defined, and therefore discernible. It is central to the argumentation of this project that there is another subject position between what are the extreme actors (master and slave) that are canonically positioned as the central players in dialectical thinking; this figure, that I label as Elemental, proves essential in building the architecture of this argument but is definitively not the homo liminalis.

Foucault’s Lecture 9 remains important here as it illuminates a space for thinking in this manner. He proposes that:

…the function that philosophy had effectively disappeared in the Middle Ages that is to say philosophy as the answer to the fundamental question of how to conduct oneself. What rules must one give to oneself in order to conduct oneself properly in daily life, in relation to others, in relation to those in authority, to the sovereign or the lord, and in order to direct one’s mind as well, and to direct it in the right direction, to its salvation certainly, but also to the truth.⁴

In thinking with Foucault it is my contention that in proposing that there is a way of conducting oneself unique to various subjects (the sovereign or lord and or “others”) we seem to have located the existence of a being that has decisions to make. Foucault’s decision to leave unexamined the trace between subject positions imbeds a structural problematic that renders the transitional term (homo liminalis) absent from his interrogation though present in his thinking as well as a mediating subject between extremes. This is principally based on the notion that the exegesis of the “series of transformations” will illuminate not just points of unstable transition (homo liminalis) but a stable middle existence (Elemental Being) between extremes. We can note this in the passage quoted above that situates the sovereign as the “other” to which all must relate leaves no space for what I would insert into Foucault’s list of possible ways in which to conduct oneself: that of the subaltern to the “altern” where the “altern” is the stable existence between a sub- and mega-form of Being, and the subaltern to the sovereign or lord. However, by imagining that the distance between the sovereign and the subaltern can be left unexamined, the middle term that allows for the separation between the two is “lost” as is the point of transition between the points of separation.

The opening moments of this argument necessitate an explanation of the architecture that I imagine represents the structure of Western societal order as it relates to broad typologies of subjectivity as an interlocking series of observation-based presuppositions.

The first question that confronts this assertion is whether the two are directly confronting one another. Stated differently, do the two “touch” one another under the terms of this oppositional relationship depicted here (Fig. 1.1)?

This account proposes that the answer to this question is “No.” This is an attempt to establish two important interpretive positions as they relate to Hegel generally and the Master/Slave dialectic(s) particularly and their relationship to this project. Hegel articulates two distinct typologies of recognition through conflict that unfortunately bear the same label: the “first” in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and the “second” in the Phenomenology of Spirit . I have emphasized the notion of ordinal numbers here in that it is obvious that the Phenomenology was written before the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit but the dialectic in the second piece antecedes the other logically.

Following the Hegel of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, there is primordial conflict among man that results in a type of recognition. This recognition is based on the fact that in any given encounter across the registers of life some are more or less dominant than others. In these encounters, the notion of “winning” or “losing” takes on the character of Mastery or Servitude, thus establishing the outer boundaries of the human condition with respect to social encounters and ultimately governance. The point I’m making here is that it seems an oversimplification to imagine that all subjects happen to, at all times, be either master or slave, always either dominating or dominated. There is a place of rest that allows a subject to have space to imagine encounters that require dialectical resolution. Again, Hegel’s Lord and Bondsman are useful here as the ontological basis of the first movement in the establishment of the framework that preoccupies this effort.

The thinking of Edmund Burke in his text of A Philosophical Inquiry Into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is the next step in this thinking. In detail, it is clear that Burke is preoccupied with the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful but what interests me here is that within his exposition of the sublime he frames a relationship between extreme figures that can be mapped against the Sovereignal Continuum that I am developing. Burke asks us to consider first the Sovereign and then the Negro. In Section V of Burke’s text entitled “Power” the philosopher tells us:

Thus we are affected by strength which is natural power . The power which arises from ...