Homo Liminalis: The Tears of the Caterpillar. Prepared for: The Department Africana Studies Brown University Providence, Rhode Island

Transcription

1 Homo Liminalis: The Tears of the Caterpillar Prepared for: The Department Africana Studies Brown University Providence, Rhode Island A dissertation prepared in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. in Africana Studies. By, Michael E. Sawyer Ph.D. Candidate Department of Africana Studies Brown University B.S. United States Naval Academy (Political Science) M.A. University of Chicago (International Relations) M.A. Brown University (Comparative Literature)

2 1 AUTHORIZATION TO LEND AND REPRODUCE THE THESIS As the sole author of this dissertation, I authorize Brown University to lend it to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. May 1, 2015 Michael Sawyer, Author I further authorize Brown University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. May 1, 2015 Michael Sawyer, Author

3 2 This dissertation by Michael E. Sawyer is accepted in its present form by the Department of Africana as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date: B. Anthony Bogues, Advisor Professor of Africana Studies Brown University Recommended to the Graduate Council Date: Date: Date: Anani Dzidzienyo, Reader Associate Professor of Africana Studies Brown University Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Reader Professor of Comparative Literature Brown University RA Judy, Reader Professor of English University of Pittsburgh Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

4 3 Table of Contents 1. Presuppositions 1 2. First Division Second Division Third Division Fourth Division Fifth Division End Notes 453

5 4 Acknowledgements First, I feel compelled to acknowledge the time and space of the production of this dissertation and its existence as the first from the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University coincident with the celebration of the 250 year history of this institution. I endeavored to take up a topic within the field of Africana Studies that allows for us to consider the intellectual erasures and barriers that have existed that have forced the intellectual production of people of color to wait to this moment, two and one half centuries later, to be explicitly recognized as a discipline of thought worthy of the recognition of a Ph.D. The shortcomings of this document are mine, the author, to bear but it has been produced with this monumental task in mind and to acknowledge through its existence that it is only one in a long line of ideas that should have been recognized in similar fashion. I would be remiss in failing to recognize the faculty and staff of the Department of Africana studies who worked so diligently to create this program and then granted me the opportunity to join the first cohort along with my cohort mate, Nicosia Shakes for whom I have tremendous respect, admiration and love and look forward to seeing finish her dissertation as well. Of particular note is Professor Anani Dzidzienyo who is the type of professor I strive to be in many ways. None of this would have been possible without the mentorship, example, friendship and integrity of my dissertation chair Barrymore Anthony Bogues. I will forever be grateful for the first piece of advice you gave me before the beginning of my course work: To read everything as if for the first time every time. That reading practice has productively broadened my thinking and enriched my enjoyment of old friends who become new again each time I take them up. Professor RA Judy of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh has been as close a friend, mentor and exemplar of excellence as Professor Bogues and the sacrifices you made to be part of this project are beyond the scope of this short acknowledgement to honor. Professor Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, from the first day of my attendance of her seminar in Radical Italian Political Thought both welcomed and honed through her special brand of pedagogy my thinking and made me comfortable to think across registers, disciplines and environments. Professors John Edgar Wideman and Percival Everett have been invaluable literary heroes of mine who were willing to take seriously my writing and thinking and push me to keep searching for new ways to make a contribution in letters. My parents, Ernest and Theresa Sawyer made all of this possible. They provide an environment for my brother and me to exceed the possibilities that segregation and prejudice had provided them and without their constant support then and now, the space I needed to pursue this credential would not have been impossible. Along with them, I have to thank my little brother Professor Mark Q. Sawyer who made all of this possible thorough his example and excellence at the same time that my aunt, Joyce M. Kocher, M.D. demonstrated the same.

6 5 Special thanks are due Ashley and Ellis Sawyer, who also sacrificed with us all to create this space to indulge this ambition and I hope that this example proves useful as you both take up your own space in a world that can only benefit from your voices. To my colleagues and friends here at Brown, particularly Kenny Berger and Meghan McBride, I value our conversations beyond measure. To Karida Brown, I will borrow from Stevie Wonder and say: For you/there Might be a brighter star/but through my eyes the light of you is all I see/for you there might be another song/but all my heart can hear is your melody (Another Star). Finally, this is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Ruth Kocher, who I always knew as Nanny and who passed before this journey was complete but up until the last moments believed that this was possible for me even when I doubted it. I miss you.

7 6 Abstract Homo Liminalis: The Tears of the Caterpillar is a work in political philosophy that considers the metamorphosis of the subject as it seeks alternative modes of being through revolutionary alteration of the terms of existence via individual and societal transformations. It addresses the concept of constituted and constituting authority that serve as the addressee of the grievances of marginalized subjects who develop theories of rebellion, revolt and revolution in the service of recovery of true self-consciousness. The thinking is from the perspective of the racialized other and offers a complete philosophical system to understand 1) the nature of the relationship of sovereign authority to the radical Other ; 2) the creation of the ontological and material Other ; 3) transitions between modes of being and; 3) an account of revolutionary interruption of this logic. The project disciplinarily, to be placed as one in political philosophy, but not necessarily limited to that - works out, through a series of propositions and close readings, a theory of the subject poised but continually moving in crossfire between vertical and horizontal axes. These axes are conceived in both spatial and temporal terms. Along the horizontal axis, I imagine the Abject, Elemental and Exalted beings as representative of varied relations with sovereign authority; along the vertical axis, those of the Divine, Common, and Profane. The intersection therefore is that of the Elemental/Common, and it is this point that in reality constitutes the real object of analysis. The Elemental/Common constitutes both a position and a liminal point of negotiation between the Divine, Profane, Exalted and Abject. The Elemental/Common is simultaneously the site of citizenship and of liminality, insofar as it must perforce not only negotiate borders, but also be a border. And in this latter capacity, it must always/ever negotiate not just incursions into its territory but also its own desires to move elsewhere. The central thematic concern of this project is to establish a philosophical tool for the examination of the experience of transition; thinking that is aided by employing elements of theology that deal with questions of kenosis. As a subject alters its being what is expelled and whether this expulsion is a push or a pull and then to think at whether this emptying is filled, if so by what and if not whether this emptiness itself represents the way of being under examination. The intellectual constellation that serves as the point of departure for this project is heavily indebted to post-colonial thinking (Du Bois, Fanon, Spivak, Mbembe, Cesaire), phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), literature (Shakespeare, Melville, Ellison, Morrison) and contemporary political philosophy and theory (Agamben, Negri, Badiou, Nancy). Keywords: Critical Race Theory/ Africana Studies/ Post-Colonial Theory/ Political Philosophy/ Critical Theory/ Literary Theory/ Othello/Benito Cereno/ Invisible Man/ Beloved/ Michelangelo/R&B Music/Jazz

8 7

9

10 Presuppositions And you slip into the breaks and look around. Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1: Introduction In short, it is becoming a matter of urgency to know whether social critique is to be made by virtue of a presupposition that is not at all social (an ontology of Being-tout-court, as it were) or by virtue of an ontology of being-in-common, that is, of the plural singular essence of Being. That is why the subject of ontology first of all entails the critical examination of the conditions of critique in general. Being Singular Plural Jean-Luc Nancy The central problematic preoccupying this project is to wonder at the interaction between various subjects that have differential relationships with sovereignty. What I mean by differential relationships is that some actors are, in the terms we have become familiar with from Hegel, Masters and others Slaves. This seems clear both from a perspective of abstract thinking and the historical record but in my mind leaves two important questions open that form what I hope to be the central contributions of this effort: 1) how, if it is possible, does a subject transition from one mode of being (i.e. slave) to another, (i.e. master) and 2) whether there is a space in between these subject positions that is not just transitional but itself a discernible way of being? Both of these questions work in concert and in real ways sketch out the meaning of what I have selected as the title of this project, Homo Liminalis; which is to say that I am search of the answer to the question as to whether the transitional actor (homo liminalis) is a subject position of the sort we have come to accept

11 2 like the master or the slave or is fundamentally different in that it represents the subject in transition rather than a subject position in itself. There is little doubt that focusing the attention of this effort on the transitional comes with its own set of difficulties. A point of departure for this effort is found in Foucault s lectures at the College de France where he identifies the existence of this problematic. In lecture nine of 8 March 1978 Foucault references the transition from what he calls the pastoral of souls to the political government of men 1 but asserts that: 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 I intend to take Foucault seriously here in two important ways. First, to note along with him, that the transition between subject positions is an identifiable phenomenon and second, in contradistinction to Foucault, to indeed take up the series of transformations he notes as the centerpiece of this research project. As a matter of principal, I am fairly comfortable in asserting that two objects cannot occupy the same space and in saying that it is clear that something like a master and a slave cannot in substance be the same there is, therefore, a space between them. From that assertion it is therefore important to wonder at whether the space between these subjects is empty space or is itself a type of subjectivity however fleeting. 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 content of being from one to the other. The second option would seem to be

12 3 of more complex nature in that if there is something between that is more of a thing than nothing then the challenge is to determine what makes up this place of transition and what the subject becomes in 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 seeming necessity for a transitional figure or space. The question is whether the figure referenced (homo liminalis) is the third figure in the room or whether there is another subject that must be accounted for. It is central to 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. Again, Foucault s Lecture 9 is important here. He proposes that the very appearance or reappearance of: 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. 3 In thinking with Foucault here, it is my contention that his decision to leave unexamined the trace between subject positions imbeds a structural problematic that renders the third term invisible to his examination. This is principally based on the notion that the exegesis of the series of transformations will illuminate not just points of unstable transition but a stable middle existence between extremes. We can note this in the passage quoted above that situates the sovereign as the other to which all must relate leaving 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 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.

13 4 There are several reasons for the intuition that leads me to devote the time to identifying and defining this third party. It seems that western political philosophy implicitly requires a third position. One example of this might be the notion of the General Will in the thinking of Rousseau. It doesn t seem satisfying to me to posit that if the subject is not the sovereign or the exceptional figure, the law-giver, then she is necessarily slave. The figure that is neither sovereign nor the law-giver is certainly below these subjects but does not necessitate the designation of slave in the absence of mastery. Rousseau accounts for this in his thinking in that the non-sovereign subject that does not occupy the unique position of exception that is the law-giver and chooses not to follow the law becomes an enemy and is subject to death as the penalty for this transgression. I will examine this in more substantive fashion later but for now what I would say is that this theoretical paradigm requires three positions: the law-giver, the enemy and the subject who becomes negatively marked in choosing not to follow the strictures of the law that is neither law giver or enemy. There are canonical examples of thinking on this matter of sovereignty and how it operates in opposition to the lesser subject that provide points of departure for this text. One generative place for this project has been Jacques Derrida s The Beast & the Sovereign Vol. 1 that obviously situates itself firmly into the thinking on this phenomenon with respect to the two extreme figures. However, in Derrida s critical Seminar 11 he implicitly, in my reading sketches out the outline of the third subject that concerns us that is analogous to the title figure in this project to the observer; the homo liminalis. In this lecture, Derrida describes an historical event from the reign of Louis XIV when the Sun King is present for the dissection of an elephant. In unpacking this incredible scene, Derrida provides Four remarks on this point before going further 4 that I will quote partially here.

14 5 1. We have in spite of everything, faced with this scene, this picture under the eye of a painter, the striking impression of hand-to-hand combat [un corps à corps]. Hand-to-hand between whom and whom, whom and what? First between two great bodies, the beast and the sovereign, of course. Between two immense living beings first of all: the king of kings, the greatest of all kings, Louis le Grand, and the greatest animal 2. This scene of knowledge is phenomenal as the elephant. This is a phenomenal beast, a phenomenal elephant, i.e. an object that appears, in its phainesthai, to the gaze of the learned observers but of a Sun King. 3. This setup (wanting to have the power to see and to know [vouloir avoir le pouvoir de voir et de savoir]-and you can manipulate this chain in <all> directions), is mediated by institutions. This whole scene of dissection and anatomy lesson (an anatomy lesson that always presupposes some cadaver subject to the hand, the instrument and the gaze of man; anatomical inspection always presupposes some cadavers docile to autopsy) unfolds under the authority of an Academy of Sciences, itself created, like the Académie française, by a sovereign monarch. To whom it remains very docilely subjected. 4. Finally the structure of this setup of knowing-power, power-to-know, knowing-how-to-see, and sovereign beingable-to-see is not, fundamentally, revolutionized by the French Revolution The walls are destroyed, but the architectural model is not deconstructed-and will, as you will see, continue to serve as a model and even an international model. 5 There are significant moments in these passages that demonstrate the existence of this third steady state subject position that interests me. We have the beast here in the elephant and we have the sovereign in the presence of Louis but we also have, what Derrida marks first as the learned observers who are apparently members of the Académie française which is docilely subjected to the monarch. It is this notion of docile subjectivity that is not part of the hand-to-hand combat between Louis and the Elephant that is the space that I am describing and, at least in this classic example is explicitly

15 6 referenced as mediating. This, in my thinking, troubles the notion of an eternally dialectical relationship between the sovereign and the beast or the master and slave. The members of the science academy, in the example before us, are clearly subordinate to Louis but I hesitate to read them as subjected to the level of enslavement. In substance, it is their learned presence that makes the exercise worthwhile and it is the relationship of that knowledge to the desire of Louis for this observational experience that makes a substantive case for a third subject between the beast and sovereign or Hegel s master and slave. Derrida s seminars on this matter are generative in my thinking on this in that in Seminar 12, he takes up important contemporary notions of the hierarchical relationship of subjects to one another and a coherent system of institutional organization by incisively addressing Michel Foucault s final chapter of The History of Sexuality, Right of Death and Power Over Life and Giorgio Agamben s Homo Sacer. All three of these thinkers in different ways create the discursive space that I am striving to fill with this project by leading me to point toward the Atlantic World and the plantation as the evolved praxis of the separation of subjects into actors with positive, negative, or neutral relations with sovereign power. Derrida, in Seminar 12, employs his critique to note what he deems are limitations in the thinking of both Foucault and Agamben in grappling with the relationship of politics to biological life that he situates as being exposed in robust fashion by Aristotle in his Politics. Let us first take into account the textual situation of this definition of man as a political animal, or, more literally, of man who is by nature (physei) a political animal (politikon zoon). This definition comes up at the very opening, the beginning, the commencement of politics, at the commencement of the first book of Aristotle s Politics. 6

16 7 Derrida s purpose in this critique of Foucault and Agamben relative to Aristotle is, in my reading, to point to the fact that the new thing, bio-politics, that they both have as their central concern has been well theorized well prior to the epochs and epistemes that they mark as serving as the inauguration of a new understanding of the relationship of the body to regimes of coercion. Foucault for his part, in the chapter referenced in The History of Sexuality makes the following claim that is relevant to this project: Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, biologizing, statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power. 7 It is this marking of epochs and degree ( most cunning and most naïve ) that seem to concern Derrida which is identifiable through his reading of Agamben s reading of Foucault: To show [the introduction of zoe into the sphere of the polis], Agamben is required to demonstrate that the difference between zoe and bios is absolutely rigorous, already in Aristotle. Can he do this? Before proceeding down this path, I should like to take a precaution. My questions or my reservations here, whether directed toward Foucault or, more precisely here, toward Agamben, don t mean that I have no interest in anything that could be called a specificity in the relations between the living beings and politics, in what these authors so calmly call modernity. New things are certainly happening in this respect today. 8

17 8 Agamben s Homo Sacer, in its relationship to these essential questions and the associated critique also marshals Nazism as exemplar of the regime of embodied coercion that concerns him. When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent visible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp-and not the prison-is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that while prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the normal order, the juridical constellation that guides the camp is (as we shall see) martial law and the state of siege. That is why it is not possible to inscribe the analysis of the camp in the trail opened by the works of Foucault, from Madness and Civilization to Discipline and Punish. As the absolute space of exception, the camp is topologically different from a single space of confinement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link between localization and ordering is definitively broken, that has determined the crisis of the old nomos of the earth. 9 This project is hardly the first to note that sequentially Foucault, Agamben and Derrida, in one way or another seem to have missed the trans-atlantic slave trade and that historical epoch s relationship to technologies of coercion and, in many ways, most importantly, the relationship along a continuum of the state to the legacy of this atrocity in contemporary times. This project is not situated as a critique of this silence on the part of these important thinkers but, as referenced above, there is a space created by the trio s important discourse regarding the matter of sovereignty that can be marshaled in addressing the plantation specifically as a material manifestation of this thinking and in the abstract the question that preoccupies me regarding the middle term that seems to exist between the extreme terms of oppositional being. In establishing the terms of this effort much thought has gone into selecting what to call the extreme terms, canonically master/slave, beast/sovereign, friend/enemy, etc. which represents its own set of methodologically and epistemological problems. In order to

18 9 separate this project discursively from the particularly fraught terms of master and slave I have selected the Exalted and the Abject to represent the extreme positions in the dialectical relationship that marks the limits of the sovereign continuum that I am proposing. The methodological reasoning behind this, particularly as it relates to the fact that this project is centered around an examination of slavery and mastery as material conditions of ontological moment, is to insure that the particularity of the enslaved Black body mastered by the logics of white supremacy is not lost in the useful abstraction of Hegel s master and slave that can stand for relations that range from slavery itself to quotidian ordering of society outside the context of coercive force (teacher/student). My goal is to situate the Exalted and Abject as abstract categories of which Atlantic world slavery and mastery are specific typologies. This in itself does not trouble the structure or language that is related to Hegelian dialectical thinking where the presence of one or more middle or transitional subjects seem to exist in my reading of this situation. Once again, in order to maintain the integrity of the methodological decision here to work from the abstract to the specific it will not due for me to situate, for instance, the scientists that facilitated the dissection of the elephant for Louis observation as the subject for observation. Those actors, like the enslaved African, or the English master, represent particularities of the phenomenon that concerns me here. In that I have elected to label the stable third term that is arguable mediating or perhaps moderating or even an empty signifier as the Elemental subject. The argument is that this category is robust because it represents the place that holds particular figures like the citizen, the member of the Académie française, and even the human that then have the potentiality of Abject or Exalted subject positions that requires passage from or through this position as well as that of the limit figure the homo liminalis.

19 10 In turning to the plantation in introductory fashion it is my intention to demonstrate that this space of the construction of a specific type of violence is constituted of and constitutes certain figures: principally the master who here fills the space of the Exalted subject and is invested with an (over) abundance of sovereignty in important ways and the enslaved figure as the Abject actor who along this sovereign continuum represents a profound lack of agency. This is coterminous with the traditional understanding of the institution of chattel slavery as a Manichean space of conflict between figures but does not account for various technologies on the part of (en)mastered i and enslaved alike to alter the terms of the absolute lack or abundance of sovereignty. This is represented by historical relationships like that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings or more abstractly, but in many ways more important, the technologies employed by the female enslaved to wrest control of their reproductive systems from absolute mastery through a variety of rebellious interactions with the discourse of death. This will be taken up in detail later in this project. For now, the task is to define the abstract subjects, Abject, Elemental and Exalted. This project is predicated on a series of related presuppositions that have grown out of critical engagement with a set of canonical formulations that in many ways have as their central concern the presence of the absolute Other. This Other, as employed in this project, can be read as occupying a space that is located at two extremes of being; on the one hand absolutely sovereign in many ways and at the other extreme, absolute in the lack of agency. This fairly straightforward and broadly accepted concept of the extremes of being raises several critical questions that preoccupy this effort: What are the implication of observation of the sublime figure of himself or of another similar subject? What, if anything, i Master, as such, is not allowed to be represented as an ontological condition of certain subjects in this project.

20 11 lies between these two extremes of being across this continuum of sovereign being? The term continuum, prior to proceeding must be dealt with. The term, as employed here, is not meant to mark a seamless transition between the three subject positions that I have proposed. As will be made apparent, the argument is that the logic of the relationship between these subject positions follows that relations between human figures is tied into the logic of the continuum marked earlier in this section that Foucault established between the God and the sovereign. I argue that it is the desire on the part of the Exalted figure to continue the legitimacy granting logic of imitating the art of creation and rule by God in the affairs of man. Foucault buttresses this thinking by his meditation on Saint Thomas assertion that the sovereign [was never] only a sovereign, that he only had to rule and governing was not one of his tasks. 10 It is this multiplicity of duties on the part of the sovereign that I read as support for the notion of a continuum of sovereign relationships across the spectrum of subjects under consideration. The sovereign for her part, at least according to Foucault s reading of Aquinas, rather than being free of responsibility has a dual role: On the contrary, he always said that the king had to govern. He even gives a definition of the king: the king is he who governs the people of a single city and a single province, and he does so with a view to the common good. The king is the one who governs the people. But what I think is important is that according to Saint Thomas, the monarch s government has no specificity with respect to the exercise of sovereignty. There is no discontinuity, no specificity, and no division between the two functions of being sovereign and governing. 11 I agree with much of this statement on the part of Foucault but at the same time view it as fruit of the poisonous tree that he has elected to dine in his avoidance of marking the substance of the transition between things. Here he explicitly notes that there is no difference between the functions of being sovereign and governing but does not allow for

21 12 their use as interchangeable terms. The task of this entire project is to meditate on what the transition between things: even things that are in substance, at the point of stasis, the same amounts to. Along these lines, the lack of discontinuity marked by Foucault is present in the characterization here of sovereignty operating along a continuum that is interrupted by points of transition (large and small) that themselves are an essential part of the seamless logic that the idealized understanding of this paradigm requires. This introduction is designed to lay out the multiplicity of questions that provide momentum for this project and Edmund Burke, in his canonical treatise on the aesthetic, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Idea of The Sublime and the Beautiful, exposes a position from which to begin to answer many of them, while establishing the foundation from which it is possible to articulate the set of presuppositions that provide the intellectual basis for this effort. 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 was mentioned above. The question of a continuum of sovereignty against which I intend to map this portion of the discussion is critical. Burke asks us, in two separate places in his text, 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 institutions in kings and commanders, has the same connection with terror. Sovereigns are frequently addressed with the title of dread majesty. And it may be observed that young persons little acquainted with the world, and who have not been used to approach men of power, are commonly struck with awe which takes away the free use of the faculties. 12 Later in the same text, Section XV, Darkness Terrible in its own nature we find the following narrative with respect to a child who has his sight restored at age 13 or 14.

22 13 Among many remarkable particulars that attended his first perceptions on visual objects the first time the boy saw a black object, it gave him great uneasiness and that some time after, upon accidently seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight. The horror, in this case can scarcely be supposed to arise from any association In our instance there is no reason to think that the ill effects of black on his imagination were more owing to the connexion with any disagreeable ideas, than that the good effects of more cheerful colours where derived from the connexion with pleasing ones. They had both, probably their effects from their natural operation. 13 What I am proposing here is that Burke has established a fundamental binary by situating the sovereign and the negro woman as eliciting similar (the same?) reactions from their contemplation by the most innocent of observers: the child. In the second case, interestingly, a child whose mind has developed independent of visual observation and therefore must be entrusted to provide an honest response to visual stimulation of all sorts. The two figures, the King and the Negro, are not the same if only because of the extremes in which they exist with respect to questions of agency. The king has complete agency, not only over himself but over others and the Negro exists as a lack with respect to agency of the self and over others. The two are read as sublime and the two will be positioned oppositionally (dialectically so), against one another as representative of the radically Other. What Burke does not provide is an account of the implications associated with the first of the questions posed above regarding the sublime figure observing the sublime. The point here is not to attempt to theorize that experience but to mark it in that there must be some third figure that occupies a critical distance apart from these two Others. In both of the instances referenced here, the critical figure is a child who is struck by the observation and whose reaction are observed by another party who, unlike the child, maintains possession/control of his faculties and is capable of relating the experience for our

23 14 consumption. The point of departure is therefore the assertion that begins with situating the radically Other. 2: The Presuppositions: Presupposition #1: The Abject and the Exalted exist opposite one another yet elicits similar responses upon their observation. In order to provide a more capacious framework: the Exalted will serve as the category of which the sovereign is a specific typology and the Abject, the category that includes the slave, which exists as one of a variety of types of this form of subaltern being. 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 as depicted: Abject Exalted Figure 1 This account posits 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. First I would like to establish that 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. Having established this fact from Hegel s ouvre the question of the Exalted and the Abject as oppositional subjects can be explored more thoroughly. As stated above and following the Hegel of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit there is primordial conflict amongst

24 15 man that results in a type of recognition. This recognition is of 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 or even governmentality. 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 is useful here as the ontological basis of the first movement in the establishment of the framework that preoccupies this effort. The next step is informed, by the Burke in two important ways the first of these we have laid out above at the outset of this section and the second is related to the fact of the similarity of reaction to the sovereign and Negro woman. Though the reaction is the same the figures being reacted to are not. On the contrary, it is the profound inequity in subjectivity of the two figures that leads me to wonder at the flatness of the response to the two and deducing that they must me situated along a continuum of sovereignty; at one pole its super-abundance (the king) and at the other the absolute lack (the negro). Burke is careful to situate the observer at a remove from the sublime figures. The child, I am reading, as representative of the Elemental subject that is most particularly different enough from either the king or the Negro to be startled by the observation of both. It is this explicit point of perspective that leads to Presupposition #2. Presupposition #2: The Abject and the Exalted do not interact directly.

25 16 Picking up from there, I propose that if the two extreme subjects do not touch one another there must be some mediating term between them. This is obvious from the account provided by Burke that serves as the point of departure for the opening of this thinking. The king and the Negro are observing neither themselves nor the other. The child, in both instances is the interlocutor. The question can then be asked as the whether the king and the slave encounter one another directly under the terms of the Hegelian Lord and Bondsman dialectic after the formative encounter in the state of nature? As a product of the recognitive encounter in the state of nature, the Elemental Subject, in this framing pre-exits the subjectivities of the Exalted and the Abject and continues to serve as a mediating position between the two. The point here is that the logical trajectory from the primordial state of direct conflict to social order establishes the continuum of sovereignty from its abundance to its lack but for the most part the notion of direct encounters is left behind and the subject trends toward the middle and mediating term of human-ness that is a state of existence that is measurably beyond the status of bare life in the Agambean sense of the things. The proposed structure is potentially coercive and confrontational; that energy is always present and can be unleashed but it is the goal of the human to find a place of rest or shelter from the experience of the kinetic energy or power of the structure. Understanding this we can return to the question of perspective that seems important here. It would seem that a mediating position would exist in this architecture that facilitates the possibility of experiencing wonder. The Burke has situated a third party observer that grants the reader access to this experience in terms that are understood. Additionally, this mediating term can be taken seriously as the locus of a contemplative place for imagination. The classical formation of this notion of mediation between two figures who have radically different relationships with sovereignty is found in G.W.F. Hegel s

26 17 Phenomenology of Spirit in the much quoted master/slave dialectic that situates the thing (das ding) between the Lord and Bondsman. The servant is self-consciousness per se, relates himself negatively to the thing and sublates the thing. However at the same time the thing is for him self-sufficient, and for that reason he cannot by way of his negating activity be over and done with it all the way up to the point of having eliminated it, that is the servant merely works on it. 14 ( 190) Hegel s account seems to be at odds with the process here in that the appearance of the Thing is a result of the direct encounter between the Master and the Slave. Here the proposition is that the mediating observer exists external to this conflict and is not the product of a confrontation between the two but occupies a necessary space of mediation/observation between them. Burke s embodied observer (the child) and the observer of that observer do not appear to be related to a dialectical experience between these extremes and therefore the necessity of mediation and the thing between the two actors here is what I will refer to as the Elemental. Presupposition #3: the Exalted. The Elemental is the mediating term between the Abject and Abject Elemental Exalted Figure 2 The subject that occupies this place of rest and observation is established as the Elemental; a distinct subjectivity that provides the stuff of primordial conflict and remains preset after. The Human as such, is formed from the Elemental subject. Human here is a fraught term and much of this effort will be occupied with situating this way of thinking

27 18 amongst the state of scholarship of the Human, the post-human and things other-than- Human that I believe requires a paradigmatic structure to provide shape. What is the role of the Human in this structure? As mentioned in Presupposition #1, all beings do not find themselves at all times in the position of Exalted or Abject relative to society as a whole. Secondarily, it seems clear from the presentation of Presupposition #2 that there is clearly another subject in the room, so to speak, as the informant for our engagement with the sublime. The Elemental subject provides the support that prevents the collapse of the Exalted and Abject into the primordial state of explicit, direct conflict. A way of thinking about this might be the implication for modern society when there is no discernible middle class. The middle class serves as a mediating type of subjectivity that grants shape, coherence and longevity to the superstructure that is designed to facilitate the existence of the extremes. It is from the purchase of the Elemental that it is possible to observe and be effected by the experience of the Abject and the Exalted. Further, it seems clear that the observer of the effected observer operates at a remove from the initial viewing, if only because the observational perspective of the observer does not experience a loss of faculties establishing yet another layer of mediation that will be taken up later. The position of the figure that can be categorized as Elemental raises several critical questions that deal directly with the interaction of the subjects presented here. Is there a dialectical relationship that produces a product (much like the Thing of Hegel s formulation) that allows the observer of this interaction to be aware of the position of the subject whose account of the encounter is presented for our analysis? Stated differently, how can we be sure that the observer and the account provided is not the unmediated observation of the radically Other that our (mis)perception situates as occupying this space of observational purchase? Questions of the perceptions of the observer and the observed prove critical in this project

28 19 and keeping track, as best we can, of the role played by each allows us to understand the interaction. Hegel s formulation, in that it produces a product of sorts that one of the two participants works on for the benefit of the other orders the parties through this process. The strictly observational aspect of the relationship described here pressures us to develop an alternative set of criterion to insure that our analysis gives us an understanding of the subject that is under consideration. Where Hegel resurges as an important framework to consider in and around this paradigm is in the contemplation of the barriers that are posited to exist between the broad types of subjects enumerated here. As a practical matter, the fact of different types of subjects presupposes that there be barriers between them of some sort that mark out the boundaries of the possibility of discerning one subject from the other. In thinking with Hegel here it is possible to read the Master/Slave dialectic as the relationship between a subject, for instance the Exalted, and the threshold or barrier between this figure and Elemental being. The barrier/threshold itself becomes the point of conflict between the subject and this paradigmatic structure and, in Hegelian terms, the Thing produced by this contact of subject and barrier is the thing that the subject then works upon in the process of transition. Much more about this later but there is a way in which this thinking marks the presence of the homo liminalis as das ding in Hegelian terms and this transitional figure, opposing the barrier obstructing an alteration in subjectivity can be mapped productively against the Master/Slave of the Phenomenology. The transition between these subjectivities; the Exalted becoming Elemental and vice versa, or the Abject becoming Elemental or vice versa is opposed by barriers that are crossed voluntarily or involuntarily. Much of the initial stages of this project will be devoted to understanding these barriers and the methods and results of crossing them.

29 20 Abject Elemental Exalted Figure 3 Presupposition #4: With respect to the Elemental that serves as the mediating term, there exists a continuum of being along this status that has as its middle term, with respect to the Human, the Citizen. The structure is depicted graphically: Citizen Abject Elemental (Human-ess) Exalted Figure 4 In some ways the nature of this structure is only prevented from collapsing in on itself by the strength of the borders between the Exalted and Elemental, and Abject and Elemental. The question that will occupy this effort on this essential aspect of the paradigm centers on the construction, materiel, firmness, passability, and strength of these obstructions that also serve as the supports presented here. As a practical matter, the way this structure is represented, the Exalted and Abject do not rest upon the Elemental outside of mediation by these borders. It becomes essential to account for the construction of these borders and understand how they are supported against collapse. The central argument here is that the structures as such are the product of the alternatively positive and negative imaginings of the subjects presented here. The practice of coherent governance or the fact of government as a legitimate, on-going institution depends, after implementation by the sovereign, on the support of the terms of these separations by

30 21 the masses or by the Elemental. The core nature of the threshold between the Exalted and the Elemental and the Abject and the Elemental is coercive force that may or may not operate overtly. Second order manifestations of this foundation of culture that seems related to the paradigm writ large are exemplified by laws, customs, and social convention. The desire to avoid the coercive power of the state in enforcing these separations by staying in place provides for the coherence and cohesiveness of state formation. For example, the Exalted defends vigorously her position as distinct from that of the Elemental. The Abject finds her desire for a return to elementality and perhaps humanity fiercely opposed by the Elemental as a proxy for the sovereign in the most extreme cases. As a practical matter, the closer the subject draws to the limits of his current position within the paradigm the more latent the power of the border becomes. As the Exalted is pulled toward the border between itself and the Elemental the crossing is opposed by the power of the subject being dragged across the threshold. The coup is one type of illustration of this while the abdication of a ruler represents another. At the opposite extreme, as the Elemental draws toward the threshold between himself and the Abject the transformation must be opposed. On the other side of the border, the Abject s strivings to be Elemental can be resisted in several ways: The Elemental can oppose this crossing as a deputy of the state or can fight it to prevent a type of inversion as when the Abject replaces the Elemental as the structure of this societal order remains in tact but the roles alter. Much of this paradigm of the state and the rigidity of the boundaries depend on its relationship to the divine. Presupposition #5: The entirety of this paradigm will operate in this project as the prototypical structure of the modern, western State.

31 22 This structure is the secularization of the cosmological structure of the Judeo- Christian tradition that is most easily imagined as being a vertical arrangement. This understanding is situated as the source of legitimacy of a State. Presented more clearly, a state, in order to be deemed legitimate has as its imprimatur mythological association with the will of a divine being and in this understanding imitates the structure of the divine economy. Presupposition #6: The Divine and the Profane are posed in opposition to one another. Divine Profane Figure 5 As with the Exalted and the Abject, this dialectical relationship is only indirectly confrontational and between the two is the Common. This relationship is the foundation upon which the notion of the relationship upon which the notion of the set of relationships that I have described as forming the state are built. The state as described here is a simulacrum of the classical cosmological notion of the separation between the divine and the secular. As with the relationship between the Sovereign and the Slave there exists a middle term, which I am labeling the Common. This relation is also legible by thinking it along with further development of Foucault s engagement with the relationship between

32 23 governance and the divine, again from lecture 9. In employing Saint Thomas on the question of sovereignty, he proposes that: Insofar as he governs, the sovereign does nothing other than reproduce a model [that] is quite simply that of God s government on Earth. Saint Thomas explains: In what does the excellence of art consist? To what extent is an art excellent? An art will be excellent insofar as it imitates nature. Now nature is ruled by God, for God created nature and continues to govern it all the time. The king s art will be excellent insofar as it imitates nature, that is to say insofar as it operates like God. 15 This requires that this project depart from the beginning of the logic of the divine relationship to man in order to trace the notion of the existence of right sovereignty as a mortal/secular pantomime of an idealized God. Presupposition #7: The Divine and the Profane do not touch one another and are mediated by the Common. Divine Common Profane Figure 6 This relationship is the foundation upon which the notion of the state is built. The state as described here is a simulacrum of the classical cosmological notion of the separation

33 24 between the divine and the secular. As with the relationship between the Sovereign and the Slave there exists a middle term that I am labeling the Common. The Common in this formulation exists as the buttress against the collapse of the Divine and the Profane into one another and allows the space for the existence of secular governance that is related in real ways to a grounding in the Divine and a place of resistance to the ever-present danger of descent into the profane. The space clearly exposes itself by the fact that all beings who are not Divine are not situated as absolutely Profane in the way I am using the term here nor are all subjects who cannot be described as Profane necessarily Divine; this is perhaps a better way to approach this assertion. As mentioned above, this divine structure is mimicked by the simulacrum of the modern state. There is a threshold between these structures the negotiation of which is the linchpin in the establishment of the legitimate nature of the state, which finds itself subsumed into the structure of the Common. This relationship is depicted here: Divine Common (The State) Profane Figure 7

34 25 The tethering of a state to the legitimacy of divine will is accomplished through one or several events that relate directly to question of the divine; episodes of prophecy, ordination, consecration, desecration, and/or myth-making are what I have in mind here. The Secular Sovereign is positioned as the earthly embodiment of the god-head and the slave as the absolutely profane. The Human is neither divine nor profane. divine. Presupposition #8: The state legitimates itself through a distinct relationship to the The relationship of the individual to the structure proposed here that separates the Divine from the Profane is through the relationship of the individual to the state and that state s existence within the conceptualization of the Common that finds its legitimacy by its relationship to divine providence. The state here can be read as analogic or coterminous with institutions (some religious but not strictly) that provide the structure for the individual accomplishment of two goals: a relationship to the Divine and membership in a state that has a positive relationship to the same. Presupposition #9: The Exalted is the secular embodiment of the god-head and the Abject of the profane. It is through these relationships to the divine and the profane on the part of the secular actors that the form and content of the divine architecture is replicated in the secular state. Two questions present themselves here: The first being that of legitimacy of the state and perhaps more appropriately, the legitimacy of the claims of the state of its relationship to divine providence and secondly the implication of the Divine architecture being represented vertically and the Secular State horizontally. The question of legitimacy that inhabits Proposition #8 is the driver of the imperative of a mythology on the part of the Sovereign that can be linked, ontologically to

35 26 the notion of the Divine that then allows the secular ruler to pronounce actors profane. Without this relationship, neither secular actor enjoys legitimacy in their status. Presupposition #10: The State, in its entirety, is the secular equivalent of the Common. Equivalence may not be the correct term here though there is an important notion of similitude that exists here. The States, as theorized here, is embedded within the divine architecture s Common and as such occupies some, if not all of its space. This notion of spatial utilization needs to be considered temporally with respect to how at any given time the space is occupied or evacuated by the array of actors represented here. 3: Methodology: This project takes up these presuppositions as points of departure and naturally their introduction generates a set of important questions that can be dealt with here rather than asking that the previous assertions be admitted axiomatically. First one might inquire into the necessity of enumerating presuppositions in the first place? This is fundamentally a methodological question. The argument is that all questions operate against a set of presuppositions and exposing them in explicit fashion at the outset allows for disclosure of the agenda of the project that may find itself implicated in teleology, circularity, or leaps of faith that, in their exposition, might serve to allow the redirection of the project or at least allow the reader to understand what is at stake from an epistemological perspective. This is not at a great remove from Merleau-Ponty s formulation in the opening moments of The Visible and the Invisible where he takes up the question of the stance of the questioner as itself being fraught with presuppositions: It was, for example, evident to the man brought up in the objective cognition of the West that magic or myth has no intrinsic truth, that magical effects and the mythical and ritual

36 27 life are to be explained by objective causes and what is left over ascribed to the illusions of Subjectivity. Yet if social psychology wishes truly to see our society such as it is, it cannot start with this postulate, which itself is part of Western psychology; in adopting it we would be presupposing the conclusions. 16 This assertion presents a formidable challenge to this project generally and the emphasis I am placing on the role of these presuppositions specifically. Therefore the problematic for this project with respect to this concern is that the fact that the questions arise from within the paradigm that I am attempting to explain which leaves few safe places from which to observe and comment. Further, in that this theoretical stance is predicated on the notion that this paradigm represents a system of coercive force that produces certain types of subjects and the system, as proposed, does not posit a position outside of its logic, it is prudent to wonder at whether these questions presuppose answers that are required to think the paradigmatic structure itself. This is, in many ways, the central question of this project and will find itself carefully considered particularly with respect to the reading herein of the Du Bois of The Souls of Black Folk and Fanon s zone of non-being in his Black Skin, White Masks. What I mean here is that this examination of the presuppositional stance of this project is itself the type of pushing against thresholds of thinking about the self that form the centerpiece of the concerns here. By enumerating what I understand to be the presuppositions that animate this argument I hope to make apparent the barriers, if we are allowed to understand serious questions as barriers, that present themselves to the production of useful and perhaps alternative readings of the political nature of the modern western subject particularly as it relates to the radically Other-ed. Therefore, by examining these fundamental questions that may, in reality be, clever (or perhaps not so clever) formulations of axiomatic statements of coerced fact from the inner workings of the system under considerations it may be useful to pose this project as

37 28 representative of a set of thought experiments that have as their context a series of predetermined truths that present themselves as such if only because they represent the attributes of the subject under consideration. Which leaves us again at the question that presents itself regarding the reasons for and perhaps the benefit of an attempt to understand the thinking that is causal to the questions presented here. At the risk of banality a short personal anecdote that serves as a foundation of the method that is employed in this project may prove useful. In my youth, much of my reading was focused on comic books, particularly the Bonze Age of Marvel Comics. ii Anyway, in addition to reading these comics over and over I was intermittently successful in convincing my parents to order products advertised in these pages with the understanding that once these items (toy soldiers, Sea-Monkeys, Phasers, etc.) arrived they would have nothing to do with the advertisement that persuaded me to purchase them. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is represented by the following advertisement for X-ray vision glasses. ii The Bronze Age of Comic Books is an informal name for a period in the history of mainstream American comic books usually said to run from 1970 to It follows the Silver Age of Comic Books. [1] The Bronze Age retained many of the conventions of the Silver Age, with traditional superhero titles remaining the mainstay of the industry. However, a return of darker plot elements and more socially relevant storylines (akin to those found in the Golden Age of Comic Books) featuring real-world issues, such as drug use, alcoholism, and environmental pollution, began to flourish during the period, prefiguring the later Modern Age of Comic Books. (from

38 29 Figure 8 Obviously I didn t put much stock in either the picture associated with this ad nor the use of the term Apparently in describing the working of these glasses. Upon their arrival they worked exactly as billed: Everything I looked at through the glasses looked like the skeleton of my right hand. Since then my concern with examining presuppositions has been informed by a constant worry that the tool I am using hasn t already predetermined what it is I am capable of seeing and if that is true then to recognize that fact. The X-ray vision glasses actually provided a fairly accurate representation of the skeleton of a humanright hand. So long as I understood that the glasses weren t necessarily as bad as they may seem. That being said, the desire here is to understand the tools being employed and to capture, ahead of time, the possibility that they are exposing a truth that is limited in its employment. Perhaps in more serious fashion, an understanding of the variable and changeable nature of truth is presented by Hegel in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit and informs the manner in which we engage his system as a whole as well as the thinking of this project. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the latter refutes the former. Likewise, by virtue of the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom s truth as it come to replace the blossom itself. ( 2) Hegel s introduction is provocative regarding the evolving nature of truth and its relationship to a consciousness that prefigures the process of self-consciousness.

39 30 However as knowledge changes, so too, in the edges of consciousness, does the object itself change, since the knowledge at hand was essentially a knowledge of the object. With a change in knowledge, the object also becomes something different, since it essentially belonged to this knowledge. To consciousness, what thereby comes to be is that what was formerly in its eyes the in itself does not exist in itself, that is, that it existed in itself merely for consciousness. ( 85) Hegel s account continues in this vein and 87 assists us in understanding how the engagement with another object can serve to alter knowledge. In contrast, it usually seems that we learn about the untruth of our first concept by means of experience of another object which may accidentally and externally come across so that what would fall into our sphere would be merely the pure apprehension of what exists in and for itself. However, from that viewpoint the new object shows itself to have come about by means of a reversal of consciousness (Umkehrung des Bewußtseins) itself. ( 87) This is helpful in parsing the implication of the presupposition that we must acknowledge as a ubiquitous and necessary precursor to thinking truth, which is ostensibly the goal of a project that, at least in theory, is taking up serious questions in serious fashion. What I am proposing here is that the (pre?)supposition that the process of Self- Consciousness from Hegel s Phenomenology is reifying rather than defining is perhaps not the case. What the Master may perceive as work or more fundamentally his ability to place work in front of the servant as Master can be found to be illusory. We simply cannot know the status of either participant until the end. The goal lies at the point where knowledge no longer has the need to go beyond itself, that is, where knowledge comes around to itself, and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept satisfaction in not to be found at any prior station on the way. ( 80)

40 31 The bottom line is that we simply cannot know whether an actor s perception of himself and his role is accurate by examining the truth at a specific temporal moment. Michael Forster in his essay Ursprung und Wesen des Hegelschen Geist begriffs offers a radical reading of this portion of the Phenomenology paraphrased here. Hegel holds that that which makes up the spirit or state of mind remains a radically reversible state based upon behavior; that even an already constituted mind or state of mind, in fact, always could be transformed by subsequent conduct after the fact. iii (Forster pp. 2 my translation) In Forster s account, the actual status of the Lord and Bondsman at the point of encounter in a specific temporal moment will in fact alter to accommodate the status that is reflected in the reality of the subsequent events. The implication of this thinking for this project is that the paradigm in that there are barriers and boundaries internal and external to it qua itself are penetrable or possible of destruction may mean that they, or the entire structure, was never there in the first (or last) place which I am positing as its own kind of truth that is discoverable through a process that begins with consciousness of the way structures that produce subjects also produce questions that are actually answers in themselves to a certain type of imaginative process or memory. The presuppositions, from this perspective are meant to be a component of the interpretive mechanism that I have described to this point that will serve as a tool for examining the process of pushing against iii Noch weniger bekanntlich hält Hegel dafür, daß dieses Konstituieren vom Geist bzw. Geisteszustand durch des Subjekts Verhalten immer (mit einer einzigen bald zu identifizierenden Ausnahme) ein radikal revidierbares bleibe, daß auch ein angeblich "schon" konstituierter Geist bzw. Geisteszustand in der Tat immer durch weiteres Verhalten im nachhinein umgestaltet werden könne. Es handelt sich hier wohlgemerkt nicht bloß um eine biedere, leicht zu verstehende ewige Revidierbarkeit von Urteilen über vergangenes Geistiges oder von vergangenem Geistigem für die Zukunft, iii sondern um eine weitaus radikalere, paradoxere Revidierbarkeit vom "vergangenen" Geistigen selbst als solchem.

41 32 the oppositional structures to new ways of being that, in their breaking, prove to shatter the ontological basis of the problem itself. This tends to be a process that succeeds in distorting in many ways the structure of the questions, answers, and logics that are involved here. Next it seems clear that if there are presuppositions there must be somewhere from whence they derive themselves. If, at the end of the day, the proposition here is that the diagram, in its final representation is a rudimentary diagram of the prototypical modern state as the point of departure, the challenge then is to provide a satisfactory account regarding its orgins. The proposal here is not that it springs ex nihilo or exists in some actual historical moment. Here I wish to situate the middle/mediating term, the Elemental, as the point of departure. This first chapter of this project will focus on this point in some detail but it is necessary to mark it as the stuff from which the presuppositions both derive and are composed. This primordial subject can comfortably be situated in my thinking as the precursor to the subject that finds itself in Hobbes State of Nature and perhaps more effectively with a distinct description of the Master/Slave dialectic that Hegel articulates in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit which I read as different in important ways from the oftquoted dialectic from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Turning here to 432 Recognition and Self- Consciousness in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Hegel exposes the notion that informs my thinking; In order to avoid eventual misunderstandings of the point of view just presented, it has also to be observed that the struggle for recognition in the extreme form in which it is here presented can occur only in the state of nature, in which men are simple singular beings. It remains alien to both civil society and the state, within which the struggle for recognition is already present. 17

42 33 This struggle for recognition in the extreme form precedes the more familiar dialectic of the Phenomenology and will serve as the condition from which I derive the structure we have established above and exposes the notion that this Elemental form endures as the mediating term that has been discussed above. Elemental (wo)man Elemental (wo)man Human Abject Exalted Figure 9 This conditionality does not speak for all of those under consideration who find themselves norming to the mediating position from which the extremes are drawn. This returns us to our starting/ final position.

43 34 Figure 10 These ten presuppositions serve as the background for the fundamental thesis of this project. The effort here is to focus on a series of interlocking and symbiotic relationships: The Divine to the Secular/Common, the Exalted to the Abject, the Abject to the Elemental, the Elemental to the Exalted, the Abject, Exalted, and Elemental to Human and then the presence of the Citizen and, of course the State as the secular embodiment of the divine architecture of god s will. 4: The Liminal Next, it is imperative that we deal with the manner I am operationalizing the term liminal. As the title of the project implies, Homo Liminalis, this project is preoccupied with liminality in general and liminality as it relates to the human most particularly. It seems that

44 35 the current literature in and around post-colonial studies uses liminal, liminality, etc. as synonymous with marginal and subaltern or what I am calling the Abject. In order to insure that I carefully mark this important departure from the predominant employment of this term, I will quote at length from Sylvia Wynter s important 2004 essay Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation An Argument. The Negroid physiognomy and its continent of origin, Black Africa, together with the dark-skinned peoples assimilated to its category have been made to function within the terms of our present biocentric conception of the human, as well as of its related formulation of a general order of existence (whose postulate of significant ill is that of a dual mode of Natural Scarcity-that is, a scarcity of fully genetically selected human beings, on the one hand, and of material resources on the other), as the actualized embodiment, no longer of the human made degenerate by sin and therefore fallen to the status of apes, but of the human totally dysselected, barely evolved, and as such intermediate between true humans and the primates. As such, the marker of that most totally dysselected-by-evolution mode of non-being that each individual and group must strive to avoid, struggle to prove that they themselves are not, if they are to be. A parallel and interlinked role is also played by the category of the Poor, the jobless, the homeless, the underdeveloped, all of whom, interned in their systematically produced poverty and expendability, are now made to function in the reoccupied space of the Leper of the medieval order and of the Mad of the monarchical, so as to actualize at the economic level the same dysgenic or dysselected-by- Evolution conception. With the post-sixties reordering of society, Negroid physiognomy and skin color will be made to coalesce with the inner city status of poverty and joblessness, crime, and drugs. They will do so together with those brown Latino faces assimilated to its status as this status, a new Liminal category, enables the incorporation of the socially mobile Black middle class into the normative order of things at a secondary level. 18 (my italics-mes) I agree with Wynter s formulation here except that I would not call the status that she is marking as a new Liminal category but as a new typology of being that is a member

45 36 of the set of figures that are marked as Abject. In this project, the liminal would be the trace of the figure as it is altered through some process from one status to another. For example, in Wynter s formulation, the subject possessing Negroid physiognomy prior to one historical epoch (pre- present biocentric conception of the human ) and the same during the present biocentric conception of the human would represent liminality not at the pre- or post biocentric conception of the human but in the transition from one such perception to the other. Using the term in this fashion allows me to accomplish several things. By marking the liminal as transitional and perhaps therefore marginal in the fact of the inherent instability of transition, I am able to employ it across the range of sovereign modes of being that I have referenced. This becomes important because there is a way in which the conceptualization of a type of absolute Other needs to be capacious enough to handle the Exalted, the Abject, and the Transitional. An example of how I wish to use the term is represented by this passage from Law and Liminality in the Bible by Nanette Stahl. Liminal moments are of pivotal importance precisely because of their dynamic, inter-categorical position as transitions leading from one period to another. Such moments may be brief and enigmatic, as when Moses and his family, returning to Egypt from Midian, encounter a menacing supernatural being-actually referred to in the Bible as God himself (Exod ); or they may be detailed and elaborate, as in the account of the post-diluvian covenant with Noah (Gen ). The depiction of a liminal moment may even consist of more than one narrative, as with the two versions of creation (Gen ; ). All liminal moments, however, share some defining characteristics: they are concerned with transition, and function as focal points of the biblical vision of the often tenuous, always dynamic relationship between God and his elect. 19 Stahl s emphasis on the relation of the liminal to the divine is not at odds with the proposal presented here in that elements of classical formulations of political theology are

46 37 important to this project. But what is most important here is the point made by Stahl that the liminal is marked by transition and may be brief. Further, she points to the important relationship between the liminal and the law when she proposes that [i]t is no coincidence that law appears as a component of liminal moments in the Pentateuch. Indeed, legal material appears with such regularity at crucial turning points that its absence takes on significance. 20 The next important distinction this use of the term liminal allows is to pull it into compliance with its use in mathematics, specifically in (the) Calculus. What this allows is the capturing of two important components of the definition of liminal that I am employing: the transitional and its instantaneous value. The question of motion is fundamental to the purposiveness of calculus, [t]he primary concept of the calculus deals with the rate of chance of one variable with respect to another. 21 Without becoming distracted with a series of mathematics problems or proofs, what is important is that we are all basically familiar with the notion of using basic algebra to ascertain how long it will take an object at a given speed to cover a given distance. By speed we usually understand the rate of change of distance with respect to time. Thus, if a person travels 90 miles in 3 hours, his speed, he says, is 30 mi/hr. 22 This is an average value that depends upon the notion that the individual was travelling at 30 mi/hr. for the entire time without variance in velocity. This is generally not physically possible particularly if the object under consideration is examined from a position of rest, therefore, in order to establish instantaneous values it becomes necessary to break the trip into intervals that can be evaluated with respect to time, space and speed. In contrasting average speed with instantaneous speed we have implicitly utilized a distinction between interval and instant, which is vital for what follows. An average speed is one that concerns what happens over an interval of time-3

47 38 hours, 5 seconds, one half second, and so forth. The interval may be small or large, but it does represent the passage of a definite amount of time. We use the word instant, however, to state the fact that something happens so fast that no time elapses. The event is momentary The notion of an instant, although it is also used in everyday life, is strictly a mathematical idealization. 23 This becomes important for thinking about the employment of the liminal here both in the obvious utility in thinking through Stahl s moments and what is important in marking points of transition by noting the instant in which the object changes. Where the limit function comes into play is to take into account the average speed and the time interval and in segmenting the analysis into smaller and smaller segments it becomes clear that it is not the speed at, in this example, where time (t) is equal to 3. In fact at the following time intervals (in seconds): 1, ½, ¼, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 the average speeds (in feet/second) are 100, 96.5, 96.3, 96.1, and [T]he instantaneous speed, the speed at the end of the third second, is not obtained by dividing a distance by a time interval. It is obtained by observing the number that the average speeds approach-the number 96 in our illustration. In mathematical language we say that the number 96 is the limit of the average speeds as the time intervals over which the average speeds are computed approach Successfully incorporating these four elements of the liminal (transitional, momentary, related to the divine, and locatable as an instantaneous value) will allow this project to productively build upon theoretical constructs that already reference one or several of these principles. Taking this seriously it becomes apparent that the final paradigm that is a product of working through the presuppositions is not up to this task in that it s one-dimensional representation does not take into account the elements of time and space that are required to make this definition of liminality comport with the mathematical employment of the concept. It is clear from the mathematics that we have worked thorough

48 39 above that it is impossible to determine the limit without a coherent relationship to time and space. This does not mean that the one-dimensional paradigm that has as its terms the Abject, Elemental, and Exalted is discarded; on the contrary, this continuum that I have proposed is a measure of sovereignty in its absolute lack (Abject) or its abundance (Exalted) will be theorized in greater detail later in this project as a type of temporality in its relationship to genealogy. That leaves the necessity of dealing with spatiality in order to capture movement as an attribute of this type of liminality. Alain Badiou, in his Theory of the Subject, gives an account of space that is useful here. Part I of the text is entitled The Place of the Subject and works carefully through his reading of what he marks as two dialectical matrices in Hegel. 26 So at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we must disentangle two processes, two concepts of movement, and not just one proper view of becoming that would have been corrupted by a subjective system of knowing. Thus: a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term of alienation; the idea of a simple term which unfold itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept. b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, and whose theme is that there is no unity that is not split. There is not the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the final and the inaugural 27 For purposes of this work, I would read Badiou s formulation a) above as what I am terming the homo Liminalis, the figure in transition through some process of self reflective denial of the self (alienation) that becomes some new subject and at the same instant becomes itself anew by stabilizing its being. Badiou s second type of dialectical relation speaks to what I proposed above as this project s thinking as it relates to Hegel s formulation of the dialectical relationship in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit that precedes societal ordering but serves as the foundation, here the Elemental, that is severed to create the extremes that form the (non)relation of the basic to the extremes of being. It is also important here to

49 40 note that I believe that both the Hegel in question here as well as the paradigm presented present a trilateral relation rather than the predominant view of these dialectics as being Manichean in substance. This is implicit in the paradigm I have presented in at least that the relationship of one state of sovereign being to the other can only be made legible by the presence of a third element. Fredrick Jameson s reading of Hegel is instructive on this point: Meanwhile, the tripartite formula is calculated to mislead and confuse the reader who seeks to process this material in a series of three steps: something for example utterly impossible things complete in the structurally far more complex play of oppositions in the chapter on the secular culture of absolutism; and alarmingly rebuked by Hegel himself in that famous passage at the end of the greater Logic in which he allows that 'three' might be 'four' after all. 28 This relationship of fours is implicit in the paradigm proposed here. For example, 1) the Abject subject has a relationship with the barrier that inscribes the abjection. Next, the Abject, through this relationship with these boundaries necessarily has a relationship with, 2) the Exalted that establishes the threshold and 3) the Elemental that prevents the extremes from touching and finally 4) a relationship of the Abject self to the idea of the Abject self that engenders an essential element of separation from the self that is taken up effectively by Badiou. There is A, and there is A p (read: A as such and A in another place, namely, the place p distributed by the space of placement, or P). It is the same A twice named, twice placed. This will more than suffice for them to corrupt one another. For you can consider A either in its pure, closed identity, or in its indexical from its second occurrence. A is itself, but it is also its power of repetition, the legibility of itself at a distance from itself, the fact that at a place, p, the other place, it is still A itself that is read, albeit other than there where it stands, even if it is nowhere, since it is seen there too.

50 41 Hegel names these two determinations the something-in-itself and the something-for-the-other. The something, as a pure category, is the unity of these two determinations, the movements of their duality. 29 This reading of Hegel gives us a way of viewing this account mathematically in that the question of limits is naturally present. What I am curious to explore here is to think about the implication of the limit of A as it approaches A p. Stated differently the limit of A as A approaches itself. Again Badiou: But what is at stake is not this reconvocation of essential origins, it is the effective process of the limitation of determination, the work of force on place, the differential of A turning back upon its own indexation in order to reduce its necessary import. This is A(A p ), the direct, limiting application of the efficacy of A onto the determination that it is. 30 Might we consider that it is by pushing against (touching) the barriers that oppose transformation, change or metamorphosis that we locate the parameters in which the subject exists or is defined? Might we consider that the structures of social order that define the subject function by pressure against these boundaries? The subject as such, is axiomatically admitted as this or that; the concern here is for the actor that approaches the boundaries or thresholds of one type of existence where the possibility of another becomes real. Several questions reveal themselves at this early stage of this project; the first of which is to wonder at the relationship of the current state of being to the transformed state. How are they related if at all? There is much scholarship that this project builds itself upon that establishes points of terminus that, in a real sense, establish awareness for this thinking that meditates on the journey from one state to the next in as much as it is concerned with the goal. Agamben s Homo Sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life is one such touchstone. He writes, with respect an

51 42 essential question for his work and this project on the notion of law establishing and law preserving violence in the following manner: In laying bare the irreducible link uniting violence and law, Benjamin s Critique of Violence proves the necessary and, even today, indispensible premise of every inquiry into sovereignty. In Benjamin s analysis, this link shows itself to be a dialectical oscillation between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it. 31 (emphasis added-ms) This project is preoccupied with that which posits and preserves in that they are different and in that they are different they cannot occupy the same space and in that they cannot occupy the same space they exist at a distance from one another and therefore this space must be accounted for and in so doing its thresholds exposed. In witnessing the threshold we can endeavor to understand the point at which this transformation of type announces itself. Stated differently, if we accept that there is dialectical oscillation there must be points at which the oscillation departs and arrives and therefore there must be the path in between those points. This allows us to articulate why this is fundamentally different that Agamben s useful Homo Sacer. In the most basic terms of this thinking, the sacer is a type of Abject subject while the homo liminalis is the status of this figure between Human/Elemental and Sacer/Abject. That space is the unstable space of liminality in this formulation. Understanding this, it becomes clear that the single dimensional diagram that I have gone to such pains to establish in the previous section is in many ways insufficient. This is not a problem as it does not go-away but needs to be expanded into additional dimensions to take into account relationship with time and space and temporality. I owe much of the locating of this entry point into this more robust paradigm to a section of Ronald A. Judy s manuscript in progress which I will cite in greater detail upon its publication but for now will emphatically gesture in

52 43 its direction in order to productively bracket this thinking in order to locate it in this intellectual genealogy. This turns upon Judy s close reading of the work of Du Bois that includes the following comment in a letter: I gave up the search of Absolute Truth; not from doubt of the existence of reality, but because I believe that our limited knowledge and clumsy methods of research made it impossible now completely to apprehend Truth. I nevertheless firmly believed that gradually the human mind and absolute and provable truth [sic] would approach each other and like the Asymptotes of the Hyperbola (I learned the phrase in high school and was ever after fascinated by it) would approach each other nearer and nearer and yet never in all eternity meet. 32 Du Bois, for the most part fails to operationalize this relationship to analytic geometry but it becomes useful for this thinking and then, importantly, finds its way into the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness as he works through questions of The Existence of Others. He writes: Now we can grasp the nature of my Self as-object: it is the limit between two consciousnesses as it is produced by the limiting consciousness and assumed by the limited consciousness. And we must understand it in the two senses of the word limit. On the side of the limiting, indeed, the limit is apprehended as the container which contains me and surrounds me, the shell of emptiness which pleads for me as a totality while putting me out of play; on the side of the limited, it is wholly a phenomenon of selfness and is as the mathematical limit is to the series which progresses toward it without ever reaching it. Every being which I have to be is at its limit like an asymptotic curve to a straight line. Thus I am detotalized and indefinite totality, contained within a finite totality which surrounds me at a distance and which I am outside myself without ever being able either to realize it or even touch it. 33 (my italics-ms) I wish to benefit from the insight of these three thinkers (Judy, Du Bois, and Sartre) and append this important point of order onto the flat graphic of the relationship between

53 44 the Abject, Elemental, and Exalted, which, preoccupied the opening moments of this project. In order to operationalize this thinking around the limit, hyperbola and asymptote I need to establish first the axis along which this will be thought on a Cartesian graph. For this purpose the x-axis (horizontal) will be used to depict a subjects relationship with time as a positive or negative quantity as it relates to the question of control of one s time. The further right a subject is graphed along this continuum the more control she has of her time; the further right, the less; this is an infinite possibility in the positive or negative direction. Relationship to Time Figure 11 The y-axis (vertical) will represent a subject s relationship to space and control of it. This is pointedly a finite proposition in that there is not unlimited space that an actor may or may not control. Relationship to Space Figure 12

54 45 The z-axis (third dimension) allows representation of the three modes of temporal reckoning (past, present and future). Temporality Figure 13 Next, the asymptotes that serve as the boundaries of the functioning of the subject under consideration must be defined. Ronald Judy s forthcoming text, riffing off the point made by Du Bois nominates Chance and Law. I think this is helpful and will borrow them in order to orient this thinking at his point. Chance Law Figure 14

55 46 Finally the hyperbola themselves are best situated as the Abject and the Exalted with the space in between them where I locate the Elemental. Figure 15 It is here that another influence on this work needs to be further accounted for and that is Jacques Derrida s lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign. In the Second Session he asserts: What remains on the table in this seminar is what remains to be thought of this metonymic contiguity between the beast and God, the beast, the sovereign and God, the human and political figure of the sovereign being right there, between, the beast and God, the beast and God becoming in all senses of this word the subjects of the sovereign, the sovereign subject of the sovereign, the one who commands the human sovereign, and the subject subjected to the sovereign. These three figures replace each other, substitute for each other, standing

56 47 in for each other, the one keeping watch as lieutenant or stand-in [suppleant] for the other along this metonymic chain. 34 Derrida s argument here re-inscribes the notion of space that essentializes boundaries: metonymic continuity ; sovereign being right there, between, the beast and God ; replace ; substitute ; standing in ; a metonymic chain. Most prominently Derrida directs our attention to three figures that for the centerpiece of this project: 1) the sovereign subject of the sovereign (Exalted/Citizen); 2) the one who commands the human sovereign (the Exalted); and 3) the subject subjected to the sovereign (the Abject). By employing the rich and provocative arguments presented by Agamben and Derrida I have a point of departure that endeavors to expand in productive ways on this thinking particularly as it relates to theory from below. How, I ask, does the Exalted or the Abject become Elemental or the Elemental become Abject or Exalted? What is the composition of the barrier between the Elemental and these other-than-elemental ways of being? How is the barrier erected? Can it be destroyed or is it firm and to be negotiated rather than obliterated? If it is crossed what becomes of the being that has made the journey? What is left behind? What is taken along? What is gained or lost? What space is evacuated and does the emptiness remain or is it filled? Is there stability or is this an inherently set of unstable conditions? This project will take up these questions in and around the figure of homo liminalis and argue from the graphic depiction above of the state as a cohesive paradigm that needs the three primary categories/positions filled in order to exist. It will be in examining the destruction of the paradigmatic state that we can expose the practice of revolutionary social change. By crossing the thresholds the structure no longer holds and has to be reconstituted in some fashion to provide for a coherent state. It is argues here that the modern subject needs the state in one form or the other to give itself actuality. The

57 48 problematic is that the marginal subject, in becoming Elemental, can at the same time implode the structure that frames her identity and requiring a two-pronged project of reconstruction of the state and the self. 6: The Structure of the Project: This project will first focus its attention on developing the theoretical framework in great detail against which this figure operates. The idea here is to establish the stage upon which an actor can be observed to perform. Following establishing the ideal terms of the structure of the world, the subject formed by that paradigm will be examined most specifically focusing on two instances of liminality: 1) The human becoming the slave and that reversal; 2) The human/citizen positioning herself as sovereign Several questions will present themselves immediately from this: One question being the construction of real political space from an imaginary or the destruction of a real political space that finds itself in irreconcilable conflict with a form of self-determined imaginary constituting desire. Following from this point, the project will examine the nature of these instances of border crossing by focusing on the black body. It will be examined in its commoditization and creation into a form of persona mixta, both human and property. In this state of ontological catastrophe iv, the body is involved in a complex minuet of recognition of the self and the other; misrecognition of the self by the other; misrecognition of the self by the self and recognition of the self by the self through a series of exogenous and endogenous touching. The asynchronous and mis-aligned processes lead to the desire or perhaps necessity or in some ways inevitability of revolutionary alteration of the condition iv This formulation is indebted to Professor B. Anthony Bogues.

58 49 of the subject in an effort to resolve or perhaps align these interlocking layers of recognitive consciousness. This still theoretical formulation can be placed in the context of real historical events. The symbiotic French and Haitian Revolutions will be presented as exemplar, in collective nature, of the state structure presented above. In short, Louis XVI occupies the position of Exalted who is forcibly transformed into Homo Liminalis through the revolutionary destruction of his divinely ordained sovereignty. Oppositionally and in concert with this transformation are the enslaved of Saint-Domingue who, at the same moment, cross the threshold between the Abject and Elemental. These historical events are depicted here in the fashion established above. Enslaved of Saint Domingue Citizen Louis XVI Figure 16 Finally, this new human will struggle to reestablish the social order that has been the point of departure for this discussion: Abject, Elemental, and Exalted, in a manner that facilitates the fulfillment of self-determined consciousness of a self that is synchronized from a perspective of duties and rights to a political collectivity. This, to this point, unitary or, perhaps, isolated activity will be situated in its context within and against a system that operates in unitary fashion through the recognition of other recognized collectivities within a Modern World System. 35 How this collectivity is recognized internationally is yet another

59 50 layer of perhaps higher order structuring of the proposed political paradigm. A system develops that is itself legitimated by a similar process of legitimating that we have described that forms a patchwork of political perceptions that inform and are informed by the individual members. This includes states that are marginal at either extreme: Abject State Elemental State Exalted State Figure 17 These collectivities function in many ways the same as the individual body or state. Further, systems of this sort can find themselves in conflict or in concert with another species or genre of system that seeks to order itself with relation to the others. All of this is presented as an answer to and questioning of the central problematic: the relation of sovereignty to the divine and the profane and in that the status the process of constitution or preserving the order that serves as the paradigm for this analysis. Returning to the Burke that opens this section in general and the importance of perspective in particular will do a great deal of work in this project. Leaving aside the what that is being observed, I am concerned here with the subject who is doing the observing. Burke situates his observer, the child, in one instance the heretofore blind child, who I read as metaphorically empirically objective. This observer, in Burke s formulation, brings no presuppositions to the encounter and therefore must be situated as a purveyor or possessor of, if not the truth then the ability to see the essence of the thing itself. This project makes no such claims and the point here is to deal with the set of presuppositions that inform this

60 51 effort. Perspective matters and it is beyond the reach of credulity to imagine subjects who come to the place of observation at dissociative remove from that which they are observing and without presuppositions. By admitting the structure as diagramed above the most fundamental question that provides for the possibility of the second order presuppositions and queries is from what position is the subject of observation being observed? Is the observer Abject, Elemental, or Exalted? Is the subject situated in an Exalted, Member or Abject state? What can be perceived, mis-perceived, observed, not observed, questioned or answered with relation to this observer/subject positional binary? Is the observer in a stable or un-stable condition relative to the macro-paradigm proposed here?

61 52 FIRST DIVISION Acknowledgement: The Lifeless Human Horns! James Brown Licking Stick then the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature. Genesis 2:7-8 Lastly, the pacts or covenants by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and untied, resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1: First it is appropriate to orient this phase of the project by describing the connection between the work to be done in this chapter and the epigraphs that introduce it. The biblical reference and Hobbes are fairly obvious in that they are describing beginnings so the appearance of James Brown as the first of these may be considered incongruous. The song from which the quote is extracted begins with James band establishing the bass and drum signature along with the rhythm guitar and an organ riff that drives the machine forward: the groove. James establishes the refrain at the outset of the tune Momma come here quick/and bring me that licking stick three times before calling for Horns. The brass and reeds respond on cue and give form to the basic structure established by the rhythm section. His exhortation for Horns! I wish to relate in three ways to the quotations that follow it in introducing this chapter. First, the groove as established, is much like the soil used to fashion

62 53 humus v36. Second, the horns, because their playing is only possible with the blowing of breath into them, are analogized here to the breath of life 37. Third, the repetition of the refrain, metronomic and consistent across the internal time signature is contiguous with the covenants and fiats referenced here from Hobbes. 38 The groove the band establishes is the basic stuff that is pregnant with possibility but bounded by the terms it has established and the vocals and horns all live up to that ironclad agreement throughout the song. Out of the established firmament of this basic stuff James calls forth life with his command for Horns. This seems difficult to imagine since the common understanding of the creation of man or the human was coincident with life, that is not the case and the space between the existence of the human and the presence of life is important for this project. The challenge set by this phase of this project is to describe in great detail the soil from which the paradigm that occupied the attention of the opening of this project is derived. In doing so, the initial focus will be to establish the form and content of the three modes of sovereignty being employed here, the Elemental, the Abject and the Exalted. The argument advanced here is that this exegesis has to begin with the Elemental with the thought being consistent with conceptualization above that it is from this stuff that the spectrum of possible modes of being are drawn or formed. The point here is to propose the existence of ontological being that antecede the observation of other types of Elemental being that I posit are built upon this foundation. Stated differently, the challenge here is to establish whether the Elemental is coincident with the human sans life or the human with it. v Robert Alter s translation and commentary, The Five Books of Moses, is the reference here. He footnotes the phrase the human, humus with the following gloss, The Hebrew etymological pun is adam, human, from the soil, adamah.

63 54 2: The Elemental or the Bare Human Important questions present themselves in addition to this locating of the Elemental within context of the stages of the creation of the human. There is also a necessity to understand the Elemental state of being as such which will give us a basis from which to proceed with respect to these questions of life or its lack. The human ( adam), as described here, is a form of existence that is human and devoid of the characteristics that we have come to understand as essential to humanity. Additionally, this state exists outside of value judgment. The question is not meant to describe an evolutionary form of being: Homo habilis to Homo erectus, a process that is, in many ways legible as a progression or improvement. The Elemental in this formulation is not an ordering at this stage of the argument: it becomes such in many ways once the Abject and Exalted are appended to the architecture but there is a notion of a primordial soup-like quality to this notion that is important. A reading of the cosmology advanced in Genesis is an apropos starting place for situating this important concept within the western intellectual tradition. Of interest here is Chapter 2 which begins with the completion of the creation pursued by God that begin in Chapter 1: Then the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array. And God completed on the seventh day the task He had done, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the task He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, for on it He had ceased from all task that He had created to do. This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created. 39 Genesis 2:1-4. Verse 5 of this Chapter begins again, literally, On the day the Lord God made the earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth 40 Genesis 2:5. Alter, in his commentary, glosses this well theorized and examined restatement of the creation by proposing:

64 55 Now after the grand choreography of resonant parallel utterances of the cosmogony, the style changes sharply. Instead of the symmetry of the parataxis, hypotaxis is initially prominent: the second account begins with elaborate syntactical subordination in a long complex sentence that uncoils all the way from the second part of verse 4 to the end of verse 7. In this more vividly anthropomorphic account, God, now called YHWH Elohim instead of Elohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yastar instead of bara, create, blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins. 41 The notions of choreography and parallel repetition that Alter raises are interestingly reminiscent of the simulacrum of divine creation that opens this chapter with respect to James Brown and his band. Producing the same result through an activity that is parallel to a previous manifestation of the same is a thoroughly improvisational praxis that is most apparent to me in Jazz. What we will see as this story of creation is narrated is that God fashioning the human and later the animals from the same soil in many ways repeating the same activity with different results (the creation of different species of animal), but that will be discussed in some detail later. The point here is to keep track of the analogy I have drawn between this creation and that of the musical selection that opens this chapter. Repeating the refrain over and over against the forward momentum of the established temporality internal to the song, in each utterance, creates something different that is similar to what we are marking here in the standardization of the molding of human life from the soil. That being said, it is the tactile nature of this creation of the human that is of interest here. Picking up from verse 7 the story asserts:

65 56 then the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature 42...Genesis 2:7-8 Here the notion of being human as such, only secondarily includes the question of life. Further, it is necessary to wonder at the type of life implied here but first we see the space that is created for the pursuit of life by this human. Picking up from that point in the text: And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and He placed there the human He had fashioned. And the Lord God caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food, and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge, good and evil And the Lord God commanded the human, saying, From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die. 43 Genesis 2:8-17. Again, the analysis of this passage by Alter is generative, specifically verses 16-17, surely eat doomed to die. The form of the Hebrew in both instances is what grammarians call the infinitive absolute: the infinitive immediately followed by a conjugated form of the same verb. The general effect of this repetition is to provide emphasis to the verb to die it is the pattern regularly used in the Bible for the issuing of death sentences, doomed to die is an appropriate equivalent. 44 As we know, Adam eats from the forbidden tree and in so doing he and Eve are banished from the garden and are sentenced by God to eat bread till you return to the soil, for from there were you taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return. 45 Genesis 2:19 The text is therefore sympathetic to the following readings: 1) that there is a type of human form that is not yet alive, 2) that, once given life, this human form (ante- The Fall) was not mortal, 3) that the sentence of death was clearly not meant to be immediate but a pronouncement of mortality, and 4) that death means a return to the stuff from which the

66 57 human is constructed. This produces, consequently four important concepts for this project: the lifeless human, the immortal human, the mortal human, and the dust from which they all are constructed. In order to deal with this proposal and its relationship to the essential notion for this project of the Elemental, and further the possibility of coming to some decision on the question animating this section regarding subjects that are not human though understood to be so outside of a discourse of lack, it seems that the necessity is to address the raw material of the human, dust or soil from Genesis 2:7. Certainly this account accommodates the possibility of characterizing the Elemental in this work as coincident with God s employment of dust or soil as the materiel with which He builds the human in form and without life. From that perspective it would be possible to situate the categories of Elemental being that will be elaborated here (human, subject, citizen, etc.) as additive to this fundamental ontological stuff. However, in pressuring this claim it seems an arrogation of divine creative power to imagine that the praxis of identity creation by the state is conterminous with the creative will of the godhead. The point here is that it is certainly possible that the imaginative horizon of the modern western sovereign state imagines for itself the power to create a figure that is analogous to the creative power of a god. Imagining that and engaging in a practice that has this belief as its context has consequences with respect to the efficacy of a political project in praxis particularly with respect to the potentiality of change on the part of a subject dissatisfied with his or her lot in life. Imagining that the state is a logical extension of god s will implicates revolutionary agitation as profane in the biblical sense of the term. The proposal here is that this question of Elemental being is an essential element of the imaginary of Western thought that allows for the structuring of a simulacrum of divine creation as an essential element of the legitimacy of sovereign power that is made so

67 58 (legitimate) in great measure in its imagined relationship to the divine. This is an essential component of the imagined state of nature that forms the ontological point of departure for classical contract theory in that this state is clearly the place of collapse after the Fall and is therefore inhabited by beings that are post the Elemental stuff from which God constructs subjects. Life, as it is understood, is already a component of the humans that exist in the state of nature. The state constructs subjects that are already compromised in that the soil, in short, is no longer pure. This, in some ways, gets ahead of this narrative so to return to this logic as it represents itself in the production of the human by God is useful in order to note the attempt by the state to create subjects in the same vein. Returning to the biblical story that is being explored, in the inclusion of it here a gap was left in the narrative that needs to be filled. This gap, I propose, contains the first appearance of the figure that animates this project, the homo liminalis. The narratio biblica that concerns us here is this space that is between God s creation of the human and the point of breathing life into this heretofore-lifeless being. Again, to focus our attention on the implication of this passage for this project, it is quoted again: then the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature 46...Genesis 2:7-8 I am interested in the play that is implicit in this and. With that in mind the Midrash Rabbah is helpful in addressing spaces of this sort in the Pentateuch. With respect to this passage, this text provides the following analysis: Of the Ground (Adamah): R. Berekiah and R. Helbo in the name of Samule the Elder said: He was created from the place of his atonement (the future site of the temple), as you read, An altar of earth (adamah) thou shalt make unto me (Ex. XX, 21). The Holy One, blessed be He, said: Behold, I will create him from the place of his atonement, and may he endure!

68 59 And He breathed into his nostrils: This teaches that He set him up as a lifeless mass reaching from earth to heaven and then infused a soul into him. Because in this world [he was endowed with life] by breathing [therefore he is mortal]; but in the time to come he shall receive it as a gift, as it is written, And I will put my spirit into you, and ye shall live (Ezek. Xxxvii, 14). vi47 What then, are we to make of this lifeless mass that is at the same time human? What is this being capable of doing or is it an inert subject that is human in form but is lacking the content of life that, in this formulation, is necessarily separable from the question of being human. What is human about a mass without life? Again, this space opened by the text of this account of creation allows a chasm of discursive play in which to theorize the content and character of this figure. It is useful in some ways to accept the term life as it is and imagine that the mass is inert with respect to biology; lacking cardiovascular processes and sentience; in many ways what we would describe as a hypervegetative state. If this being, lacking life, is composed only of the physical embodiment of humanity, without bodily function, then this is a state of being that seems to be an empty shell that might naturally be considered to be a type of death. The Midrash takes up this question of what is meant by this breath that makes the human [become] a living creature. The breath of (Nishmath) life: It has five names: vii nefesh, neshamah, hayyah, ruah, yehidah. Nefesh is the blood; For the blood is the nefesh-e.v. life (Deut. XII, 23). : this is so called because it ascends and descends: thus it is written, Who knoweth the ruah (E.V. spirit ) of man whether it goeth upwards, and the ruah of the beast whether it goeth downward to the earth (Ecc;. III, 21)? vi The footnote here is useful: Therefore he will be immortal. (Midrash pp. 116f2) vii This is relevant as well: Deut. R, 11, 37. The five names may denote the different characteristics of the soul as the Rabbis understood it, or possibly some of these are conceived as different things; v. Th. And Y.T. ad loc. (Midrash pp. 116f2)

69 60 Neshamah is the breath; as people say, His breathing is good. 48 Hayyah (lit. living ): because all the limbs are mortal, whereas this is immortal in the body. Yehidah (unique): because all the limbs are duplicated, whereas this is unique in the body. Thus it is written, If He set His heart upon man, if He gather himself unto Himself ruho (his spirit) and nishmato (his soul), all flesh shall perish together and man shall return unto dust (Job XXXIV, 14 f). What this exegesis of the biblical account seems to accommodate is the notion that life is both a physical and metaphysical concept. What I have presented here seems to be the human (body) that is constructed with soil and is then animated with biological life as well as spirit/soul. What this seems to allow is that the human is understood to be the body that is able to accommodate the breath of life and [become] a living thing. Therefore the Cartesian cogito can be thought in perhaps different ways principally in that the question of sentience is not a question of humanity; the human preexists the notion of life in its physical or meta-physical manifestation so therefore the contemplation of the self that defines the subject is a meditation on life in its multiple manifestations and is a distinct question from that of the human which here is potentially a form without content. It will prove useful to take this understanding and address in careful fashion Foucault s formulation of biopower, Agamben s bare-life and its extension on the part of Mbembe as Necropolitics as this division progresses. But death seems to be an inappropriate term for this being because it does not seem possible to die if the subject has never been alive. This will be explored in more detail later in this chapter. What of the questions I asked about this lifeless human above? Based on what gaps we have been able to fill by adopting aspects of the Midrash and theorizing organically with the question of homo Liminalis in the background of the process we can propose that this human, just after the point of its creation and prior to the inclusion of life is an inert being

70 61 that is profoundly interesting for this thinking in the infinitude of possibilities that are represented in this space that is without being as we have come to understand it and its equation with life. Rather than viewing this as negatively, a lack or deficit of being it is useful to situate it as a lack, perhaps, only in the presence of the limitation of defined subjectivity. Everything and nothing is possible for the human and it appears that it is life as both a biological and meta-physical additive that defines and therefore limits the human. So, to take up the question that preoccupies Prof. B. Anthony Bogues, What about the human? I would answer that, for purposes of this project, the human is about infinity and life and about defining the limits of infinite possibility. The two are distinct from one another and the human can exist in the absence of life but life requires the human to give it a platform. But it is important to note that this lifelessness is not a form of death but theorized here as a possibility. By tracing this account of creation further it becomes important in ascertaining what we mean by the notion of will; divine and human. After creating Adam, placing him in the garden and noting the presence of the problematic tree the question of naming presents itself. As a practical matter, Verse 8 of Chapter 2 of Genesis names the garden as Eden so it is to be assumed that the text is sympathetic to understanding that as the true name of the garden in that it is coterminous with the will of God and His creation. Additionally, it is clear from the text that the notion of the first human being known as Adam is in actuality what he is not what he is named recalling the notes on this passage presented by Alter. It seems, therefore, that God reserves for himself the naming of certain types of creation as the text illustrates picking up at the start of verse 10. Now a river runs out of Eden to water the garden and from there splits off into four streams. The name of the first is Pishon [a]nd the name of the second river is Gihon And

71 62 the name of the third river is Tigris [a]ne the fourth is Euphrates. 49 The text here seems to situate God as the naming agent of the non-living features of the world and the plants but Adam is granted the power of naming the living creatures in the absence of explaining where the names of these rivers originates if not with the unmediated will of God. And the Lord God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. And the human called names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the heavens, and to all the beasts of the field, but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. 50 (Genesis 2: 19-21) This is what was meant previously as the repetitious nature of God s creative practice that creates different types of living creature[s] however it remains an open question whether these beings require the same addition of God s breath as the human did to become living creatures. A strict reading of the text implicates the beasts of the field and fowl of the heavens as living beings upon their creation rather than existing as the same type of inert being that the human was just after formation. If this is the case, and the text allows the space for this assumption, human life, at this point is explicitly differentiated from animal life in that the latter is not a product of God s breath. The difference here cannot be in the biological elements of life in that the animals referenced certainly exist along with and because of the biological elements of life as we understand them. This tends to allow for two possibilities: 1) that God s first utilization of the soil to construct the human was different in that He purposefully left out life in its entirety and 2) that the soil is a material that God can employ which already contains life. From this perspective, outside of the biological elements that God s breath contributes to the human, it is those that are separable from biology that is important: here we would be interested in ruah as the type of life granted

72 63 by God s breath that is independent of biology and can be called soul or spirit. The argument here is that it in the addition of ruah to the human that we witness a type of life that is linked to God s in ways that are not implicated in animal life and is important to the consideration of will. Adamic naming seems to have a different characteristic before and after the fall and in its examination against the question of spirit we can begin to note the locus of our understanding of the caesura between the will of God and the human. Prior to the fall, the naming practice of Adam is coincident with the will of God. Referring to the quotation above: and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. This question of naming and functionality seems to extend to the appearance of the second Human that is built viii from Adam s rib is first called Woman: This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, This one shall be called Woman, for from man was this one taken. 51 (Genesis 2:23) Again, like Adam, Woman is not a name so much as what she is. What is apparent here, is that like animal life, the Woman, at her appearance, is never marked in the text as the lifeless human that attains animation with the addition of God s breath. The Woman is fully formed and fully animate and the question becomes whether this formation can be considered alive in the same way as Adam. The feminist critique here is obvious; the construction of a hierarchy at the level of the relationship of the female both to the human and to God establishes the Woman as at least derivative if not inherently inferior in being formed from an alternative mode of creation and in her ontological dependence on the viii Alter offers important gloss on this term built. This may seem an odd term for the creation of woman, it complements the potters term fashion, used for the creation of the first human, and is more appropriate because the Lord is now working with hard material, not soft clay. As Nahum Sarna observed, the Hebrew for rib, tsela, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.

73 64 physical being of Adam. The Woman is not created from the soil directly as are the human ( adamah) and the beasts and fowl. She is molded from the rib of the already animated/living human and as such is also excluded from the direct infusion of God s life giving breath. Further, granting Adam the task of naming the female creation just like he is able to name the animals is a profoundly important point to consider. By affixing the label of Woman on this creation the argument is again that the will of Adam is coterminous with that of the divine will. However, after the fall and the pronouncement of God s punishment (Genesis 3:14-19), Adam re-names the Woman, [a]nd the human called his woman s name Eve, for she was the mother of all that lives. 52 (Genesis 3:20) This name, Eve, seems to be a progression away from the pre-fall notion of naming of living things that encompasses what the creature is to this point post-fall of what the creature does. Or presented more carefully, the name Eve as distinct from Woman seems to be caused by the instance of failure to follow God s strictures. The human creature, granted life is not necessarily understood to have its actions map directly upon what the creature is. In other words, Human, Man and Woman were created by the will of God and in the naming of them as what they are their actions were expected to follow this logic. At this juncture, the Woman/Eve separation in the first instance of renaming acknowledges the possibility of actions that fall outside the expectations of God s creation. This is particularly important because this naming encompasses within it the essential understanding of the transgression that caused it which is a distinct separation from the purity that is related to the naming of God s creation from the same soil that Adam is constructed. God, in building Woman from the stuff of the living Human rather than the soil seems to have created a different type of human being.

74 65 Now we have, at least provisionally discovered six things: 1) the non-living human, 2) the immortal human, 3) the human derived from the body of another human and not from the principal material of construction of living beings (soil), 4) the various components of what the life God grants through his breath is composed, 5) the mortal human and 6) the moment of separation of the will of the human from that of God. The common thread through each of these and what is of fundamental importance to the goal of positing what is meant by the term Elemental is the term life, its opposite death and additionally the question of lifelessness that is distinct from death. Based upon this deeper understanding it is necessary to revise the diagram presented in the first section of Presuppositions. What had been rendered as a graphic depiction of the state of being that informs Hegel s formulation of the Master/Slave relationship in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit requires revision when read against Genesis in that the states of being that precede the state of nature need to be articulated. Soil God s Breath Lifeless Human Living Immortal Human Living Mortal Humans Fall Living Immortal Female

75 66 Figure 18 The process depicted here that is meant to mirror, or perhaps trace the description of the creation of the human from Genesis ultimately results in the appearance of the Living Mortal Human which is theorized as the Elemental form of being that has in its genealogy four moments of transition or liminality in the manner the term is employed here. 1) the Soil made Human and Lifeless; 2) the Lifeless Human given Life and deemed here as Immortal; 3) the formation of the Woman Human (also deemed immortal) from the Human; and 4) the Fall that renders both Human Subjects Mortal. Again this final step in this process of transformation of this subject leaves us with the Elemental Subject that has as its primary reason for existence the maintenance of mortal existence (zoë) and in that process enters into the type of adversarial relationships and interactions that are described by Hegel in the formulation of the Master/Slave dialectic of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The maintenance of life, principally through ever more complex forms of conflict both internally and externally allow us to look carefully at Giorgio Agamben s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, which in many ways depends upon this question of life and the human form. The thinker opens the text with a passage that is relevant for the thinking here. The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word life. They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoë, which expressed the simple fact of living common to living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of life proper to an individual or a group. 53 Agamben s description that theorizes life as being composed of typologies fits with what has been discussed to this point regarding the human, once being granted life but does not take up the question of the human without life, a situation that it seems important to distinguish from the notion of death. As a practical matter, death, as we understand it, does

76 67 not logically or sequentially precede life. The figure that must occupy our attention here, at least momentarily, the lifeless human, simply cannot die in that it has never been alive. I use the term it here to specify that characterizing this assemblage of soil beyond that label is difficult from the perspective of our stance that understands humanity to be composed of at least a set of characteristics that make it distinguishable from another human or perhaps the same in that those characteristics that serve as distinguishing do not present means for separation. As a practical matter, and keeping ourselves oriented with the cosmogony before us, there is no one else to distinguish this figure from: it exists in singularity and is important in that this project wishes to take seriously the Hegelian notion of mechanical causality. Important elements of which are usefully explicated in Robert Pippins text, Hegel s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. ( the contents of causes continue into their effects), but the essential point is that an external cause cannot be said simply to act on a purposeful being and produce an effect because any such possible result depends on the proximate cause being as he says taken in and transformed its causal power the result of the way it is understood and, in human beings, whether such possibility is a reason to act or not. 54 What I mean to focus on here is the notion that each step along the way toward the creation of a figure necessarily contains components of the being from which it is drawn. In this instance, the existence that is lifeless that then is granted life is theorized to establish a desire for both bios and zoë that are fundamental to the subject of the Human. The point of departure has to be this question again of the Human that is lifeless but not dead. This position proves important in that it posits a subjectivity for which there is no dialectical oppositional understanding. Our perspective on the question of life situates lifelessness as another way of marking death. This original position, the Lifeless Human, requires us to

77 68 think differently about two important formulations for the modern age, Bare Life and Biopolitics/power (force). Beginning with Agamben s understanding of Bare Life, it is apparent that in this instance we are witnessing something very different in many respects. What becomes important, following the logic of mechanical causality, is how this ontology is implicated in the continuum of human development. How might the echoes of Human Lifelessness as the foundation of Human-ness find itself implicated in the subjects that follow? A way into this question might be to look closely at Agamben s Bare Life to ascertain when it appears along this continuum and its relationship to Human Lifelessness without Death. Agamben, on this point, writes: In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined-as merely reproductive life-to the sphere of the oikos, home (Politics, 1252a, 26-35). 55 The concern here is not principally oikos or polis as it seems to be in Agamben s text, but this question of simple natural life that seems to exist a step or so too far along the logic exposed here that contemplates a simplicity of basic life that is more bare than even the formulation presented in Homo Sacer proposes is related, in the classical sense, to the question of reproduction. Recall that reproduction in the sense of this cosmogony does not become a component of human life until after the fall. Neither the Lifeless Human, the Living yet Immortal Human, or the Female Immortal Human is concerned with the question of reproductive life until after the Fall and the additive of mortality to the elements of the understanding of what it means to be Human. For obvious reasons, for Adam, when he is alone in the sense that the only other subject is the radically Other God or the creatures on the Earth, there is no need to consider reproduction. Additionally, if we are able to

78 69 understand the ante-fall Adam and Woman as immortal, there is additional no necessity to populate the Earth beyond the two of them in that there would be no end to humanity since they simply cannot die. So, the formulation of bare life in this sense simply does not accommodate human life that precedes Fallen Man. Additionally, Bare Life is implicated as that which is just this side of death. This is the type of dialectical relationship between Life and Death that is irrelevant for the Human we are considering. It is clear that the theorizing of Agamben around sovereignty begins with a subject for whom Bare Life is relevant in its relationship to serving as a preventative to death. What we are interested in here is a type of Bare Life that is unrelated to death and is a type of zoë that is internally coherent and exists without normative relationship to the possibility of dying. There are two things to consider. The first is the question of lifelessness that is not a type of death and life that is not at risk of ending: an immortality that is not divine as the eternal life of a god seems to be but immortal in that it is a type of perpetual human life that knows no end. This position is of particular importance for this project in that it identifies a type of human existence that is unrelated to the possibility of coercion in that it is unrelated to the possibility of death. Without the threat of the absolute violence of destruction of life there is, as a practical matter, nothing with which to threaten and therefore coerce either of the Elemental typologies of human subject on display here. The Lifeless Human is potentially inanimate and unconscious but most importantly, in not having a life that can end it is not possible to consider it as dead until it is granted life. The next two steps along the way; the Living Human that is Immortal and the Woman who is equally outside of the discourse of death, exist in a space of infinite possibility in that the only limit to their potentiality is God s will, the argument here being that, at least in the case of Adam as exemplified by the naming process, there exists no separation between his

79 70 wishes and God s desires. It is only after the Fall, the banishment from the Garden of Eden and the introduction of death as the ultimate wage of this sin that it becomes possible to coerce the Living and now-mortal Human. The reason that this proves important is twofold: First, as mentioned above, we have identified in this intellectual tradition the first appearance of the homo Liminalis and secondarily in punishing the Human subject with mortality, God pronounces the following sentence that was referenced above: eat bread till you return to the soil, for from there were you taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return. 56 (Genesis 2:19). The argument presented here is that in death, the subject, in order to return to the soil, must pass through the stages of Human development that have been referenced here and is not truly dead until the return to the soil. Further the argument is that in order to change subjectivity (metamorphosis of the subject), the figure must engage in the discourse of death and reach the point of originary potentiality (nominated here as exemplified by Fanon s zone of non-being that will prove important later in this text), the Lifeless Human Figure with infinite potentiality and take advantage of this spatiality to reverse this vector by assuming another type of zoë. This understanding is posited in order to encompass canonical representations by Hegel and Fanon on the discourse of death as imperative to the phenomenological experience of the subject engaged in dialectical processes of self-making. Death becomes, in this formulation not necessarily the goal of a process of revolutionary alteration of the self but the mode for its accomplishment. Mortality as such is a risk component to the reward of accomplishing an alteration of the subject but it necessarily passes thorough the space of originary liminal existence as this lifelessness that was theorized as being devoid of oppositional logics which renders it a fundamental ontological space or the space of Being in that it is at the same time the locus of non-being. It is therefore, only in the reaching or

80 71 turning toward death that the possibility of creating a subject from the position of Elemental Being is possible. The importance of death here requires close careful attention and Achille Mbembe s essay Necropolitics is generative and provides forward momentum for this aspect of the analysis by serving as a bridge to the exploration of the Exalted and Abject. In this essential essay Necropolitics takes on the question of death and sovereignty in an effort to fathom the exercise of reason as the stuff of modernity. At its outset, the author states categorically that [t]his essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. 57 Following this logic against the cosmogony examined here it is clear that God is the absolute sovereign in that he grants life and then pronounces that it must end. What becomes interesting here is to take seriously that the Fall of Man, based on this formulation is therefore implicated as an act of sovereignty in that Adam, who had been told of the consequences of eating from the forbidden tree, elected to do so and in that act selfimposed mortality life and death. From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of selfunderstanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation. Politics therefore is defined twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are told is what differentiates it from war. In other words, it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject-or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this

81 72 case, rest on the belief that the subject is the master and controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and selflimitation (fixing one s own limits for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society s capacity for selfcreation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations 58 Following Mbembe here, the lack of sovereignty must therefore be subjection to externally dictated institutions and external limitations on the self. This makes the decision to violate the first laws the Human is given by God; And the Lord God commanded the human, saying, From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die. 59 (Genesis 2:8-17) rendering the wresting of sovereignty away from God, which, at the same time, having it be legible only through its relationship to death; again, a possibility that up to that point, did not exist for the Human. In substance, God had externally dictated biological (bios) and political (zoë) life on the Human in that there is an eternal existence without possibility of death; returning to the opening of Mbembe s essay, the capacity to dictate who may live, in that the Human was lifeless until this point and establishing the conditions to fulfill the second of the imperatives here ( [dictatate] who must die ) 60 by punishing the human with mortality are arguably externally imposed conditions except when the cause and effect relation to death was an act of agency on the part of the Human. From this perspective it seems that death, as such, becomes the critical term to consider here in forming this relationship to modes of Elemental or perhaps abstract being. We have mentioned above the importance of death in interrogating Hegelian dialectics and Mbembe takes up this question with respect to the formation of the subject. Significant for such a project is Hegel s discussion of the relation between death and the becoming subject. Hegel s

82 73 account of death centers on a bipartite concept of negativity. First, the human negates nature (a negation exteriorized in the human s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work or struggle. In transforming nature, the human being creates a world; but in the process, he or she also is exposed to his or her own negativity. Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary. It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the animal that constitutes the human subject s natural being is defeated. In other words, the human being truly becomes subject-that is, separated from the animal-in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity). It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history. Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death. To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit, he says, is not that life which is frightened of death, and spares itself destruction, but that life which assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. Politics is therefore death that lives a human life. Such, too, is the definition of absolute knowledge and sovereignty: risking the entirety of one s life. 61 Juxtaposing this analysis of Hegel s centering the relationship to death as the necessary and sufficient condition for political life against the cosmogony engaged here, it becomes clear that the story of the human vis-à-vis the question of the political begins with the conscious decision on the part of these subjects to violate the laws of God and make death a possibility. Prior to that, the Human, as such, cannot be considered a political being and is outside of the consideration of the notion of the political as a unit of analysis as it relates to the formation of the subject. The argument then is that the understanding of the Human that substantively only begins with the death-bound subject is insufficiently undefined for the Elemental figure pursued here in that it is implicated as a particular type of political actor. What is likely necessary is to mark the Human that occupies the space here for Hegel and Mbembe alike might better be described as a Person that then is implicated as a

83 74 particular type of Personhood within a defined political context. The Elemental figure that occupies the foundational stuff in the paradigm here, or the prototypical homo Liminalis, is not the soil but the Living Immortal Human that has the biological attributes of life but has not chosen a political perception in that death is not a consideration. The goal all along has been to locate the sufficiently abstract subject from which to build the particular that is implicated by the hierarchical relations that necessarily follow. This relates closely to the goal established by Hegel in his search for the general universal in many ways and is explicated in W.T. Stace s useful text The Philosophy of Hegel. The more specialized it is the later will be its place. Therefore, the first category will be the most general of all, the summun genus. 62 From this perspective and in the context of this effort it is possible to view the Lifeless Human as the summun genus that Stace nominates as the first category. By abstracting from the differentia life, which is inherent in the concept of animal, we should reach the concept material object, and so on. Hence the first category will be the most abstract category, and will be reached by carrying the process of abstraction to its extreme limit. The highest possible abstraction, that which is common to every conceivable object in the universe, is the concept of being Being, the quality of isness, is clearly the highest possible abstraction. 63 Interestingly, Stace situates life as inherent in the concept of animal while it is the contention here that, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the most abstract character with respect to the Human is lifeless. Lifelessness, as such, serves the purpose of establishing the Human in form that is devoid of the particularity that comes much later and is a conceit of the political Human to suppose himself as the basis from which the understanding of Human exists. The normativity of the Elemental, in this paradigm, must be

84 75 representative of all possible human beings and not potentially exclusionary. This means that the addition of life begins this process by including in the biological aspects that Stace sees as inherent also those that are political. It is this space of nothingness that elides the existence of the particular as universal and therefore exclusionary Human figure represented by this important image. Figure 19 This plaque that NASA affixed to the Pioneer 10 probe that is currently journeying beyond our solar system presents these two persons as elementally human thus establishing a specific type of human being as normative or the standard by which all others are measured. This is, in the thinking here, out of phase with the notion of Elemental being that is explicated here and represents a manifestation of the separations that concern us here the first of which being the Exalted. But this representation of the Human requires close attention. The purpose of the plaque is to communicate to intelligent life forms that may encounter this probe in the furthest reaches of the void, who we are, were we came from, and what we are about. It accomplishes this by first noting the awareness of the constructors of this spacecraft of the Hydrogen atom, the most common element in the universe. Second, the

85 76 location of the solar system from which the probe comes is located by its relationship to pulsars that contribute lines of bearing to the Milky Way galaxy and our sun. Third, the course travelled by the Pioneer is demonstrated by the mapping of this planetary system and noted that the gravity of Jupiter was employed to propel the probe out of this galaxy and on its way. Finally, all of these objective points of reference are joined by a depiction of the constructors of this device superimposed over a picture of the silhouette of the Pioneer. The problem, at least for this project s thinking, is that there is nothing objective about the depiction of the beings that are meant to represent the human. A particular type of human, male and female, phenotypically Caucasian, is exhibited and necessarily understood to be the normative representation of the Human. As a matter of fact, most people on the planet Earth do not look like these people and it represents a conceit of cosmic proportion (literally) to imagine that beings from another planet would even find the lengths to which this artist s rendition of the human goes to realistically depict a specific type discernible. What I mean is, that it is a fairly settled matter that amongst human beings we have a difficult time recognizing individuals across racial and cultural lines so it seems difficult to imagine that beings who are likely to be almost unfathomably different than us would be capable of noting anything other than the most rudimentary aspects of human physical appearance. In short, there is likely no difference between that depiction and a set of stick figures from the perception of an alien consciousness. This representation is likely just as useful for the extra-terrestrial being in noting what a human being might look like.

86 77 Figure 20 As a practical matter, our own representations of what we think of when we envision the alien speaks to the lack of discernible difference of appearance and gender. Figure 21 The point here is that it reveals the hegemonic vision of the aesthetic presentation of what is normatively human on the part of Western man that will be further examined later in this text when I take up what I call that Aesthetic Corpus. That being said, differentiating the human from the beings who may encounter them for the first time in some space between here and Alpha Centauri while at the same time differentiating the person of European descent from everyone else on the planet speaks to this question of separation, exaltation and faux normativity that is the necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of the subaltern figure.

87 78 3: The Exalted It is probably most useful to begin here where we started and finished in the section above, with the cosmogony presented in Genesis. What becomes important at this stage of the project is discerning that which renders one type of Human sufficiently different from the other to be recognized at such a distance from some standard to be considered Abject or Exalted. The previous work in this chapter as it related to identifying the elemental form of human that exists at a stage prior to the figure which we understand as possessing bare life or more carefully the Human figure that is not yet subject to the limitations of life and death in that it is not yet alive. This Bare Human (Lifeless), is the first in a series of beings that are arguably, in many ways flat with their relationship to the creator God in that both beings exist and have no expectation of death. It is at the moment of choosing death as the goal of life that the Human is firmly demarked from the creator God and establishes the first of the hierarchical relations that are relevant here; that being the relationship between the immortal God and the mortal human. This is taken up most clearly in the Presuppositions, specifically Number 6 The Divine and the Profane are posed in opposition to one another and further Number 7 The Divine and the Profane do not touch one another and are mediated by the Common. This opposition marked in Presuppositions 6 and 7 is at the outset related to death only. As a practical matter, the argument presented here is that the relationship of the Human to God is discernably differentiated from that of the Divine to the Profane. The creator and creation causal relationship does not presuppose a hierarchical relationship, or, it is not necessarily true that the creator is naturally greater than the creation. The point here is that the relationship described above between God and Adam as exemplified by the practice of Adamic Naming, which I argue is at no distance from the will of God, and in many ways allows, through the process of naming, Adam to function as an extension of the creator

88 79 God. Secondarily, Adam, as such, in providing the stuff from which God forms the Woman is not only created from the fundamental material of creation but provides himself the stuff of creation. Following this logic, and mapping this against the question of the divine and profane, it seems clear that the myth, as presented, seems to accommodate the notion that God would neither allow the profane to name and therefore define all living creatures nor use subaltern materiel for the production of another living creature. Therefore, at this moment along the continuum of Human evolution, there is no profane existence only the cause and effect relation of creator to creation. Even the prohibitions pronounced by God to Adam, I do not read as marking a necessarily hierarchical relation beyond that of more rather than less knowledge about the world and the implication of actions within it. The Fall is critical in that it shifts the flat cause and effect relation between God and Human to a vertical relationship between the Divine and the Profane. It is death that serves as the punishment for this transgression and in the final analysis the thing that separates the Human from God. The Mortal Human has a fundamentally different relationship with time than the Immortal Human. Recall the x-axis of the paradigm from the Presupposition section of this project. What it is meant to represent is both a continuum of sovereignty in so doing mark the relation of the subject to control of time. Focusing here on the pre-fall, flat relationship of God and Human, we can propose that what this bears witness to is another manner in which we are able to see the cause (creator) and effect (creation) logic play itself out but without the possibility of the created being having finitude, the two beings are both in control of time in different yet related ways. The Creator in that time becomes the tablet upon which creation is written and is therefore in absolute control of time in that he has no negative relationship to its passage. For the Immortal Human, time is likewise of no moment in that there is literally

89 80 no end to the time of the created being. With the Fall and the pronouncement of Death as the wage of this sin; But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die[.], 64 time becomes of vital import to the human in that there is suddenly only so much of it. Further, the journey back to the stuff of creation, [b]y the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread till you return to the soil, for from there you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return; 65 (Genesis 3:19-20), I am theorizing as having to take account of the stage of Immortal Humanity and Lifeless Humanity. Upon the addition of finitude to the life of the Human, the x-axis that previously marked the contiguity of the Human and Godly relationship to time now situates the two figures at a great distance from one another to demonstrate that the Human no longer is able to control his relationship with time in the final sense. This accounts for the horizontal separation of God from the Human and recalling the nomenclature surrounding the multidimensional paradigm, the y-axis in that it marks the relationship of the subject to space, marks the second dimension that separates God from the Human. Recall that Adam and the newly named Woman, Eve, are banished from the Garden of Eden. The verse states: And the Lord God said, Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever. And the Lord God sent him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken. And he drove out the human and set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life. 66 (Genesis 3:22-24) Several things present themselves for consideration in this passage. Most provocatively is the opening moment of the passage that reads [n]ow that the human has become like one of us implying that there is more than one god, that it is possible for the human to become like them through knowing good and evil and finally that there is only

90 81 mortality that prevents the human from becoming a god; he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever. This presents important problems for this project for several reasons the first being a counter-factual that wonders what would have become of the Humans if they had consumed the fruit of the tree of life instead of or before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Second, I have spent a great deal of time here proposing that the Human, prior to the Fall, was immortal but this passage seems to require that the Human eat of the tree of life to enjoy that status. These matters are inextricably related to one another and the sequence of consumption matters. First recall that God prohibits consumption of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not the tree of life. From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die. 67 This passage seems clear in that at the time of the divine prohibition, Adam was immortal, and if he eats from the tree of good and evil he will be doomed to die. There is space here to consider that the Humans were free to and had been consuming the fruit of the tree of life. There is no reason to assume that they did not and further it fits with the proposition that these beings were indeed immortal. Then it becomes necessary to relate the Divine Prohibition to knowledge of good and evil. This is what troubles God and, according to the text makes the human like one of us. It is at this point that taking from the tree of life is prohibited because it would then serve to commute God s sentence of death and render the Human a god. Here we witness several instances of the threshold between the Elemental, the category that contains the Human in all of its manifestations, and the Exalted, that accommodates the presence of divine beings as well as the first elements that prove to make up the being of the Exalted.

91 82 Beginning with the attributes of the Exalted, the first of them would necessarily need to be the power of creation without which there would be nothing to order. The additional attributes seem to be knowledge of good and evil in combination with immortality. The threshold is mortality. It is fine for the Elemental Human to be immortal. It is the combination of knowledge of good and evil and immortality that is prohibited. Returning to the multi-dimensional paradigm that has been constructed we can map these events and discern what I marked earlier as the collapse of the horizontal relationship of the Human and God along a continuum of sovereignty that I referenced as the relationship with time. Along the x-axis, the introduction of mortality shatters or perhaps more clearly establishes time as the relevant measure for the existence of the Human. Along the y-axis, the Cherubim and the flaming sword that blocks access to the tree of life establishes a space of exclusion, inverting the former relationship with space from positive to negative. The Midrash is useful here to fill in the spaces that are left in the text. proposes: First in relation to how the tree of knowledge alters the subject, the Midrash He [the serpent] began speaking slander of his Creator, saying Of this tree did He eat and then create the world; hence He orders you, ye shall not eat thereof, so that you may not create other worlds, for every person hates his fellow craftsmen. 68 As with any effective lie, this one, which is likely the first one, at least according to this mythology, uttered on the Earth, contains elements of truth. The truth here is bracketed between two important falsehoods: 1) that the Creator ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in order to create the world and 2) that every person hates his fellow craftsmen. Obviously, the creator God did not eat of the tree prior to the act of creation

92 83 since the tree is part of creation. ix Second, persons may indeed hate or be jealous or perhaps envious of the creation of other persons but this would not apply to God since he is not Human and therefore not a person. The truth, as the saying goes, lies somewhere in the middle: hence He orders you, ye shall not eat thereof, so that you may not create other worlds. What then is it about the knowledge of good and evil, in combination with immortality that would make the Human capable of creating other worlds? What is it about discerning good and evil that facilitates the Human becoming like one of us [Gods] which is necessarily and importantly different than becoming one of Them, yet still have the God-like power to create other worlds? The argument here is that this knowledge allows the imagination to embark on the process of ordering which is the fundamental element of the creation of worlds. What I mean here is that the binary between good and evil, like that of the abject and the exalted or the king and the Negro woman is only discernible from a third unrelated and necessarily middle position. The existence of difference between actors or actions that is not contextualized against a standard, in this case the question of good and evil is just that, difference without distinction independent of value or moral judgment. God and the Human are different and until the Fall not discernible, as such, against a continuum of Good and Evil but only relative sovereignty and a relationship to temporality. Adam perceives God and is in no position to judge the observation against an understanding of Good versus Evil; the human at this stage did not have this capability. God, since He posses the two component parts of Exaltation, knowledge of good and evil and immortality, is able to establish a prohibition for seemingly no other reason than this process of ordering the ix Or perhaps not. This concept preoccupies the novel There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden by Leon Forrest.

93 84 Human against the Divine and further against the other living things. As a practical matter, God could just not have included the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden or placed it under a guard more impenetrable than his warning at the outset and avoided this problem. Upon eating of the tree the Human becomes aware of the possibility that the world is different than it had seemed to their uninformed perception and further that if it is different than, and this seems to be God s concern, another one can be produced with different rules. Adam at this point has not become Evil but aware of the possibility of both Evil and Good. Again, the Midrash attempts to close this gap in the narrative that appears that wonders at what it is that happens to the Human upon this awareness. And the eyes of them both were opened (III,7). Were they then blind? R. Judan in the name of R. Johanan b. Zakkai, and R. Berekish in the name of R. Akiba explained it by comparing them to a villager who was passing a glassworker s shop and just when a basket full of goblets and cutglass ware was in front of him he swung his staff round and broke them. Whereupon he [their owner] arose and seized him, saying to him, I know that I cannot obtain redress from you, but come and I will show you how much valuable stuff you have destroyed. Thus He showed them how many generations he had destroyed. 69 This proposal allows us to discern several things regarding the Midrashic understanding of this passage. First, it is clear that the thinking here situates God as a craftsman that assembles fragile articles that are subject to destruction by an outside, unknowing force. Second, there is no way for the offending subject to repair the damage and perhaps it is even beyond the capability of the craftsman to remedy. And finally, making the destructive force aware that the carefully crafted items represent generations speaks to a central argument of this project; that the term against which these beings operate, in the first instance and prior to the complication of matters that requires multi-dimensional

94 85 thinking, is temporality and it presents the central concern which is then equated to genealogy that is the context for this question of sovereignty. What I mean here is that God in the creating of the Human has established a genealogy and in so doing sets time in motion. The initial act of creation is that of absolute sovereignty and the immortality of God is passed along to his Human creation. This is a generational question; admittedly the generative and, at this moment, only generation; God to the Human but it covers everything in that, as I have mentioned before, there is no need for procreation in that since the Human will not die, there is no necessity of replacement. This establishes a relationship of time and space that is alternative to the post- Fall relation in that there is no end to either. If time and space are both laid atop one another in this instance, i.e. the x-axis and y-axis laying atop one another it shatters our Cartesian understanding of the relationship of time and space and the possibility of locating a point along it. Effectively, in this understanding time and space are the same thing and a being situated in time is also situated in space, which is much different from this world. I write this at 10:08:33 A.M. 16 June 2014 in Providence, R.I. What I am proposing here is that in the world under examination at this stage of the mythology, only one of these terms is necessary to locate the subject in question. If the x and y axis are the same then saying 10:08:33 A.M. 16 June 2014 would be the same as saying Providence, RI and vice versa. Further, by designating the subject that is located at this singularity of time and space one would also need go no further in expressing the where and when. That subject, named would be located as accurately as is possible today against any coordinate system. Following this proposition, God as such, when named is located along this infinite plane of time and space where there is no separation between the two as well as no distinction between God, space, time and infinity. This does not require that there be unity

95 86 of subjects. Human can be understood to be located along the same time/space singularity and be like God in this but necessarily distinguishable one from the other and even amongst other Humans. In that the Human is located in the garden, seems unaware of anything outside of it or that it might have boundaries along with being immortal, this subject is also located along this singularity of time and space which has no limit. There exists at this point, distinction between Human and God without boundary. The argument is then that it is the sentence of death that shatters the time and space singularity. This is triggered by the relationship that God establishes with the knowledge of good and evil and the punishment of death. There is no reason to imagine, as we have seen, that the introduction of this knowledge into the psyche of the Human would have done anything other than facilitate the creation of an alternative time and space singularity that might be indistinguishable from that established by the mythology before us in that it might lie directly on top of it or, if different, parallel or perhaps perpendicular, crossing one another at a single point of divergence or perhaps meeting at multiple points. Additionally, it seems that God notes that the sentence of death without the introduction of control of space would not achieve that desired effect. Two things might occur. The Human might continue to feed from the tree of life and realize the fear God articulated in the text: Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever or perhaps continue to occupy the infinite space of the Garden with newly acquired knowledge and expire there when death arrives in substance leaving the time-space singularity in tact but rendering them finite. It may not be obvious how I am reading the space of Eden as infinite since naming a place seems to contradict that assertion; a place cannot seemingly be somewhere and everywhere at the same time. In many ways the limitlessness of the

96 87 temporality of the Human as a product of immortality is obvious. Less obvious is the manner in which I am situating the Human before the fall as limitless in space as well as time without resorting to the tautological explanation that would propose that since space and time are the same because they are both limitless they are limitless because one or the other of them is without an end point. It is not sufficient to propose the singularity space and time in this manner without examining each as a separate entity and then demonstrating the manner in which they can be linked. Again, the discourse surrounding time is clear. I am arriving at the limitless nature of space by noting that the text at no point prohibits the Human from leaving the Garden of his own volition. There is no reason to believe that Adam and Woman could not have come and gone as they pleased from the Garden but in fact had no reason to venture beyond its limits since it contained everything they could ever imagine including that which would lead to their ruin. As such I am reading the limitless space of the world as coincident with the horizon of the limits of Human imagination. Upon the Fall the Humans are denied access to the tree of life which concurrently places a firm limit on imagination and thus introduce a boundary to the perceptually formerly limited space. By dooming the Human to death and banning it from the Garden and access to the tree of life God created the condition that separates time from space in terms of the Cartesian coordinate system that is so vital to this project. Finally, we have identified four essential components of the paradigm explored here: 1) the separation of the Exalted and the Elemental, 2) the identification of death as the threshold between the two, 3) the components of Exalted being: Knowledge of Good and Evil, Immortality and the power of creation and 4) the separation of time from space. The next task is to accomplish much of the same for Abject being.

97 88 4: The Abject Genesis will remain as the text under examination in two areas: the first phenomenon to examine is the story of Cain and Abel and then that of Noah and Ham, the latter of which serving to build the bridge to the central concern of this project, the notion of racial abjection. As the story of Cain and Abel goes, picking up with Chapter 4 of Genesis, Adam and Eve bear two sons. The point here is to define the terms of the existence of the Abject in the same manner it was accomplished for the Exalted in the proposal above. Again, it seems here that Adam and the growing number of Humans on the Earth exist as separate from the divine being of God yet not yet Abject in that there exits no separation within the context of the Elementally Human to locate beings below that status. The first instance of this appears in this chapter of Genesis when Cain makes an offering to Lord just as his brother Abel. And it happened in the course of time that Cain brought from the fruit of the soil an offering to the Lord. And Abel too had brought from the choice firstlings of his flock, and the Lord regarded Abel and his offering but He did not regard Cain and his offering, and Cain was very incensed, and his face fell. And the Lord said to Cain. Why are you incensed, and why is your face fallen? For whether you offer well, or whether you do not, at the tent flap sin crouches and for you is its longing but you will rule over it. 70 (Genesis 4:3-7) Cain hears this admonition or advice from the Lord and his mind assembles the notion of intra-human competition for the favor of God that is not a component of the statement. God did not situate Cain s offering against that of his brother but against the presence of sin that must be mastered. Unfortunately for Abel, Cain does not see it that way

98 89 and instead murders his brother and in the killing makes himself the first of what I mark as the Abject Human, a distinction from the Elemental Human which we have noted is different than God in important ways but until this point not in the sense of a lowering. What have you done? Listen! your brother s blood cries out to me from the soil. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it will no longer give you its strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth. And Cain said to the Lord. My punishment is too great to bear. Now that You have driven me this day from the soil and I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me. And the Lord said to him, Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer a sevenfold vengeance. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain so whoever found him would not slay him. 71 (Genesis 4:11-15) This is an important passage that marks two important separations: The Elemental from the Abject and vitally a typology of Abjection, the killing of which causes a ban more severe than the punishment of the initial abjection. This last distinction will prove important when it comes to situating Agamben s conceptualization of the state of exception generally and more specifically the formulation of the homo sacer as: the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will be considered homicide. This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. 72 There are important points here that must be marked first in the relationship of the now abjected Cain to Elemental humanity and further the distinction between this and what Agamben places before us. By returning to the passage from Genesis under consideration this can be read against the threshold matter of death that served as the linchpin in the creation of the

99 90 important distinctions from the previous section. There are three instances of death that must be considered here and serve as the terms against which we can gain access to the separation that concerns us here. The first is the causal condition of the murder of Abel by Cain. I wish to focus here in some detail on the narrative presented in Genesis. Listen! your brother s blood cries out to me from the soil. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother s blood from your hand. 73 (Genesis 4:11-12) We witness here a type of death that is unnatural in that the doom pronounced by God of the mortality of the Human did not consist of an emptying of the life force. The blood of Abel spills into the gaping mouth of the soil that is eager for the return of the Human body but it is the hand of Cain that intercedes in the natural rhythm of birth and death that God establishes and ruptures that divine temporality creating the first abjection. By interrupting the temporality of the Human body of Abel, Cain has abjected himself beneath the level of Elemental Humanity. It is the hand of God that is the locus of life and death, not that (ideally) of Fallen man. The second condition of death that causes a separation is the concern that preoccupies Cain; that by expelling him from the space x that he shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me. (Genesis 4:14.) God pronounces a protective measure that preserves the life of Cain within his abjection, [a]nd the Lord set a mark upon Cain so whoever found him would not slay him. (Genesis 4:15) Alter, as usual, proves helpful here regarding this mark. It is of course a mark of protection, not a stigma as x Alter provides an important footnote to these passages: The biblical imagination is equally preoccupied with the theme of exile (this is already the second expulsion) and with the arduousness or precariousness of agriculture, a blessing that easily turns into blight. (Alter. Pp. 30f9)

100 91 the English idiom mark of Cain suggests. 74 God, in this reading, insures that natural Human temporality remains a component of the subjectivity of Cain and if anyone were to interrupt his existence, even under conditions of abjection, that individual would be subject to the third of the instances of death that are explored here. And the Lord said to him, Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer a sevenfold vengeance. (Genesis 4: 15) The terms of this vengeance are not enumerated but what is important to note is that again the fact of death, natural or unnatural, serves as the triggering event for the demarcation of a type of subject as distinct from which she came. The other term that is important here is the discursive importance of space as marking the condition of the subject at hand. The notion of banishment, from the Garden of Eden, from the space occupied by the First Family, and forms of metaphysical exclusion that appear to be both the condition of separation and in some instances its cause. What proves important for this project in considering this question of the relationship between spatiality and the Three Modes of Sovereign Being (Abject, Elemental, and Exalted) explored here. It is clear that a meditation on the spatiality of the cosmological account here accommodates the notion that the space occupied by a subject serves to define the limits of the existence under consideration. Returning to the discussion above on the expulsion of the first Humans from the Garden, it is clear that this ban from that space was substantively a precautionary measure on the part of God to regain control over the horizon of possibility for his Human beings. By forbidding access to the Tree of Life, which, recall, had previously been allowed for the use of the Humans, God erects a physical threshold to shore up the already existing pronouncement of restrictive space and the punishment to follow that proved insufficient.

101 92 It is important here to linger on this aspect of Elemental being that requires the second, more robust forms of exclusion that God has to pursue to place parameters around the ambitions of his beings. Recalling the Hegelian concept of mechanical causality noted above and described in the text by Pippin, it is this component of Elemental being that lingers in the subjects that follow and leads to the desire for a change in subjectivity of the subject in question, the alteration of a third party s being, or the prevention of the ambition of another that might prove to jeopardize the settled or prospective being of the actor in question. One is reminded here of the explosive courtroom drama, A Few Good Men and the climatic conflict between Colonel Nathan Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson) and Lieutenant (junior grade) Daniel Kaffee (portrayed by Tom Cruise). In the course of the trial of two enlisted Marines accused of murdering another of their comrades, Kaffee notes that Colonel Jessup asserts on several occasions that his orders are always followed. Kaffee: A moment ago, you said that you ordered Lt. Kendrick to tell his men that Santiago wasn't to be touched. Jessup: That's right. Kaffee: And Lt. Kendrick was clear on what you wanted? Jessup: Crystal. Kaffee: Any chance Lt. Kendrick ignored the order? Jessup: Ignored the order? Kaffee: Any chance he forgot about it? Jessup: No. Kaffee: Any chance Lt. Kendrick left your office and said, "the old man is wrong"? Jessup: No. Kaffee: When Lt. Kendrick spoke to the platoon and ordered them not to touch Santiago, any chance they ignored him? Jessup: You ever served in an infantry unit, son? Kaffee: No, sir. Jessup: Ever served in a forward area? Kaffee: No, sir. Jessup: Ever put your life in another man's hands and asked him to put his life in yours? Kaffee: No, sir. Jessup: We follow orders, son. We follow orders or people die. It's that simple. Are we clear?

102 93 Kaffee: Yes, sir. Jessup: Are we clear?! Kaffee: Crystal. Colonel, I just have one more question before I put Airman O'Malley and Airman Rodriguez on the stand. If you gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched, and your orders are always followed, then why would Santiago be in danger? Why would it be necessary to transfer him off the base? Jessup: Santiago was a substandard marine. He was being transferred... Kaffee: That's not what you said. You said he was being transferred, because he was in grave danger. Jessup: That's correct. Kaffee: You said he was in danger. I said "grave danger"? You said... Jessup: I recall what I said. Kaffee: I could have the court reporter read back to you... Jessup: I know what I said! I don't have to have it read back to me, like I'm... Kaffee: Then why the two orders? Colonel? Jessup: Sometimes men take matters into their own hands. Kaffee: No, sir. You made it clear just a moment ago that your men never take matters into their own hands. Your men follow orders or people die. So Santiago shouldn't have been in any danger at all, should he have, Colonel? Jessup: You snotty, little bastard. Ross: Your honor, I'd like to ask for recess. Kaffee: I'd like an answer to the question, Judge. Judge: The court will wait for an answer. Kaffee: If Lt. Kendrick gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched, then why did he have to be transferred? Colonel? Lt. Kendrick ordered the Code Red, didn't he? Because that's what you told Lt. Kendrick to do! Ross: Objection! Kaffee: And when it went bad, you cut these guys loose! You had Markinson sign a phony transfer order, and you doctored the log book! Ross: Damn it, Kaffee! Kaffee: You coerced the doctor! Judge: Consider yourself in contempt! Kaffee: Colonel Jessup, did you order the Code Red?! Judge: You don't have to answer that question! Jessup: I'll answer the question. You want answers? Kaffee: I think I'm entitled! Jessup: You want answers?! Kaffee: I want the truth! Jessup: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like "honor", "code", "loyalty". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very

103 94 freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to! Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red? Jessup: I did the job that - Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?!! Jessup: YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!! This excellent scene lingers on the same questions that preoccupy us here with relation to God and the subjects, these Humans that He created. The Creator made it clear to his creation that he was not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; this was clearly not good enough. The creator then banishes Adam and Eve from the garden and replaces his word with a physical barrier to supplement the prohibition in the form of the Cherubim and the Flaming Sword, all in aid of preventing the ultimate usurpation of divine existence by the Human. In the continued relationship between Cain and Abel we witness the necessity of God punishing again because the jealous brother again does not understand or perhaps take seriously the admonition from the mouth of the God-head and takes matters into his own hands, killing his brother in order to elevate his status. Kaffee, if interrogating the Creator just as he did Colonel Jessup would have to ask the only question that matters: Why the second order? Or more appropriately why won t the Elemental Human do as he is told? The proposal here is that the Elemental even in its ontological form, is characterized by desire and that desire, following the resent re-translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard is self-consciousness. Pinkard s translation of 167 as self-consciousness is desire itself as opposed to the alternative and more traditional self-consciousness is desire in general, is transformational. 167 But this opposition between its appearance and its truth has only the truth for its essence, namely, the unity of self-consciousness with itself. This unity must become essential to self-consciousness, which is to say self-

104 95 consciousness is desire itself. As self-consciousness, consciousness henceforth has a doubled object: The first, the immediate object, the object of sense-certainty and perception, which however is marked for it with the character of the negative; the second, namely itself, which is the true essence and which at the outset is on hand merely in opposition to the first. Self-consciousness exhibits itself therein as the movement within which, in its own eyes, the selfsameness of itself with itself comes to be. 75 I would like to linger here on this question of desire and, remaining on the narrative surrounding the murder of Abel by his brother, Cain, focus on the hand as a particularly useful way in which to consider this question. Recall the binary of desire that is exhibited in the text surrounding the murder. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother s blood from your hand. (Genesis 4:11) There are two points of desire, as such, here; the soil explicitly, in its gaping was longing for the blood and implicitly the hand of Cain was equally desirous of the liquid as well. This desire, to alter the subject, I am positing can be traced to the earliest moment taken up here in the foundation of the Elemental Human who is complete in form yet lifeless. In approaching this it is useful to consider Michelangelo s representation of the text of Genesis on the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Four panels of the Sistine Chapel s ceiling draw the attention of this project. 5: The Sistine Chapel 5a: Panel 4: The Creation of Adam This is perhaps the most famous of the panels of the chapel and provides an artistic representation of much of what concerns this aspect of this project.

105 96 Figure 22 Several aspects of this panel are important for this text. The argument here is that Michelangelo has depicted the archetypical homo Liminalis, represented in the form of the Lifeless Human. Here, Adam reclines upon the soil from which he was produced but is, perhaps, far from inanimate. In fact, even in his languor we note the desire for an alteration in the subject position that precedes the addition of life to the physical form of the Human. Adam looks toward God and most importantly stretches his arm toward the hand of God to receive life. As mentioned, the focus here is on Michelangelo s masterful representation of the innate desire (self-consciousness) of Adam for life, something he (Adam) could have no a priori knowledge. This extends to the very tips of his fingers that are frozen in the interstitial space of liminal being between lifelessness and life, groping for the touch of God. Paul Barolsky s essay, The Imperfection of Michelangelo s Adam, engages this depiction. As we contemplate Michelangelo s fresco, we need to recall what the Bible tells us, which the artist considered very

106 97 carefully: first, God formed man from the earth; then he filled him with the breath of life, that is, with spirit. According to a deep theological tradition, the finger of God stands for spirit. Hence, the moment that Michelangelo chooses to depict is the very instant just before the Creator, having already formed Adam s body, inspirits him by extending his finger toward the expectant finger of Adam. We may think of Adam s body as perfect in physical beauty, but Adam was not in fact perfected until he received the spirit suggested by the incompleted touch from the finger of God, the archetypal artist. In the imperfection of Adam, physically beautiful but spiritually still incomplete-a truly sublime form of the non finite-we behold the imminence of imperfection. 76 This analyst s emphasis on physical perfection speaks to a different point about normative and aesthetics that are important in many registers but not essential at this point of the analysis. The important aspect of this passage is the characterization of Adam as expectant that reifies the importance of an innate presence of ontological desire that prefigures the presence of life and/or spirit. One can be lead to wonder at just how long Michelangelo s Adam has been reaching toward God in anticipation of his touch in that he seems to be resting his arm on his knee implying that it has been a while since Adam made the decision to engage the hand of God. The time between the creation of the lifeless Human and this touch or breath that grants him life is both forever and no time at all in that a thing that is lifeless has no temporality to speak of and the thing for which he reaches, in that it is immortal, is also beyond the consideration of time. In spite of this, Michelangelo depicts Adam in a position that can be characterized as repose. Resting from what? Creation itself or the anticipation of the life giving touch of spirit that will set in motion human immortality? Or perhaps it is the desire of the observer that Michelangelo is playing upon. Representing in this mythical moment of divine creation our own endless cycle of reliance upon always the next desire to serve as the drive from one perception of the self to the next. A reading of this work certainly appears to accommodate the notion that this Human,

107 98 without life and perhaps animate in a primordial fashion or perhaps molded as a sculpture and frozen in space and time, has nothing if not the desire for life. To meditate on this aspect of the representation of the Human in the moment before the touch allows us to consider essential elements of the mysteries that inhabit the question of Human will that can be read as operating outside of the existence of the divine will in that, as we know, the decision to defy the strictures of the creator are present in that God issues strictures in the first place. What I am proposing is that the Human, as a physical space, was designed with points of attachment that are prepared to receive life. The question that presents itself here is whether it is a point of attraction or a space that awaits the agency of God s desire to grant it life. Did the Human, as he found himself lying in this space, without temporality, call to his Creator to set him in motion? Might God have created the Human and only considered the next step of giving it life when the creation reached out its hand to receive it or is this the way that the Creator posed his creation; an inanimate form that is frozen in the pose of longing and expectation even outside of the presence of life? Both possibilities are left open by Michelangelo. Before focusing our attention on the hands of the Human and the Creator, we have to mark the body language of both. We will see Adam in repose again and should pay close attention to the openness of God to the expectation of Adam. This is further present in the detail of their groping hands.

108 99 Figure 23 Adam, for his part, appears inactive, the touched rather than the toucher or at least satisfied that what he has requested is immanent. Panel 5 presents a much different relationship. 5b: Panel 5: The Creation of Eve I wish here to read this panel from left to right and in so doing take in the progression of the tale that is told. This Adam, appears inanimate in contradistinction to his other self that seemed animated but we know was lifeless. Here, the Human has been put to sleep to become the donor site for the creation of his companion. This Adam is the one we might have anticipated in Panel 4 to represent the lifelessness of the Human. So we turn our attention to the newly created second Human, the as yet unnamed Woman. The figure

109 100 seems to be in the process of being formed or organically completing the formation begun by the Creator in that the right leg of the figure appears not to have completely separated itself from the side of Adam. But this is a figure in motion and we are left space to speculate in the text of Genesis whether this represented the same type of two-step process of creation that attended the development of the first Human. Michelangelo also represents this figure as desirous of something from the Creator and the posing of the body and the prayerful positioning of the hands capture this. Figure 24 The second Human seems to entreat God; hands placed together in a gesture of prayer. Her mouth is open and at the moment of creation, prior in the narrative, to being named by Adam, the Woman seems to be requesting something of the Creator. For His part, God seems to be explaining why what is being requested, the prayerful desire of Woman, might not be possible to grant or perhaps even inappropriate to request of He that can grant anything. Looking carefully at the hands of both subjects, Human and God, we see a much different posture than that of the panel before it. Rather than reaching toward the other as

110 101 is the case with the Lifeless Human and the Creator, these figures are engaged in a dialog that appears to be contentious. Additionally, the posing of these bodies is notable for its anomalous nature with respect to the other panels discussed here generally and that of Adam in this panel in particular. Both the Woman and the Creator God have adopted positions of activity; Woman seems to be requesting with all of her being while the Creator appears to be denying with just as much emphasis. For his part, Adam, in his slumber, remains in a position that is reminiscent of the panel depicting his lifeless form and his hands are contorted in almost impossible directions reminiscent of the posing of sleeping infants who often adopt postures of body and limb that seem uncomfortable and belie the depth and peacefulness of their rest. Figure 25

111 102 Figure 26 5c: Panel 6: The Temptation and the Expulsion This panel is necessarily, as with Panel 5, read from left to right to mark the sequence of events surrounding the Fall. First we must take note of the architecture of the panel. It is divided by the presence of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that marks a before and after echoing the previous discussion here of the unity of space and time that exists for the Human prior to this event. The tree demarks, in this panel, both the before and after as well as the boundaries of the Garden.

112 103 Figure 27 Let us first note, at the far left of the panel, the positioning of the bodies of Adam and Woman. In contradistinction to the times we have encountered Adam in the previous panels, here he is standing erect. Woman has adopted the reclined position that was reminiscent of Adam in the first two panels under consideration and her pose and attitude are reminiscent of that of Adam in Panel 4. Adam, for his part, has taken the initiative and is groping in the tree of knowledge of good and evil for fruit; Woman is reclined and reaches languidly toward the serpent who seems to have helpfully plucked the fruit for her consumption. This is not her first bite from the apple. Her insouciance speaks of depth and breath of experience. Adam is a novice here and occupies the third space of his liminality. Here he is at the moment between his complete lack of knowledge of good and evil and complete awareness. He grips a branch of the forbidden tree with his left hand, the hand that had been the locus of his touch with the Creator and his right hand, that Michelangelo had almost excised from Panel 4 is pinching the fruit from the tree underscoring the notion that it is not even the consumption of the forbidden that amounts to the crossing of the

113 104 threshold that concerns us here. It is the reaching for the goal that demarks one subject position from the other. It is the same in the previous panels under consideration here. Figure 28 Witness now the serpent and it seems appropriate to begin from the ground up in order to follow the coils of the animal. If you follow them carefully one notes two things: first, the serpent has secured itself to the tree and second, Michelangelo has depicted its coils as a Gordian Knot that is impossible to reconcile or unravel. The serpent has become a part of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and there is no way, it appears, short of hacking it to pieces to remove it. Obviously the serpent is depicted as a woman and in this

114 105 rendering it seems clear to me that it has taken on the physical appearance of the Woman from Panel 5. The fresco seems to accommodate a solution to the dilemma of what it was that Woman was asking of the Creator at her birth; it was knowledge that she asked of God and was naturally refused. Figure 29 I would like to return here in some fashion to the earlier discussion of Hegel s mechanical causality and develop a chain from the soil to this moment of transgression of the only law that the Creator had promulgated. The soil served as the stuff of creation of the Lifeless Human form that had nothing of its composition if not desire. That desire proved definitive in the lifeless Human reaching to receive life from God. The rib of the now Living but Immortal Human provided the stuff of creation for the construction of the second Human that, as we have seen, is also desirous of a gift from the Creator; in this instance knowledge. So following our chain we see desire as the engine that has been the

115 106 force behind the Human qualities of both life and now knowledge of good and evil. The reason in this reading that Woman in the previous panel begins with entreating God for knowledge is that is the next thing in the chain of causality that the Creator has set in motion. So the question that presents itself at this moment is from whence does the serpent gather its knowledge of the desire of Woman and the manner in which to fulfill it? It must lie in the soil from which the serpent, like every other animal, was both constructed and then subsequently named and given functionality by Adam. Based on this logic it is in the ontology of Adam and his innate desirous nature that we can locate the Fall. The primary element is in the chain of mechanical causality that we have proposed which must necessarily be manifested by the praxis of Adamic naming given the Human as a task by the Creator. Recall, And the human called names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the heavens, and to all the beasts of the field, but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. 77 (Genesis 2: 19-21) The point here is that in naming Adam gave functionality so, inclusive in the identification of the serpent is the establishment of its role. This is picked up in the notion that after the completion of the process of naming none of the creatures were sufficient as a sustainer thus the necessity of the second Human. We can now address the tree itself that, as previously mentioned serves as the dividing line that inaugurates the three modes of temporality: past, present, and future. Recall that the argument here is that, as a practical matter, it is at this moment that death becomes inevitable for the Human. That time, as we understand it, or perhaps more appropriately, Human consciousness of time, manifests itself. This will be explored in much greater detail when I take up the notion of time more completely. Here, however, it is

116 107 sufficient to note the work the tree is doing as a marker and barrier. A marker in the sense noted above as a before and after and in that also a barrier to a return to innocence. First note the role the tree plays for the first four figures in the panel: Adam, Woman, the serpent and the cherubim. They are all attached in one fashion or another to the tree. Adam in grappling a branch as he gropes for fruit. Woman lies beneath its shade and reaches to partake of more. The serpent is bound to it and the cherubim might be imagined to be gripping it to remain earthbound and more importantly to eliminate the possibility of drifting away from its appointed task; preventing the human s return to Paradise. Here consider the Cherubim, Adam, and Woman. It is here that the feeling of the panel changes and the Humans, Adam and the renamed and repurposed, Eve, no longer represents the perfection of human form that Barolsky perceived in the reclining Adam. They are both broken figures and skulk away from the garden at the point of the cherubim s sword. It is important to note the explicit threat to the neck and head of Adam. It almost appears that the blade is already buried in the nape of his neck. Trees and the throat of the chastened subaltern will loom large as this project unfolds. Figure 30

117 108 Finally with this panel we take note of the ground. Note that at the outset, under the protective boughs of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the earth is the same as that upon which Adam reclines awaiting his life. On the right of the tree the earth has become flat and arid and there are necessarily no branches bearing the knowledge giving fruit that extend into the realm of the space of expulsion. The Humans have succeeded in separating themselves from the realm of the unity of time and space. What follows on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not follow the trajectory of human abjection that I have followed here that takes up Cain and Abel. Instead, the artist picks up with the depths of depravity of all mankind and focuses panels 7, 8 and 9 on Noah. Panel 7 is the Sacrifice of Noah, Panel 8 the Great Flood and Panel 9, which concerns us here, The Drunkenness of Noah. 5d: Interstitial Space #1: Noah Before focusing on the panel itself it is important to frame the biblical account of this event which is found in Genesis 9: Before moving to those passages, the concern regarding the ontological nature of human desire is voiced in an internal dialog God has with himself upon draining the earth and accepting Noah s sacrifice. He (God) says I will not again damn the soil on humankind s score. For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth. 78 (Genesis 9:21) Alter s footnote is important here: and the LORD said in His heart. The idiom means said to himself but it is important to preserve the literal wording because it pointedly echoes 6:6, and was grieved to the heart, just as the devisings of the human heart are evil explicitly echoes 6:5. The Flood story is thus enclosed by mutually mirroring reports of God s musings on human nature. Whether the addition here of from youth means, as some commentators claim, that God now has a more qualified view of the human potential for evil, is questionable. 79 Bracketing the tension amongst scholars regarding what it is God means by this notion of youth it allows the possibility for the thesis that has driven this project to this

118 109 point to live a bit longer. This renders it necessary to draw together the question of these devisings of the human heart as evil with the prospect advanced here that it is desire that forms the foundation of the ambition of the Human. The question then becomes whether this self-consciousness is itself evil or whether it in itself is not necessarily so but can be consequently read as such. This will be discussed at length later in this project but the purpose here is to admit into the discussion of the Curse of Ham as it exists in the Pentateuch by focusing on Genesis 9: What becomes critical here is the establishment of a second genealogy for the Human after the destruction of all living creatures that were not saved on board the ark. The Creator, at this moment, having learned that some things need to be stated in explicit fashion issues a second set of orders to this foundational Human and in doing so establishes a hierarchy of Elemental being while demarking the Abject. And God blessed Noah and his sons 80 (Genesis 9:1) This is critical for the thinking of this project. The argument would be that at this point, Noah and his progeny (sons), in that they are the only people on the planet and have all been blessed, form a type of Elemental being for which the alternative existing subject is only the Exalted God. There are, at this point, post-diluvium, no Abject subjects in existence though the possibility of the category exists as a construction of God s will rather than a result of Human transgression. God leaves out the possibility that the killing of Abel might be out of ignorance of its cost. He who sheds human blood by humans his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made humankind. 81 (Genesis 9:6) In this fashion, pointedly accepting the risk that Cain had illuminated of death at the hands of man as punishment and commanding that the sanction for taking human life is

119 110 death by other human beings. This provides for the erection of the barrier between the Elemental and the Abject in at least one clear fashion. The focus of this part of this project, the curse, establishes another. Having assured the foundational and Elemental Humans that in spite of the absolutely certainty that there will be problems, God will never punish all of Humankind in the same manner, the Humans go about their business. And the sons of Noah who came out from the ark were Shem and Ham and Japeth, and Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth spread out. And Noah, a man of the soil was the first to plant a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and became drunk, and exposed himself within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan saw his father s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. And Shem and Japheth took a cloak and put it over both their shoulders and walked backward and covered their father s nakedness, their faces turned backward so they did not see their father s nakedness. And Noah woke from his wine and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. And said, Cursed be Canaan, the lowliest slave shall be to his brothers. And he said, Blessed be the LORD the God of Shem, unto them shall Canaan be slave. 82 (Genesis 9:18-27) First it is necessary to focus on what the passage says before moving to how it has been employed and finally how it was interpreted by Michelangelo. First, to address and move past an obvious contradiction in the text, it appears from the order of presentation that Ham is the middle son and either Shem or Japeth would be understood as the first born. David M. Whitford s essential exegesis of these passages is particularly useful in dealing with this inconsistency.

120 111 His youngest son here means Ham, even though the text makes clear earlier that Ham is actually his middle child. The reason for the anomaly is the fact that different editors revised this text over the centuries. Until the modern era, however, all exegetes had to deal with this seeming inconsistency. 83 Eliding this small point and moving toward more substantive matters it is clear that this has become much about genealogy in that Ham is established as the father of Canaan while at this stage the houses of the other two brothers remain unnamed. The telos represented here is that by identifying the house with which Ham is associated rather than Ham individually the terms have been set for the identification of a genealogy that will be punished for the sins of the father. It is essential to read this against what we have seen previously in at least two ways. First, at the outset of this narrative of transgression and punishment, the Creator establishes several general conditions of Human Being that are situated as punishment for the consumption of the forbidden fruit: 1.) Enmity between man and woman; 2) birth pangs for the woman; 3) difficulty in the cultivation and finding of food for Adam/Human; 4) and finally mortality. In the situation under consideration here, for his transgression, the progeny of Ham, and not Ham himself, are subordinated to all other Human beings. What is essential here is the non specific nature of the subject of punishment that establishes a genealogical relationship to Abjection that is different than the sanction, as in the case of murder, for a specific crime or as is the case for the altering of the conditions of Humanity for every subject that renders itself particular in its universality; everyone will die but die in their own way. This is further reified in the commitment God makes to forswear mass punishment of the type witnessed in the Flood. What has occurred here is that the biblical narrative to this point has established three Genealogical relations that map themselves against time and sovereignty as it is operationalized in this effort.

121 112 The Exalted Genealogy as well as the Abject is characterized by its eternal repetition. In the case of the Exalted Subject, just as the Abject, there is a component of infinitude to the status that is represented by the immortality of a god and the curse of a house for the genealogy of abjection. The Elemental represents a state of Being that is marked by a type of mortality that allows the figure to die qua both corporeal and metaphysical being with no existential legacies for future generations other than the quotidian nature of Elemental Being. All three of this subject positions are depicted in the final panel of the Sistine Chapel that is of interest here. 5e: Panel 9: The Drunkenness of Noah As has been the convention here, the panel will be read from left to right which focuses attention first on the figure who is digging with a shovel. This, as a practical matter and optically, is likely Noah himself who has worked the land and planted a vineyard. And Noah, a man of the soil was the first to plant a vineyard. 84 (Genesis 9:20-21) Michelangelo skips the consumption of wine by Noah but depicts its result. Noah has collapsed into the posture that we have seen in this piece on the part of Adam at the point of his own creation and that of Woman as she and Human grasp for more forbidden fruit. Here, Noah s pose mirrors that of Human at the creation of himself and that of Woman in two ways. From the neck down and with the exception of his left arm, Noah is the mirror image of Human in Panel 4. His head and left arm are identical to the sleeping Human in Panel 5. This marks that this is a passive position of extraction rather than one of active desire. The first figure that we witness to the right of Noah is obviously either Shem or Japeth. This individual is depicted looking away from the sleeping and naked Noah and at the same time endeavoring to cover his nudity in a shroud. The next figure, I am reading as

122 113 Ham for two reasons. He is pointing at his father and seems to be in the process of being pulled away by his brother. The final figure, though facing the naked Noah, has averted his glance and is using both of his hands to exhort his brother to do the same. Figure 31 In focusing on the hands of the three brothers, it is notable that Ham points and his hand is depicted in similar fashion to that of God at the moment before granting life to the Human. This signals agency. Ham has extracted something from the slumbering Noah and it is only belatedly that he will become aware of the cost of this transaction. The bodies must be marked. They are all naked or at least uncovered just like their drunk and slumbering father.

123 114 Figure 32 That is important in one register but in the move to considering the body as such in the next Part of this project we note that there is nothing to distinguish Ham from his brothers. Ham, at least in the mind of Michelangelo, does not carry the curse in his epidermis and is in fact depicted as noticeably lighter than his brothers and more akin in complexion to the drunken patriarch. 5f: Interstitial Space #2: Black Ham It is clear that in the imaginary of modern man, the Curse of Ham is read as being a specifically racialized formation that is employed to justify as a divine imperative the enslavement of people of African descent. The purpose here is not to unpack this transportability of the House of Canaan to the Africa that is ably handled in Whitford s text which in many ways situates Genesis 9 as creating a space for the same type of thinking employed in this text to fill in the spaces left by the passages. Genesis 9 he Whitford writes, is a text of opportunity. 85 The passages have been read and recast opportunistically by Michelangelo and the goal of this examination of this tale here is to examine the already filled space that is left by the breaks in the Bible. In doing so, I will admit as axiomatic the condition that drives the careful study of this phenomenon by Whitford. He situates his effort in this fashion:

124 115 The need for slaves did not give rise to the myth. Not even the beginning of the slave trade demanded a myth of legitimacy. It was only when the legitimacy itself was undermined that the Curse of Ham rose to the level of utility. To be of real utility, however, it had to have a cultural currency. This book is an attempt to understand how that currency was established so that when it was needed, it could be called upon. The Curse myth turns out to be a kind of Frankenstein creation of pieces stolen from this medieval exegete, that classical author, with a good dose of newly made pieces added to the mix. 86 The currency of this curse, as far as this project is concerned, is firmly established and having admitted it as such it allows us to return for once last glance at Panel 9 of the Sistine Chapel. 5g: Panel 9: continued The argument presented here is that Michelangelo has, in his depiction of the Drunkenness of Noah, placed before us the wholly secular paradigm that was assembled in the Presuppositions that opened this examination. Witness first the critical step forward made in the notion of the Exalted as a secular possibility in the author of the Curse of Ham. It does not come from God, but in a replay of the event of Adamic Naming, Noah damns a line of his offspring for all of eternity. And Noah woke from his wine and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan 87 (Genesis 9:24-26) The focus here is on the he that both knows that which, it is hard to imagine, that he could, and says that which formerly had been the sole power of the Lord God to pronounce. The repetition of And he said is a direct echo of the activities of the Creator at moments of creation, separation, and sanction. It is not the verb that attracts the attention here but the conjunction And that serves to mark the thresholds that concern

125 116 this project. In this instance, as in those in the narrative surrounding the expulsion from the Garden each one conjoins subject types across a barrier of sanction: And the Lord God said, Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever. And the Lord God sent him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken. And he drove out the human and set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life. 88 (Genesis 3:22-24)[my italics] What I mean to draw attention to here is that the And statements that are attributed to Noah situate him as the declarant as the Exalted figure who controls time and space. Cursed be Canaan, the lowliest slave shall be to his brothers. And he said, Blessed be the LORD the God of Shem, unto them shall Canaan be slave. Time in the sense of the genealogical curse and space in the land that will be associated with the dispersion of the progeny of his sons that then reinscribes the relationship between the two older sons who represent Elemental being and those of Canaan who are the Abject. Understanding this we can return to the questions asked and answered by Whitford s text and imagine that upon the pronouncement of the Curse, much like the case of Cain, the body is marked and in this case, rather than labeled for a form of divine protection these bodies are marked for subjugation and they are black.

126 117 SECOND DIVISION Resolution: Habeas Corpus si nemo a me quaerat, scio, si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. Saint Augustine Confessions I know it won't be very long till I receive my starry crown it won't be very long till all of my burdens I lay down Sam Cooke It Won t Be Very Long The concept of time is therefore not an arbitrarily posited concept but is linked to the basic question of philosophy, if indeed this asks about the being of entities, the actuality of the actual, the reality of the real. Martin Heidegger Prolegomena: History of the Concept of Time Some people will argue that the situation has a double meaning. Not at all. Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks 1 Prior to moving forward it is useful to delineate what was accomplished with the work up to this point. The Presuppositions were presented to expose the guiding principles that are driving the questions before us. At the completion of that exposition it is most important to note the expansion of the uni-dimensional notion of the three subject modalities proposed here into a three dimensional paradigm that takes into account the subject s relationship to time, space, and temporality. The Judeo-Christian tradition was engaged in many ways as both overtly and covertly serving as the dominant framework for understanding the construction of the western subject: knowing or otherwise. This close reading of elements of Genesis related to the creation of the figure that we know as Human allowed us to view the ontological and flat unity of time and space that represented the natural state of Being of the Human relative to the Divine. It is with the introduction of punitive mortality that time and space separate themselves and establish the

127 118 multi-dimensional paradigm against which we can map the possibility of exaltation or abjection for the Elemental Human whose operative term seems to be the relationship of the figure to death that can be read as (given) temporality. The employment of Michelangelo s Sistine Chapel and specific panels depicting the events explored here facilitated my examination of the symbolic representation of this language that provides an insight into the moment in time that antecedes, in strictly mythical terms, the robust creation of the nigger that concerns thinkers like James Baldwin and is the central preoccupation of this effort. Moving forward, the purpose here is to work through the same modes of subjectivity that were formerly presented as abstractions in many ways that are related to a type of irreducible Being to a corporeal existence in order to determine the components and/or composition of the body that are Elemental, Abject or Exalted. The effort here will develop what we understand as the Elemental relationship with time and space and then elaborate the associated understanding of the extreme figures that concern this project. In following the established logic to this point, we will begin with time and take seriously the challenge presented by Jean-Luc Nancy in his work, Corpus where he posits the following. The ontological body has yet to be thought. Ontology has yet to be thought out to the extent that its basically an ontology where the body = the place of existence, or local existence. (Here local shouldn t be taken as a piece of ground, a province or a reservation. It should be taken, rather, in the pictorial sense of local color, the vibration and the singular intensity-itself changing, mobile, multiple-of a skin-event or of a skin as the place for an event of existence.) 89 It bears mentioning, though I hope that it is apparent, that one of the foundational purposes of this project is to come to just such an understanding with respect to the abstract Human in the various forms presented here that can be situated to represent the

128 119 ontological body that Nancy notes in its absence. In addressing this problematic, Nancy s notions of local existence and vibration will be examined closely as we take up the challenge of locating the ontological body 2: Elemental Internal Time Signature Addressing the concept of Internal Time benefits in many ways by taking stock of Edmund Husserl s Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time if only to set parameters around expectations for solving this conundrum. Naturally, we all know what time is; it is the most familiar thing of all. But as soon as we attempt to give an account of time-consciousness, to put objective and subjective timeconsciousness into the proper relationship and to reach an understanding of how temporal objectivity and therefore any individual objectivity whatever can become constituted in the subjective consciousness of time, we get entangled in the most peculiar difficulties, contradictions, and confusions. Indeed this happens even when we only attempt to submit the purely subjective time-consciousness, the phenomenological content belonging to the experiences of time, to an analysis. 90 An initial concern here might be to wonder at why an in-depth meditation on time in this fashion matters for this project. No one doubts that we experience time whether consciously or subconsciously and further that the perception of that experience and the experience itself can vary across subjects. This however does not facilitate the critical linkage that I wish to draw between the consciousness of internal time and modes of sovereign being. As is apparent from the first of the Presuppositions presented here, the first move is to acknowledge that sovereignty, as operationalized, from its abundance to its lack, is theorized to be a product of a particular type of relationship with time. This means that internal time as established by an individual then has to turn itself outward and confront a synchronous or asynchronous relationship with external normative notions of temporality. The outcome of this confrontation is read here as an indicator of the lack or possession of a

129 120 positive or negative relationship with temporality. This becomes important at a second level of consideration in that the outcome of this encounter has implications for the coherence of internal time for the subject. At that point the question becomes how the subject resolves consistency or inconsistency between internal and external temporalities. Clearly there is much at stake for this project in carefully considering the complex relationship of the subject to time. To introduce this thinking it is necessary to keep hold of two notions presented here. First that time and space were, in the framework of the ontological Human subject prior to the Fall, a single dimension, not a time/space continuum but time and space as a single phenomenon. Second, it is at the Fall that the separation of this time and space binary occurs and inaugurates the continuum that is the predominant framework for our current context. Recall that the argument presented is that prior to the introduction of mortality into the lives of the Human, he, for all practical purposes was in a coterminous relationship with space and time, both of which proved to have no finitude. This is a fairly complicated matter for us to grapple with from the perspective of our understanding of the world particularly in the relationships of time, space, and movement. Revisiting our simple distance (d) = rate (r) multiplied by time (t) calculation from the first part of this text we see that at the most elementary level if d=t then the equation renders time/distance as the equivalent to the rate of movement. For the sake of mathematical representation we can symbolize this combination of space-time by the variable x space-time so that this method of describing an objects location is the same as describing its time or its space; not as a relationship but as a single term that establishes the location of the subject. x space-time = r

130 121 Therefore an object that is immobile (r=0) situates the object where it is in both space and time. If the object has a rate of movement, call it 10, then the equation reads x space-time= 10. The object is then located in space and time at the rate at which it is moving. There is no need to describe the object s location further because space and time are the same as the rate of movement. One might read this as relative motion between subjects to be the sine qua non of perception. This motion, I argue, is a component of the internal pulse of time. This point leads us to the first of the Africana thinkers to influence this text, Saint Augustine and his Confessions, specifically Book XI Time and Eternity. This question of movement proves essential to his understanding of this problematic and is essential for this text in that this analysis finds itself taken up and challenged in a constellation of thinkers that are immeasurably important for this section and this question of Elemental Internal Temporality: Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl and Paul Ricoeur. Prior to addressing movement, it is useful to carefully examine Augustine s meditation on time against the context established here. The engagement with Augustine s thought and the thinkers who marshal it will be centered around the central problematic of a deeper understanding and definition of this ontological body that concerns us here and its relationship to non-being, being and most prominently, desire. What I mean to address is the implication of desire (self-consciousness) as the central impetus for the establishment of the future as a limitless potentiality and as the engine for the establishment of time for the Human as theorized here who, at a point, was timeless as well as lifeless but possessing only infinite futurity. Augustine has as his central concern the nature of time as such and the problem he sees that much of it, in the form of past and present, does not exist. He marks the present as a fleeting moment arising out of the non-existence of the future and receding into the

131 122 equally non-existent past. What is of particular interest to this project is the spatial nature of this inquiry on the part of Augustine. Ricoeur pushes this effort to a deeper analysis of this aspect of the Confessions and its implication for the thinking here that labors on this notion of time and space. What is even more enigmatic, Ricoeur proposes referencing the image that sometimes serves as an impression of the past, sometimes the sign of the future, is the quasi-spatial language in which the question and the response are couched. If the future and the past do exist, I want to know where they are (18:23). To which comes the reply: Some such different times do exist in[in] the mind, but nowhere else [alibi] that I can see (20:26). Is it because the question has been posed in terms of place (where are future and past things?) that we obtain a reply in terms of place (in the soul, in the memory)? Or is it not instead the quasispatiality of the impression-image and the sign-image, inscribed in the soul, that calls for the question of location of the future and past things? 91 Augustine here, in leaning heavily on the question of spatiality and in so doing, movement, non-movement and the possibility of measurement or non-measurement of these phenomenon problematizes the assertion made above that the motion that ultimately is of concern here and the solution to Augustine s inquiry is the internal pulse of time. Here Augustine seems to reach a point of reference that is useful in shrinking the frame of reference of the motion that facilitates the establishment of time from the cosmological: I heard a learned person say that the movements of sun, moon, and stars in themselves constitute time 92 to focusing on the body. Augustine s thinking can be applied here as we consider this Elemental body and its time. If, however, we have been able to note the points in space from which and to which a moving body passes, or the parts of a body when it is spinning on its axis, then we can say how much time the movement of the body or its parts required to move from one point to another. It follows that a body s movement is one thing, the period by which we measure is another. It is self-evident which of these is to be described as time. Moreover, a body may sometimes be moving,

132 123 sometimes be at rest. We measure by time and say It was standing still for the same time that it was in movement, or It was still for two or three times as long as it was in movement, or any other measurement we may make, either by precise observation or by a rough estimate (we customarily say more or less ). Therefore time is not the movement of the body. 93 Based upon this move by Augustine, what he proposes should be obvious is that it is the period by which we measure that he describes as time. This does little to advance the thesis proposed here that time is about a type of relative motion but seems to answer the question regarding whether time is a force or a measure. Augustine proposes that time as he witnesses it is a measure that is independent of movement. I will return to an attempt to rescue the notion of time representing the fact of relative motion within the subject that is the pulse of time. But first it is important to trace this thinking on the part of Augustine for its foreshadowing of his threefold notion of time. Much of this seems to be the result of the trouble Augustine identifies with the essential nothingness of time in its arrival from a place of non-existence: the future, to recede into another locus of nothingness: the past. Ricoeur takes the measure of this aporetic position and proposes that Augustine s dialectic of the threefold present is the solution to this problematic. It is in resolving the enigma of measurement that Augustine reaches this ultimate characterization of human time (21-31). The question of measurement is taken up again where we left it at 16:21: I said just now that we measure time as it passes [praetereuntia] (21:27). Now this assertion, which is forcefully repeated ( I know it because we do measure time. We could not measure a thing which did not exist [ibid.]), it is immediately transformed into an aporia. What passes away is, in fact, the present. Yet, we admitted, the present has no extension. The argument, which once again throws us back toward the skeptics, merits a detailed analysis. First of all it neglects the difference between passing away and being present in the sense in which the present is the indivisible instant (or, as will be stated later, a point ). Only the

133 124 dialectic of the threefold present, interpreted as distension, will be able to save an assertion that must first lose its way in a labyrinth of the aporia. But more important the adverse argument is constructed precisely with the resource of the quasi-spatial-imagery by means of which time is grasped as a threefold present. Passing, in effect, is being in transit. 94 The challenge here is addressing this thinking on the part of Augustine and Ricoeur s reading of the decision on the part of the saint to eschew the notion of movement for the question of measure. Ricoeur returns the solution to measurement in his incisive understanding of the problem represented by Augustine understanding the instant in a way that posits it as an inert point of stillness rather than noting that the instant as such arrives and then retreats. Ricoeur asserts this as distension that facilities cognition of the transitional character of the present. It is, according to Ricoeur, a natural progression from the essential problematic that faces Augustine in engaging the non-being of a thing that is measured. For what can be measured is only what, in some way exists. We may deplore the fact if we like, but the phenomenology of time emerges out of an ontological question: quid est enim tempus? ( What, then, is time? [11 14:17]. As soon as the question is posed, all the ancient difficulties regarding the being and the nonbeing of time surge forth. 95 This is an essential insight on the part of Ricoeur that provides a bridge to drawing together the essential elements of this section that are purposive of resolving the question of Elemental Internal Notions of Time for the Elemental Subject. Non-being has been hovering from the outset of this project in that this question of the abstract ontological Human serves as the centerpiece of thinking on this subject. The aporia that populate Augustine s thinking that Ricoeur attempts to resolve can also be situated on top of the challenge posed by Nancy regarding thinking the ontological body. It seems that this discourse is sympathetic to a merging of the arguments that allow time, the starting point of this discussion, the subject

134 125 that troubles Augustine and its relationship to non-being to serve as the most appropriate subject from which to think the ontological body which I wish to nominate as the Adam of Panel 4 of the Sistine Chapel: the Lifeless Human. 2.a: The Lifeless Human It is clear that Augustine s exegesis of time begins with a meditation on Genesis and the Creation that is set within a meditation on the relationship between eternity and time, inspired by the first verse of Genesis, in principio fecit Deus. 96 Much has been said here regarding the proposal regarding the difficulty in separating time as such from space as such around the discourse of mutually existent infinitude on the part of both dimensions causing them to be unitary. This is an essential component of the thinking here regarding the Ontological Human that I am working to position as coterminous with the Ontological Body. Time becomes essential here in its aporetic appearance that troubles in many ways the existence of Augustine s threefold present. If the threefold present becomes the sine qua non of understanding a subject that is situated within time, situated within space, and therefore measureable and discernible as a body it is no wonder that it has been difficult to think the ontological body. Addressing the essential aporia confronting Augustine is the way into this discussion. The first of these is the presence of eternity and time as the principal element of this discourse that are separated, in my thinking, because of the difficulty in identifying the relative motion necessary for solving the measurement of time that is the result of two elements of non-existence: past and future. Ricoeur marks this as a type of violence. In this sense, to isolate the analysis of time from this meditation is to do violence to the text, in a way that is wholly justified by my intention to situate the same sphere of reflection the Augustinian antithesis between intentio and distentio and the Aristotelian antithesis between muthos and

135 126 peropeteia. Nevertheless, a certain justification can be found for this violence in Augustine s own reasoning, which, when it is concerned with time, no longer refers to eternity except to more strongly emphasize the ontological deficiency characteristic of human time and to wrestle directly with the aporia afflicting the conception of time as such. In order to right this wrong done to Augustine s text, I shall reintroduce the meditation on eternity at a later stage in the analysis with the intention of seeking in it an intensification of the experience of time. 97 I wish to approach the essential problem in this passage by Ricoeur that I read as the ontological deficiency characteristic of human time as in may ways the same as Nancy s absence of the ontological body by rigidly linking thinking and eternity to allow the Ontological, Timeless and Lifeless Human Subject to resolve these tensions. Recall that Augustine s primary problem with time echoes the skeptical discourse surrounding past, present and future. Augustine s solution is the threefold present. This cannot be true for either the Creator or his first Human creation. There is no past from which either of these figures have arisen meaning there is nowhere for the present to recede. From this position we see that there is logically only a futurity that is infinite in its character because the discernment of a present requires a past into which the future can progress. Augustine writes: What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exits, and it is inexact language to speak of three timespast, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation. (11 20:26) 98 Based upon this description, the Human that continues to trouble us here lacks a present in that there is no past and lacking life, as such, no future as we understand it as a

136 127 relation to the forward motion of living. The subject therefore is either only present or if we take seriously the concept of distension, is only futurity that lacks a discernible present. The illegibility or perhaps non existence of a present for the subject in question requires that we take a step back and consider perspective in this analysis. The lack of time of this figure in the formulation of Augustine is from the perspective of the observer or the measurer of time. This renders a two-fold question. Does the complex figure in question, the nominee for the Ontological Body/Human, have an internal temporality that is not discernible to a third party and secondly, does a subject require a sense of internal and/or externally obvious time in order to recognize the temporality (internal or external) of another? The first of these is the most important for this effort. In Copernicus-like fashion it is necessary that we shift the perspective of the analysis from the external gaze of the measurer to that of the measured: So my God Augustine writes, I measure, and do not know what I am measuring. I measure the motion of a body by time. Then am I not measuring time itself? I could not measure the movement of a body, its period of transit and how long it takes to go from A to B, unless I were measuring the time in which this movement occurs. How then do I measure time itself? 99 What I posit as the answer to this last query posed by Augustine, how then do I measure time itself?, is what I term Elemental Internal Time. Shifting the focus of this intellectual genealogy from Augustine to Kant we are led to his classical formulation of this phenomenon from the Critique of Pure Reason. In that text, the philosopher proposes that time is a necessary representation that grounds all intuitions in it all actuality of appearances possible. 100 Kant elaborates: But how (inasmuch as in addition to sensible intuition I can present, at least as possible, a different kind of intuition) can the I who thinks be distinct from the I that intuits itself and yet be the same as it by being the same subject? And hence

137 128 how can I say: I as intelligence and thinking subject, cognize myself as an object that is thought, viz., I so cognize myself in so far as in addition I am also given to myself in intuition-except that I cognize myself, as I do other phenomenon, not as I am to the understanding but as I appear to myself? The question involves neither more nor less difficulty than does the question as to how I can be an object to myself at all, viz., an object of intuition and of inner perceptions. Yet so it must actually be, as we can establish if space is already accepted as being merely a pure form of the appearances of outer senses. For as regards time, which after all is not an object of outer intuition at all, we cannot present it to ourselves except under the image of a line insofar as we draw that line without exhibiting time in this way, we could cognize the singleness of the dimension. 101 ( 24) There is much to unpack here specifically as this passage relates to the proposal that space as such, is distinct from time, as such, in that space is accepted as being merely a pure form of the appearances of outer senses while time is not an object of outer intuition. Distilling this, Kant proposes here that we give ourselves time as an internal matter and receive space as an external proposition. This calls for a return to the question that preoccupied the previous paragraphs here as they relate to Augustine and the question he poses that I find productively decentered: both his question and conclusion by Ricoeur. In detail, if we go back to Augustine armed with Kant we are able to resituate these central matters as they relate to the definition of the Elemental subject as it internally produces, inhabits, and is marked by time. First it seems useful to take up the question of perspective here and note that in this respect, Kant s assertion that space is already accepted as being merely a pure form of the appearances of outer senses renders the observation of another subject in motion or not, as a question of space for both the perceived and perceiver, not of time qua time because in that time is not an object of outer intuition at all but necessarily of inner intuition, it would not be time that the observer or observed perceives by looking from the outside, but space.

138 129 The question of how we interpret the term intuition seems of some import here. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology says: Intuition: contemplation, view XV (rare before XVII); regard, reference; (philos.) immediate knowledge or apprehension XVI (Hooker); (gen.) immediate insight XVIII. 102 Based upon the use of this term as it relates to the internal given-ness of the intuition of time, the pulse that concerns us here can be taken as a point of reference. This leads me to propose that Augustine s observational thought experiment: I could not measure the movement of a body, its period of transit and how long it takes to go from A to B, unless I were measuring the time in which this movement occurs. How then do I measure time itself? would be answered by theorizing that time itself is not a measure but a reference point that is structured internally for the subject in question that then provides the metric for measurement of other subjects and phenomenon. So what does this mean for the question of the Elemental Body? We can get at this by returning to the three potential nominees for the ontological body that come to use from the extended meditation on Genesis conducted here. The Body that is Lifeless; the Body that has Life but is Immortal and; The Body that Has Life and Mortality. In order to conduct this thought experiment it seems that we need to hold in our minds three elements of the theoretical positions before us. 1) Augustine s Threefold Present ; 2) Ricoeur s distinction between passing away and being present as well as his (re)introduction of eternity and 3) Kant s inner perception of time. We can then address the figures one at a time using these tools. The first of these, The Body that is Lifeless, would seem to troubles our quest for the Ontological Body most prominently and perhaps offer the greatest reward.

139 130 The Threefold Present, which serves as Augustine s definition of time is difficult to apply to the first figure under consideration across the three modes of perception of time that interest us: 1) internal time; 2) outward time and 3) the perception by an external subject of the figure of interest. The internal time of the subject, using Kant, establishes an inner dialog which then serves as the foundation of internal time. There is no reason to propose that the figure under consideration; which is embodied but lifeless, would not have this internal pulse of time. Recall that in the previous chapter I theorized that this lifeless body is only comprised of one thing and that would be desire which was read as self-consciousness itself which now we can situate as Kant s internal time. Self-Consciousness then, in the Hegelian sense of the term, which we will see several times as this project unfolds, is Internal Time. When this self, the lifeless body, calls to itself and is therefore self-conscious and has established a sense of time, we must ask; what is it that this body is self-conscious or desirous of? In addressing this we arrive at gloss provided by Ricoeur of Augustine; the differentiation of passing away and being present that is essential to establishing, in the end, the threefold present. In this mythology, much like the Creator, this figure can be asked what it might have been about before creation? The answer would follow Augustine s formulation in that prior to this subject s creation it did not have any of the elements of time necessary to be situated in that register and additionally was not embodied and therefore lacked space. At the moment of creation of this body, without life but with internal time and space it would seem that it lacks a present to serve as a stopping point of sorts between the two aporia we have noted before: the non-existence of both the future and the past except for much different reasons. This figure has neither past nor a discernible future in that it has no life and the eternity or infinitude of its existence is only the distension or

140 131 perhaps plasticity that so concerned Augustine. What this figure desired or stated differently, of what this figure was self-conscious was its lack of a present and hence reaching for the hand of God was in substance a solution to this problematic. To unpack this we need think carefully through the application of Augustine s Threefold Present with respect to this figure. There can be little doubt that the limitation of comprehension of a present around the mystery of eternity requires the formulation of a separation of time from the infinite as well as his gloss on what we mean by the present. The question of eternity is relevant here because of the eternal nature of this Lifeless Human. Augustine proposes the following with respect to the question of a creator that exists ante creation: It is not in time that you precede times. Otherwise you would not precede all times. In the sublimity of an eternity which is always present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come, and when they have come they are past. (11 13:16) No times are coeternal with you since you are permanent. If they were permanent, they would not be times. 103 (11 14:17) Though Augustine is concerned with the question of the eternal and the trouble it causes for conceptualizing time with respect to God, the same concerns can, and should, be applied to the figure of the Lifeless Human that is also eternal and has its time signature encumbered with the same problematic referenced in the passage under consideration. The crux of this matter is the always disappearing and perhaps non-existent present. As we have seen, in order to carve out a space for the present between the two non-existent and therefore impossible to measure past and future, Augustine offers the concept of the Threefold Present, which seems inapplicable to the Human figure we are examining as well as to God. This is for at least two reasons: First the lack of a past from which to proceed; in the instance of the creator because there was no time prior to the creation of it and with

141 132 respect to the Lifeless Human it is due to the lack of genealogy. The second is the question of eternity and immortality. The first of these elaborated by Augustine, the present of things past is obviously inapplicable because like God, the newly created and lifeless Human has no past for things to recede into nor a past that provides the essential element of memory to this formulation. The Lifeless Human does not have a past that has been forgotten or a series of relationships that have been severed and substantively erased. This Human in fact has nothing to remember because there is nothing to remember, forget or erase. Ricoeur draws our attention to the role played here by memory. Later, by placing the past and the future within the present, by bringing in memory and expectation, he will be able to rescue this initial certainty from its apparent disaster by transferring onto expectation and onto memory the idea of a long future and a long past. 104 Therefore, without memory, as such, there is trouble for this question of the present. The present that Augustine arrives at has the essential element of extension into the past and present which give it sufficient volume for cognition. Here, with respect to the newly formed, Lifeless Human, there is no extension into the past through memory or genealogy. We then turn to the future or Augustine s expectation which one can imagine I would wish to read as self-consciousness/desire and time. memory. Augustine accomplishes this through his careful analysis of reciting a psalm by Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is

142 133 present: by that the future is transferred to the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory. 105 (11 28:38) Ricoeur, in commenting on this move by Augustine says: The solution is elegantbut how laborious, how costly, and how fragile! 106 The fragility of this proposition is on full display when it is applied to the subject under investigation here. Memory, or the past, serves as the sine qua non of this understanding of time. Following Augustine s analogy, it becomes immediately apparent that there can be no recitation of a psalm from memory unless there has been a time in which the psalm itself was experienced and remembered in a past. This does not attend in this instance. Therefore, there can be no past, present or future from the perspective of the Augustinian present for this figure but it is empirically true, at least in mythological terms, that the Lifeless Human has a time in which it exists, it was created, and has an internal time signature, because it desires. From this perspective, we can then propose that time, as it exists for the Lifeless and Immortal Human is desire and this desire can be read as an existential necessity for the figure to resolve itself in a present. This resolution in the present is what we have come to understand as self-consciousness; a brand of awareness that is only about the distension of a desired futurity into the realm of the future as a phenomenological event. This is a long way around to proposing that the first of the figures we have put before this analysis is only desire. The future exists only as desire without memory. This will prove to be an important conceptualization of a priori longing for that which there is no memory or present model for comparison. Desire, in this formulation, (and feel free to insert time or self-consciousness in its place) has no past or present, only a future. Apprehension of this desire on the part of

143 134 this ontological Being is intuition of this desire as a present perception of the future that the desire represents. This is the purest form of time travel and revolution. Augustine, in the closing moments of his discourse on time asks the following: But how does the future, which does not yet exist, diminish or become consumed? 107 (11 28:37) The answer would be that it diminishes for this figure, into the ontological present that is without a past in the form of pure self-consciousness and manifests itself as the Kantian internal intuition of time. 2.b: The Body that has Life but is Immortal We can now take the framework we have established above that employs Augustine, Ricoeur, and Kant to address the next figure along the evolution of the Human; the Body that has had its desire fulfilled and is in possession of life but is immortal. There are two elements of this progression that are of great importance for this project: The first is the question of establishing a metric for marking what is brought along with the body from its appearance as Human and Lifeless to this point of Human, Alive and Immortal and what is left behind. The second needs to take up carefully the implication of eternity/immortality on the three perspectives of temporality that have been established as points of concern: 1) internal time; 2) outward time and 3) the perception by an external subject of the figure of interest. The first of these concerns allows us to mark the central problematic of this project, which is the transitional nature of the subject: homo liminalis, which is ultimately the point of this exercise. What I mean by that is that it is fairly easy in comparison to establish fixed subjects: Human or non-human. Beast or Sovereign. The question that animates this project, as was mentioned at the outset is the trace between this relatively fixed subjectivities. This concern, at this stage of the development of the argument can sketch the

144 135 outline of this problem by establishing what is gained and lost at the points of termination. In this specific instance, what is it about the Lifeless Human that finds itself remaining when the subject takes on life? To build on the work done so far the most advantageous point of inquiry is time. We have established that the Lifeless, Immortal, Human is only futurity. Upon the introduction of life, this figure gains a past that then becomes a component of memory that, as Augustine proposes, provides the stuff of expectation. Memory then becomes the locus of this inquiry and specifically what we can make of the only memory that this figure could possess which is recollection of a time without a past, no discernible present and desire as both the structure and content of the future. The substantive question for thinking about the central concern here: the phenomenology of alteration of the subject, would be in meditating on the analogy that Augustine provides with respect to the recitation of a psalm to thinking about this subject and its desires. This question will be situated against the mythology of creation in Genesis that has been painstakingly unpacked. The telos, as far as this analysis is concerned would be that in the first instance, the desire of the figure before us: Living Adam, his desire and consciousness are focused on the insufficiency of the creatures placed on earth, recall but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. 108 (Genesis 2: 21) The Creator again appears to recognize this desire and produces from Adam s body what the Human then calls Woman. Robert Alter provides an insight into what the text means by this term sustainer that is integral to ascertaining what the desire here might be and how it can be related to the chain of desire we are marking. 18. sustainer beside him. The Hebrew ezer kenegdo (King James Version help meet ) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means alongside him, opposite him, a counterpart to him. Help is too weak because it suggests a

145 136 mere auxiliary function, whereas ezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms. Taking up this notion as active intervention as the raison d etre for the creation of Woman that fits into the first of the desires located here; life/time/self-consciousness/desire itself, we have to inquire as to what this active intervention, that I wish to read as understood within the logic of Hegelian mechanical causality, has to do with the ontological desires of the first Human. Recall the physical comportment of Woman in Panel 5 of the Sistine Chapel. The Woman seems to be entreating the Creator for something that he seems reticent to grant. Following the chain of events as expressed in Genesis, it would seem that the ontological desire for life itself and therefore the possession of coherent temporality on the part of the Human would manifest itself here in the expressed and acted upon desires of the Human and Woman. Taking up the Fall at this juncture is to be a step ahead of the figure under consideration. Understanding this, it is appropriate to focus on the content of the subject(s) before us at this stage that (is)are Human, Alive and Immortal. This question can productively be related to our exegesis of time with respect to these figures. Immortality, or eternity looms for this figure and it is useful to return to Augustine here and reconstitute the two parts of his analysis in Book 11 of the Confessions, Time and Eternity. Augustine opens the Book with the following: Lord, eternity is yours, so you cannot be ignorant of what I tell you. Your vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned. 109 (11 1:1) This goes a great way toward answering our problematic. This figure; Human, Living and Immoral is, however, and in contradistinction to the Creator both ignorant and has a vision that is temporally conditioned. The solution to this problem is knowledge. From this position we can wonder at the consciousness of the subject that is infinite but lacks the knowledge basis to be self-consciousness. Augustine offers more

146 137 insight into his reading of the linkage between immortality, knowledge and time in the closing chapter of Book 11. Certainly if there were a mind endowed with such knowledge and prescience that all things past and future could be known in the way I know a very familiar psalm, this mind would be utterly miraculous and amazing to the point of inducing awe. From such a mind nothing of the past would be hidden, nor anything of what remaining ages have in store, just as I have full knowledge of that psalm I sing. I know by heart what and how much of it has passed since the beginning, and what remains until the end. But far be it from you, Creator of the universe, creator of souls and bodies, far be it from you to know all future and past events in this kind of sense. You know them in a much more wonderful and much more mysterious way. A person singing or listening to a song he knows well suffers distension or stretching in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound. With you it is otherwise. You are unchangeably eternal, that is the truly eternal Creator of minds. Just as you knew heaven and earth in the beginning without that bringing any variation into your knowing, so you made heaven and earth in the beginning without that meaning a tension between past and future in your activity. 110 (11 31:41). The next of these, the present of things present is possible but problematized by the overabundance I am ascribing here in my reading of Augustine s theorizing of the future as it relates to the eternal figure. This becomes clear as we examine the closing moments of Augustine s effort here on time when he asks: Or how does the past, which now has no being, grow, unless there are three processes in the mind which in this is the active agent? For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention and to what it remembers. Who therefore can deny that the future does not yet exist? Yet already in the mind there is an expectation of the future. Who can deny that the past does not now exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of the past. None can deny that present time lacks any extension because it passes in a flash. Yet attention is continuous, and it is through this that what will be present progresses towards being absent. So the future is a long expectation of the future. And the past, which has no

147 138 existence, is not a long period of time. A long past is a long memory of the past. 111 (11 28:37) As a practical matter, the subject the Creator has produced is all tension because of this distension of the future that, in the absence of knowledge which facilitates resolution of the problem. Augustine returns here to the metaphor of the psalm and we can employ it to consider the plight and desire for resolution of it that would populate the consciousness of the Living, Immoral Human that is ignorant. If we imagine that the consciousness of the figure before us is situated in time and, as we noted in the previous section, with the introduction of life is able to discern a present, the problem seems to be the overwhelming of that present with the distension, ad infinitum of the future. Recall the opening of Book 11 where Augustine marks the notion that the vision of the Creator, in that is infinite, is managed by the lack of temporal conditionality of the subject s view of occurrences in time. This renders the infinitude of the future in which the eternal subject is situated manageable in that the consumption of the present into an ever-expanding future does not prevent the dis-aggregation of the present into the Three-fold phenomenon exposed by Augustine. This is not the case for the Human that is eternal, alive, and lacking in knowledge. Let us focus on the helpful analogy of the Psalm. Recall the imperative of memory and experience in some fashion that allows for the possibility of recitation in the present or even perhaps the future. Augustine, in his clear understanding of the difficulty in pinning down the present notes that the recitation of the psalm is the transportation of a memory of the text into a future where the words approach the subject in the present as they are drawn back into the repository of the past: imagine if you will this process as analogous to the news crawler that has become a ubiquitous component of modern television except that what is being read is already known to the viewer and is a component of remembrance rather than discovery. That is, in my reading

148 139 what Augustine is positing in his elegant statement: Your vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned. 112 In this, to understand the vision of God as Augustine posits it and as it is related to this question of the eternal, one has to envision the supra-temporal nature of this consciousness that is aware of the distinction between past, present, and future but is not constrained by it. What is frustrating to the Human in this instance, and following the analogy of the psalm, is that the text will continue to run toward the subject situated in some present without end. This frustrates human cognition in that this futurity has no relation to a past that is being recalled as a soon-to-occur-yet-never-experienced-futurity. Without absolute knowledge as a component of immortality the Human subject is unable to view occurrence without temporal conditionality. The desire for this subject then, as manifest by the desire for life is a termination to this dissonance: Woman begs the Creator to solve this conundrum. In the denial comes the next step along this logic: the Fallen Mortal Human subject. 2.c: The Body that is Alive and Mortal There are, in the abstract, two choices here that could solve the dilemma of the Human that, in this reading, is endowed with supra-temporality but lacks the intelligence to reckon with it. The Human can chose mortality and thereby introduce a terminus to the futurity or the Human can acquire knowledge sufficient to deal with supra-temporality. As a practical matter, just from the text of Genesis, we have no reason to believe that Woman was made explicitly aware of the penalty for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and it does not seem to be possible to acquire mortality outside of the context of punishment. Could this have been what the newly created Woman asked of God? To be allowed to die? But this may not have mattered. This ontological desire/self-consciousness

149 140 could only be satisfied by either knowledge or mortality: the Creator, in the structure of the prohibition rendered the acquisition of knowledge as the end of immortality; recall the following passage: And the Lord God said, Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever. And the Lord God sent him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken. And he drove out the human and set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life. 113 (Genesis 3:22-24) This passage exposes the introduction of death to the formerly immortal human and the further exclusion from access to immortality (we have covered this before), solves the dilemma that confronted the Human as it relates to an incoherent relationship to time and, as we have likewise covered, introduces access to space as the barrier to the acquisition of vision that, like that of the Creator, is independent of temporal occurrence. This is the locus of the coherent experience of Augustine s Threefold Present with past, present, and future encumbered (mercifully) with the necessity of temporal occurrence. 3: The Remaining Questions In order to get at the fundamental question motivating this section: The Elemental Body, I hope to take stock of Nancy s intervention: The ontological body has yet to be thought. I will approach this question by taking seriously the notion of locality that informs Nancy s idealized notion of the ontological body. Ontology has yet to be thought out to the extent that its basically an ontology where the body = the place of existence, or local existence. (Here local shouldn t be taken as a piece of ground, a province or a reservation. It should be taken, rather, in the pictorial sense of local color, the vibration and the singular

150 141 intensity-itself changing, mobile, multiple-of a skin-event or of a skin as the place for an event of existence.) 114 The Ontological/Elemental Body then has to be internally coherent which reintroduces this important notion of perspective and perception. What I take Nancy to require here is that the Ontological Body exist as an independently, self-referential coherent entity with the skin-event as a type of cordon sanitaire against externally imposed imperatives. In the theme of the work here we return to internal notions of time and Kant s theorizing around this question. The important aspects of Kant s thinking here, as mentioned above, are centered on the question of intuition as it relates to the inwardly cognized nature of time. This is critical because of the proposal advanced here that the Ontological/Elemental Body is likewise based upon a self-contained evaluation of the self that, in Kant s language is based upon intuition. The essential concept here is Kant s notion of what he terms sensible intuition (Gedankenbestimmung). Sensible intuition, in this formulation, allows the subject to determine inner sense in accordance with the synthetic unity of apperception; and thus it can think synthetic unity of the apperception of the manifold of a priori sensible intuition-this unity being the condition to which all objects of our (i.e., human) intuition must necessarily be subject This question of the a priori is imperative for my purposes here in that Kant proceeds as this section progresses, to take stock of imagination which is the power of presenting an object in intuition even without the object s being present. 116 Imagination becomes essential in this chain of reasoning to constructing Kant s conceptualization of time. We cannot think a line without drawing it in thought. We cannot think a circle without describing it. We cannot at all present the three dimensions of space without placing three lines perpendicularly to one another from the same point.

151 142 And even time we cannot present except inasmuch as, in drawing a straight line (meant to be the externally figurative presentation of time), we attend merely to the act of the manifold s synthesis whereby we successively determine inner sense, and thereby attend to the succession of this determination in inner sense. 117 From here we can begin to investigate the notion of internal time for the first of our potential figures for the Elemental/Ontological that would necessarily be invested with similarly described time. It is productive to focus on the notion of the line here that Kant employs to illuminate the conceptualization of time here. First it is important to note that Kant is likely not taking up the question of the Lifeless Immortal Human but in many ways, the vector of the line proposed has to be related to the type of time I have argued is internal to this figure. The newly created, Human that is lifeless and immortal has, demonstrably, no past therefore the vector of time that resides in this figure is a line that progresses away from the figure with no commensurate line into a past. I would argue that this is what serves as the foundation for the notion of internal time for any of these figures that are under consideration as the locus of Elemental and therefore Ontological Being. In spite of the Mortal Human understanding time in the manner described by Augustine as a Threefold Present, mechanical causality attends and this original understanding of time as a vector into the future is manifest in each of these figures as what we have characterized it: desire, selfconsciousness and time. Returning to the challenge of making progress toward reading the Elemental as contiguous with Nancy s ontological body we have to address the question of the physical spatiality of the body. Again, Kant proves useful in thinking the body that we require here that is without additive. If from your experiential concept of a body (Körper) you gradually omit everything that is empirical in a body-the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the

152 143 impenetrability-there remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has not entirely vanished), and this space you cannot omit [from the concept]. 118 We will visit this blank body again when we take up the concepts of non-being in the thinking of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. For now I would like to finalize this discussion by proposing that the body that we are in search of: the Elemental form that serves as the basis for all other additive understandings of the subject as depicted by Michelangelo in Panel 4: The Creation of Adam. The lifelessness of the body is belied by its apparent animation: desire. That desire is what we understand as Hegelian selfconsciousness that in theorizing manifests itself in the quest to resolve the problematic relationship between the Human form, immortality, knowledge and temporality. This is the Elemental Form that is invested with a complex, internally singular time that forms the basic stuff from which we will elaborate the Exalted and the Abject Subjects. 4: Exalted Internal Time Signature: Turning here to the Exalted marks a theoretical decision about the construction of the subject from the stuff of Elemental Being. One way into this discussion is to focus on the concept of sovereignty, which I have marked as a relationship to temporality, space, Law and Chance. In that vein, one theoretical proposal is that of Orlando Patterson from his essential text, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, here, Patterson makes the opposite theoretical choice in arguing that: [t]he basic argument of this work is that freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their role as master, slaves, and nonslaves. 119 The implication of this approach for this project would be twofold: First, Patterson does not theorize the existence of a figure that is neither slave, nor free which is the principal point of

153 144 the Elemental figure sketched above. Second, independent of that difference in approach, following Patterson s lead, it would seem that the existence of the Abject figure would precedes that of the Exalted. This effort alters that cause and effect relationship and is sympathetic to Ricoeur s reading of this question in Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary where he posits: This reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary leaves no doubt even about the direction in which we must read their relations. Not only does the involuntary have no meaning of its own, but understanding proceeds from the top down, and not from the bottom up. Far from the voluntary being derivable from the involuntary, it is, on the contrary, the understanding of the voluntary which comes first to man. I understand myself in the first place as he who says I will. The involuntary refers to the will as that which gives it its motives and capacities, its foundation, and even its limits. This reversal of perspective is only one aspect of the Copernican revolution which in its many forms is philosophy s first achievement. 120 This project agrees with Ricoeur s fundamental alteration of Patterson s cause and effect relationship but raises the intervention that there is an in between space that Ricoeur seems to mark here as man but needs additional description: hence the work prior to this section. That being said, it is the argument here that prior to the construction of an Abject figure, Patterson s enslaved or Ricoeur s involuntary, we have to understand the existence and workings of the Exalted. What then is Exalted Internal Time and perhaps, more fundamentally, why does it exist and if it does, how does a subject access it? To the first of these questions there is an obvious answer that tracks with the context pursued here regarding the Judeo-Christian account of creation. That answer would be that Exalted Internal Time is, basically, as described by Augustine, a perception that it elides the necessity of sequentiality in the reckoning time: [y]our vision of occurrence in time is not temporally conditioned. 121 Further, this supra-temporality is manifest from the perspective

154 145 of the activity of this subject for whom there is no tension between past and future. 122 This type of temporal existence is, mythological underpinnings notwithstanding, not an option for the human subject, Exalted or otherwise. Understanding the limitations of the mortal to effect time and space it is, however, possible to consider a human subject that exists at some remove from the basis existence within time and space that is the experience of the Elemental subject. How then do we mark the secularization of Exalted Time? It is here that it becomes necessary to collectivize the analysis in more complete fashion that has been the case to this point. For the most part, it has been an examination of individual figures along the continuum of creation that now and then interacted with another but with respect to establishing the Elemental figure, it was primarily an analysis of a singular subject. This is in fact a fundamental maxim here in that it is possible to be Elemental alone: that is not the case for the Exalted or the Abject. As with Ricoeur s Voluntary and Involuntary, these are interactive states of being. The difference here is that I propose that it is possible for the Exalted to exist along with the Elemental and without the existence of an Abject figure. The Abject, however, requires the existence of the Exalted and the Elemental but that will be taken up later. For now the focus is on the Exalted subject. The subject we are examining is fundamentally Human and therefore ontologically Elemental and is invested with what we painstakingly unpacked as the content and character of the internal time of this figure. The reason that the collective nature of the Exalted is important is much about the relationship of this figure s internal conception of time and that of others. Jacques Derrida takes up the relationship of the internal given-ness of time and proposes that it represents what Derrida understands as the calling to self by the self. In this construction, the self, calling to itself is as if to an other, establishes, an auto-affection that allows the subject to touch himself and in this touching establish the pulse of internal time.

155 146 This is a pre-condition for the turning outward of this question of internal auto-affection. The Elemental Self that exists in a collectivity is marked by the existence of independent notions of self-affective/referential time. When these subjects exist in a collective of other self-affective subjects there is necessarily a turn outward that requires the establishment of some form of collective time. Much of this has the feel of classical contract theory and a way in which I can describe the operation of this relationship is through the lens of Rousseau and his elaboration of the General Will. In short, what I am proposing is that the General Will is analogous to a General Temporality that I will unpack through the lens of Rousseau s Social Contract. The crux of the matter here is to come to an understanding of how this project operationalizes Rousseau s General Will by: 1) understanding its relationship to the Individual Will; 2) understanding the relation of the Law Giver to this question of individual versus general will; 3) rendering the time coextensive with these questions and; 4) establishing the Law Giver as the exemplary Exalted Subject. 5: The Social Contract: In attempting to define the Exalted we naturally approach the first of the boundaries that present themselves as the central concern of this project. Necessarily, to separate the Elemental from the Exalted we are dealing with questions of differentiation and, as noted earlier, that exaltation cannot be experienced along. Understanding that this is a social question, one that I intend to examine through the lens of time, the central question appears to be: How is it that fundamentally Human subjects can differentiate themselves into subjects who are considered somehow more (or less) of a Human than the Other? In this case we are focusing our attention on the radically sovereign other and what attends in that instance. I will approach this problem by first considering Rousseau s Social Contract

156 147 thorough the concept of what I wish to mark as Radically Exalted Temporality and then turn to a close reading of Walter Benjamin s canonical Critique of Violence to complete the exegesis of Exalted Subjectivity as it is delineated through societal ordering. Jean-Jacques Rousseau s Social Contract, in my reading, is deeply implicated in the establishment of hegemonic subjects that then establish normative societal order (rationality) for the group under consideration while at the same time reifying the necessity of separation between types of subjects. Later in this text we will take up the implications of this philosophical position as it relates to revolution but at this moment the point is to understand its role in forming the normative conditions that serve as the addressee for revolutionary fervor. As we are aware, the tradition of contract theory is deeply motivated by the existence of a primordial state of nature from which man emerges. Rousseau is no exception and the point here is to map the state of nature as contiguous with the state of Elemental Being or the Ontological Human. Rousseau proposes that I assume that men reach a point where the obstacles to their preservation in a state of nature prove greater than the strength that each man has to preserve himself in that state. Beyond this point, the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence. 123 By establishing our understanding of Elemental Being and the primacy of internal notions of time, we can rephrase Rousseau to read that there is a point where the plenitude of individual notions of time prove an obstacle to living in a societal order. At this point the necessity arises to recognize and establish a normative notion of time that is accessible to the subjects under consideration and serves as the basis for recognition of the individual within a societal order. I am marking this as equivalent to the thinking surrounding Rousseau s notion of the General Will that proceeds from this question of the need for a structure to manage the

157 148 disparate notion of right that is capable of maintaining the central discourse of Freedom that I am linking to internal time. This complex balancing of individual wills is recognized by Rousseau who poses the dilemma as a question: How to find a form of association which will defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which the individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution. 124 The first task is to situate this question and the solution to the discourse of time by wondering if it is possible to equate internally established temporality with freedom and understand the conditions under which it can exist coherently with respect to the collectivized understanding of time. The General Will in this formulation becomes refracted to exist as a tool for facilitating the recognition of a normative time signature that is almost necessarily out of synch with internally established time. Stated differently, the general will, as I am employing it here, is the acceptance by the individual subject of the necessity to synchronize, without erasure or destruction, individual notions of time with some mutually agreed upon temporality. That formulation presupposes that there is something like normative time that comes out of some aggregation of individual temporalities much the same as the argument that Rousseau makes in his first attempt to define the General Will. There is a great difference between the will of all [what all individuals want] and the general will; the general will studies only the common interests while the will of all studies private interests, and is indeed no more than the sum of individual desires. But if we take away from these same wills, the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out, the sum of the difference is the general will. 125 (my italics: MS) This is a utopian solution and Rousseau knows it. Ultimately, the notion of some combination of individual wills that is blended together mathematically to arrive at an answer finds itself relying upon the existence of some radical Other that is beyond the reach of

158 149 this reckoning and serves as the measure for its validity: The Law Giver to Rousseau and here what I would call the Exalted. Rousseau opens Chapter 7 of Book II with the description of this subject. To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with out nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws. 126 This figure needs to be examined from the perspective of its own temporality and the relationship it maintains to the collective. The question being whether the time of the collective is a product of one of several possibilities: the adoption of the temporality of the lawgiver; the lawgiver serving as the referee for the summing of the differences of individual wills to form the general will; or a figure that exists outside of time and is situated to insure compliance by those who are within the society with the mutually agreed upon establishment of collective temporality. It seems from a textual analysis that the question of the exceptionality of this figure seems to be the most fruitful path to pursue and fits with the understanding that we are developing here of the Exalted figure and the relationship to notions of sovereignty. This requires that we back up a step and take up what Rousseau means by sovereignty in the context of the general will and how that formulation relates to the question of the lawgiver internal to the Social Contract and subsequently to our question of temporality, exaltation and the elemental. The chain of reasoning pursued here traces Rousseau s conceptualization of the distinction between the sovereign and sovereignty; the necessity of coercive force to secure the contract; the nature of law which I will take up out

159 150 of sequence to return to the lawgiver and finally back to the question of coercive force as it relates to the discourse of life and death. In the closing moments of Book I of the Social Contract, Rousseau sets up the discussion that preoccupies us here by marking the sovereign as necessarily exceptional in that it would be against the very nature of a political body for the sovereign to set over itself a law which it could not infringe. 127 The Sovereign, to Rousseau is to be understood as this complex collectivization that represents the general will and dispenses with notions of individual will. For purposes of this analysis, lets indulge this understanding by freely substituting will with time. Therefore we have the Sovereign as a collectivity of the primacy of general time over individual time. Again our problem, like that of Rousseau, is arriving at a coherent explanation of this amalgam. This is much about the question of passing from the discursive perspective of the individual (read here individual time) to that of a collectivity, or what Rousseau calls Civil Society or in this parlance, Civil/Collective time. Here this question of freedom or the reality of individual time is marked as a negative formation that can only be ameliorated by submission to this general will. that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means noting other than that he shall be forced to be free 128 By holding to the relation of internal time to freedom we can then read this sanction: forced to be free as being forced to exist in a zone of individual time that is outside of, and perhaps mutually incoherent to, the collective of general time. We will see this again. It is the transition from the individual state of being to that of civil society that is important to understand. Rousseau defines it as being marked by several alterations of the subject principally the notion that duty has taken the place of physical impulse, and right of desire 129 In order to render this line of reasoning coherent it is important to take

160 151 seriously the relationship we have drawn between internal time, self-consciousness and desire. Here, Rousseau requires that membership in the collectivity feature the alteration of desire into right. This binary of duties and rights is central to Rousseau s thinking here in and around the contract but for our purposes we need to take into consideration what could be meant by the transformation of notions of internal time, self-consciousness and desire into a question of rights within a societal order to which the subject has contributed out of duty. The focus here is most consistently time and its relationship to Rousseau s central concern of the general will. If we admit individual will as contiguous with or perhaps composed of individual time as we have traced it from Kant and located it in the Elemental Subject as desire/self-consciousness; the duty to accept the terms of the primacy of the collective over individual freedom in an Elemental state takes the place of physical impulse. This impulse represents a type of freedom replete with the negative connotations of the free for all of the state of nature so abdicating this individuality to the collective as a duty replaces what we have ontologically characterized as self-consciousness or desire or desire for selfconsciousness that is time itself with the question of right. This alteration in the subject who had hitherto thought only of himself, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason rather than study his other inclinations. 130 This represents the forswearing of individual time for that of the collective; participation in which comes with the series of rights that Rousseau articulates accrue to life in a civil society. Suppose we draw up a balance sheet, so that losses and gains may be readily compared. What a man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and the absolute right to anything that tempts him and that he can take; what he gains by the social contract is civil liberty and the legal right of property in what he possesses We might also add that man acquires with civil society, moral freedom, which alone makes man the master of himself; for

161 152 to be governed by appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to the law one prescribes to oneself is freedom. 131 So, we can draw a metonymic relationship as it relates to time through Rousseau s civil society as the locus of the performance of the contract. This combination of individual wills/time into general will/time is what Rousseau labels as the Sovereign which is where he establishes the point of departure of Book II by asserting the critical distinction between the sovereign and sovereignty. My argument, then, is that sovereignty, being nothing other than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated; and that the sovereign, which is simply a collective being, cannot be represented by anyone but itself-power may be delegated but the will cannot be. 132 The inalienable nature of sovereignty is accompanied by its indivisibility for either the will is general or it is not; either it is the will of the body of the people, or merely that of part. 133 Both of these conceptualizations map onto time as the unit of analysis. First to take up this question of inalienability, Rousseau notes that individual will, just like individual time, may coincide with the general will on some point or the other, [but] it is impossible for the coincidence to be regular or enduring. 134 This speaks to the possibility of imaging a series of metronomes, all set to different time signatures that eventually, inevitably, will synchronize at some point or another, but not for long. Societal order requires more than infrequent and unpredictable instances of synchronicity. With respect to sovereignty being indivisible, Rousseau assures us that, in its indivisibility, it is representative of an ontological condition. As we have sought to establish time as the basis from which this narrative proceeds, it, likewise, is positioned as having no antecedent and being impossible to reduce so at least in these elements it is the same as Rousseau s account of Sovereignty.

162 153 Sovereignty however is distinct from the sovereign. The Sovereign is the collectivity of wills that form the general will. We can safely label this as the state and sovereignty is the exercise of the general will in the process of governance. In my parlance, the Sovereign is the notion of civil time and sovereignty is the application of that temporality to the lives of the relevant subjects. The question becomes, in my reading of this complex matter, how sovereignty is made the prevailing mode of existence? This is where I wish to understand the employment of coercive force in the securing of the contractual relationship that binds the subject to this collective temporality. Rousseau establishes the terms of the relationship of sovereignty to the contract in Chapter 4 of Book II, The Limits of Sovereign Power. What then is correctly to be called an act of sovereignty? It is not a covenant between a superior and an inferior, but a covenant of the body with each of its members. It is a legitimate covenant, because its basis is the social contract; an equitable one, because it can have no end but the common good; and it is a durable covenant because it is guaranteed by the armed forces and the supreme power. 135 Here we see at the fundamental level the social contract in this formulation is to join a covenant that positions the state as the ultimate arbiter of compliance with the terms of the collective in that the state has the power to coerce by the power to punish. The dire terms of transgressing the contractual relationship necessarily requires that we ascertain the character of the laws to be followed. Rousseau returns us to the discourse surrounding duties and rights and proposes that there must be covenants and positive laws to unite rights with duties and to direct justice to its object. 136 Recall that in the context of time that we are employing, the first duty is to forgo the freedom of individual time that then triggers a series of rights that in this analysis are fundamentally related to the participation in civil time.

163 154 At this stage we return to this question of the lawgiver as the locus of a possible solution to this problem of establishing what is best for this collective that is necessarily formed from a combination of individual notions of right. This position is fundamentally related to the type of separation of the Exalted from the Elemental, which elevates the lawgiver over the monarch. A prince has only to follow a model which the lawgiver provides. The lawgiver is the engineer who invents the machine; the prince is merely the mechanic who sets it up and operates it. 137 There is nothing that indicates that this lawgiver would be considered a divine presence but for the purpose here it is clearly meant to mark a subject that is Exalted even over the sublime figure of the monarch. What I want to consider again is the presence of this figure that necessarily exists outside of the notion of the civil time that we have mapped onto Rousseau s Civil Society and consider that this may be the primary marker of the separation of the Exalted from the Elemental figure. The time signature of the Exalted is necessarily at a distance from that of even the collective sovereign time signature that is a product of the general will. The lawgiver is, in every respect, an extraordinary man xi in the state. Extraordinary not only because of his genius, but equally because of his office, which is neither that of the government nor that of the sovereign. This office which gives the republic its constitution has no place in that constitution. 138 Here we find that this figure, employing the language of this project, gives the society its time but has no place in that time. This is the first marker of the Exalted body. Being in xi In spite of closing the first paragraph of this Chapter with the statement: Gods would be needed to give men laws. (The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 7, pp. 84) it is clear that the lawgiver is not divine.

164 155 the unique position to give time to the other while having no place within the time that is given. This is fundamentally understood within the well-worn context of Agamben s notion of exception and provides an interesting way into extended his thinking around the Homo Sacer to include its polar opposite, the figure that gives time but is not subject to it. Further, as the giver of the law, this figure has a special relationship with death; this I am marking as the second element of the Exalted Body: establishing the conditions under which the existence of a figure within the envelope of Civil Time has that existence terminated through death. This figure, the lawgiver as the Exalted Body, in Rousseau s text, is vested with a power of creation that lends to support to a central pillar of this approach to the creation of a subject by employing the evacuated body as the point of departure for alteration of being. Whoever ventures on the enterprise of setting up a people must be ready, shall we say, to change human nature, to transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which that same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his being. The founder of nations must weaken the structure of man in order to fortify it, to replace the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a moral and communal existence. In a word each man must be stripped of his own powers, and given powers which are external to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. The nearer men s natural powers are to extinction or annihilation, and the stronger and more lasting their acquired powers, the stronger and more perfect the social institution. 139 We will examine this stripped figure in much greater detail in the thinking surrounding Fanon s zone of non-being. But for now, this complex passage can serve to underscore the necessity of grappling with an evacuated body as a place of reconstitution. Here I return, as promised, to a moment in Rousseau s text that precedes the chapters on law and the lawgiver. In Chapter 5, The Right of Life and Death, Rousseau

165 156 takes up the case of the figure that transgresses the laws that we will find in Chapter 7 are the providence of the lawgiver. Moreover, since every wrongdoer attacks the society s law, he becomes by his deed a rebel and a traitor to the country; by violating its law, he ceases to be a member of it, indeed, he makes war against it. And in this case, the preservation of the state is incompatible with his preservation; one or the other must perish; and when the guilty man is put to death, it is less as a citizen than as an enemy. 140 This chilling rebuke and its relationship to the coercion that we have illuminated here as the foundation of the contract establishes the existence as theorized here in the thinking of Rousseau. The man who becomes guilty is, prior to his transgression a citizen and therefore subject to the laws that attend that status, think collective time here. This is Elemental Subjectivity, or the Elemental Body, that, as citizen relinquishes individual time for collective temporality. Upon electing to violate the strictures of societal order, the Exalted figure who has established the duty to relinquish individual time and the unified perception that replaces it, punishes the transgression of the regime of law with death forcing the former Elemental Citizen into the status of the Abject with a new time that is marked as death. This can be examined more carefully by taking up Walter Benjamin s essay, Critique of Violence in some detail. 6: The Punishment of Korah In considering Benjamin s essay we will return to the Torah; Numbers Chapter 16. First, however, it is important to consider Benjamin s essay and its relation first to the questions I have worked through regarding Rousseau s Social Contract generally and second the specific relationship of the essay and the previous discussion to the form and content of the Exalted Body. Benjamin s goal, as stated in the opening moments of the text, is to parse the notion of violence as a tool of social ordering taking into account the important

166 157 genealogical facts surrounding the motivation for an act of violence and whether the act itself is a means or an ends. For if violence is a means, a criterion for criticizing it might seem immediately available. It imposes itself in the question of whether violence, in a given case is a means to a just or an unjust end. A critique of it would then be implied in a system of just ends. This, however, is not so. For what such a system, assuming it to be secure against all doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a principle, but, rather, the criterion for bases of its use. The question would remain open whether violence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends. 141 This formulation immediately puts stress on the fundamental principle articulated by Rousseau that it is coercive force that insures the good result of forgoing individual will for inclusion in the general will and the contract. This question is inextricably tied to the fundamental concern of the establishment of whether the project in question is moral or just; a situation that Rousseau resolves with the presence of the lawgiver and I mark as exemplar of the body that concerns us here: the Exalted. This notion of the relation of the creation of law has two critical aspects for this project: law in the first instance as law making and in the second law preserving. By extension, the notion of violence takes on the same characteristics as violent acts that establish or secure order that I then want to extend to include thinking on bodies that are ones that establish types of order or preserve it and their associated temporalities. All violence, Benjamin claims, is either lawmaking or lawpreserving. If it has claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits validity. 142 From this perspective, we are led to consider the question of violence in the formation of the bodies that concern us here. We have seen violence in the form of the sentence of death employed to alter the subject. In thinking through how this maps against the Exalted Body, Benjamin offers the narrative of God s judgment on the company of Korah for consideration which

167 158 requires us to take up the question of mythic and divine violence. Mythic violence, in Benjamin s judgment is a mere manifestation of [the god s] existence. 143 Divine violence, on the other hand is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first [mythic violence] demands sacrifice; the second accepts it. 144 This project is concerned with divine violence, as we have seen in the close reading of the series of banishments, condemnations and murders that have accompanied the reading of the Old Testament. What we are then confronted with is thinking on violence that has similar affect to mythic and divine violence but is the act of Elementally Human subjects who employ it as a system of social ordering. Benjamin s reading of the Korah rebellion in Numbers 16 is situated as divine violence. The goal here is to examine this event as it relates to the separation of the Elemental into Abject and Exalted subjects. The legend of Niobe [mythic violence] may be contrasted with God s judgment on the company of Korah, as an example of such violence. God s judgment strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, and a profound connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatory character of this violence is unmistakable. For blood is the symbol of mere life. The argument that I am pursuing here is that Korah proposes a radically broad view of the status of the subjects of Israel that obscures the separation between Elemental, Exalted and Abject that I argue forms the basis of societal order in the western tradition. And they assembled against Moses and against Aaron and said to them, You have too much! For all the community, they are holy, and in their midst is the Lord, and why should you raise yourselves up over the Lord s assembly? And Moses heard and fell on his face. And he spoke to Korah and to all his community, saying, In the morning the Lord will make known who is His, and him who is holy He will bring close to Him and him whom he chooses He will bring close to Him. Do this: take your fire-pans, Korah and all your community. And place fire in them and put incense on

168 159 them before the Lord tomorrow. And the man whom the Lord chooses, he is the holy one. You have too much, sons of Levi. And Moses said to Korah, Listen, pray, sons of Levi. Is it too little for you that God of Israel divided you from the community of Israel to bring you close to Him to do the work of the Lord s Tabernacle, to stand before the community and serve them? And He brought you close, and all your brothers the sons of Levi with you. And will you seek priesthood as well? Therefore you and all your community who band together against the Lord-and Aaron, what is he that you should murmur against him? 145 The tactic I wish to pursue in unpacking this complex narrative is to remain consistent and do so through the lens of temporality. The argument will be that substantively, the radical nature of Korah s proposal alters the separation of time and space that attended the Fall but does not take into account the existence of constitutional violence in the sense of mortality and will ultimately face the wrath of law preserving violence. Additionally, I wish to push against Benjamin s reading of this as divine violence that strikes them without warning, [and] without threat in that the fact of the rebellious act in the first place makes it clear that Korah is fully aware of the coercion implicit in the structure of their social order and his attempt at revolutionary alteration of the relationship between Exalted and Elemental subjects. Without this knowledge, what he is proposing makes no sense and Benjamin s assertion also seems to discount the naked threat from the mouth of Moses: You have too much, sons of Levi.. The most obvious point of entry into this discussion is to examine the radically altered spatiality that Korah proposes. We must remember that as Levites, Korah and his relations have access to the Tabernacle just as Moses and Aaron. The explicit genealogy here is important in that it establishes the inner time of the Levites in marking their generations. We can see this in Chapter 3 of Numbers. The Levites are consecrated by God and in that status they have special duties and in the mind of Korah, special rights.

169 160 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Bring forward the tribe of Levi, and set them before Aaron the priest, that they may serve him. And they shall keep his watch and the watch of all the community before the Tent of Meeting to do the work of the Tabernacle. And they shall keep watch over the furnishings of the Tent of Meeting and the watch of the Israelites to so the work of the Tabernacle. And you shall give the Levites to Aaron and to his sons, wholly given shall they be from the Israelites And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, And as for Me, look, I have taken the Levites from the midst of the Israelites in place of every firstborn wombbreach of the Israelites, that the Levites be Mine. For Mine is every firstborn. On the day I struck down every firstborn in the land of Egypt I consecrated to Me every firstborn in Israel from man to beast-mine they shall be. I am the Lord. 146 This passage illuminates the critical linkage between spatiality and time as it is represented by the acknowledgment of a genealogy. God here has established a relationship of substitution that presents an important way in which death is framed as a type of service or duty. The sentence of death on first-born sons is now situated to a commitment to a lifetime of service for the Levites. Reckon the Levites by their fathers houses, by their clans, every male from a month old and up you shall reckon them. 147 (Numbers 3:15) Alter illuminates the nature of this reckoning that renders the Levites unique from the other Israelites. 15. every male from a month old and up. Unlike the other tribes, whose census is the vehicle of an explicit military conscription and hence based on the age of the twenty and over, the Levites are dedicated to God for their whole lives. The count begins not from birth but from one month because given the prevalence of infant mortality, only after one month is the child regarded a viable person. (an explanation duly noted by several medieval commentators). 148 Korah, a Levite, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi 149 (Numbers 16:1) is desirous of availing himself of this privileged genealogy and the privilege of proximity to God that it allows in access to the Tabernacle. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by

170 161 returning to the text of Korah s demand of Moses quoted earlier from Numbers 16. You have too much! For all the community, they are holy, and in their midst is the Lord, and why should you raise yourselves up over the Lord s assembly? 150 (Numbers 16:3) What Korah seems to be proposing here is a radical departure from the basic uni-dimensional figure that we have established at the outset of this project. Rather than recognizing that even amongst the holy that there are hierarchical relationships, Korah instead demands a removal of the barriers that interest us here that serve as thresholds between these subjects and a return to the flat relationship between creator and creation that required infinitude. The visual representation of the world that Korah proposes would resemble the following: The Holy God Figure 33 Here, as Korah proposes, [f]or all the community, they are holy, and in their midst is the Lord. This prevents the notion of there being a holy of holies let alone the question of abjection. Spatially, this is actualized for the Levites in their access to the Tabernacle, which is the locus of the one to one contact between Moses and God to which Aaron serves as witness. Here we can return to the affect of the alteration between God and the Levites through the resituating of the sentence of death of the first born to a lifetime of service by the Levites. As we have seen in each instance it has been mortality and even untimely death that has served to demark one subject from the next: the mortality of the Humans

171 162 after the fall; the murder of Abel by Cain; the prohibition, upon penalty of death, for the murder of Cain; and in many ways similar to the status of the Levites, the eternal notion of servitude visited upon the children of Ham. Korah, in his reading takes all holiness to be absolute and without boundary not just between the community of the holy but even between man and God. This can be attributed to the recurrence of the notion that God resides in the midst of the Israelites. And they shall make Me a Tabernacle, that I may abide in their midst. 151 (Exodus 25:8) Much of these chapters of Exodus (25-33) are devoted to the physical properties of the Tabernacle and ultimately the consequence of entering it. This question of space and the locus within sacred space of important talisman that contribute to the alteration of the human subject here, as in Genesis as it relates to the various trees (knowledge, eternal life) within the Garden, is reflected here as well. For instance, in Exodus 29:37, with respect to the altar within the holy of holies of the Tabernacle and Aaron s priestly relationship to it we read the following: Seven days you shall atone on the altar and consecrate it, and the altar shall be a holy of holies, whoever touches it shall be consecrated. 152 All of this, taken together, speaks to the radical nature of Korah s ambition with respect to his temporality (genealogically Levite) and the right of access to the Tabernacle. Some of this is affirmed by the instructions given to Moses regarding the Levites and the Tabernacle. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, But the tribe of Levi you shall not reckon, and their heads you shall not count in the midst of the Israelites. And you, make the Levites reckon with the Tabernacle of the Covenant and with all its furnishings and with all that belongs to it. They it is who shall bear the Tabernacle and all its furnishings, and they shall serve it, and around the Tabernacle they shall camp. And when the Tabernacle journeys onward, the Levites shall take it down, and when the Tabernacle camps, the Levites shall set it up, and the stranger who draws near shall be put to death. 153 (Numbers 1:48-51)

172 163 The critical question becomes whether this spatial/temporal exaltation of the Levites tends to render them the equals of Moses and Aaron with respect to their relationship with God. The concept on the part of Korah that there is no separation between the relative relationship of Moses and Aaron and the totality of the people renders the separation that attends the relationship of the Human to the Creator after the Fall moot. Moses is outraged at the conceptualization and means to demonstrate to Korah and his band of followers that the alteration of the condition of first-born mortality to one of service within the Tabernacle does not accrue to a universal condition of holiness that would render the term useless. This question of mortality proves to be the central manner in which Korah and his band will be taught that there is a critical difference between themselves and those who the Lord chooses. And Moses said, By this shall you know that the Lord has sent me to do all these deeds, that it was not from my own heart. If like the death of all human beings these die, and if the fate of all human beings proves their fate, it is not the Lord who has sent me. But if a new thing the Lord should create, and the ground gapes open its mouth and swallows them and all of theirs and they go down alive to Sheol, you will know that these men have despised the Lord. And it happened, just as he finished speaking all these words, the ground that was under them split apart, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households and every human being that was Korah s, and all their possessions. And they went down, they and all that was theirs, alive to Sheol, and the earth covered over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly. 154 (Numbers 16: 28-33) This is critical. What we see here is that, as we have noted in the previous section, Elemental Human Life is characterized most prominently by its relationship to mortality. The problematic for this paradigm existed in establishing the notion that it was possible to be mortal and Exalted, substantively demonstrating that the Exalted Subject and Body are still inextricably tethered to the imperative of mortality but in being closer to the divine, this

173 164 relationship allows for the alteration of the mortality of other Human subjects. This will prove to be the fundamental element of the discourse of violence that attends the creation and maintenance of the Abject. und What also becomes imperative to begin to think here is what is it about these additional privileges that Korah desires? This I posit, points to a confusion for the ontological and material that will be elaborated later and serves as an account for understanding the need for Abject being. 7: Abject Internal Time Signature: Early in this project I noted that the goal here was ultimately to view these matters from the perspective of the subaltern actor; in the language here the Abject subject. Methodologically, the lengthy elaboration of the structure of this social order has focused on that of the Elemental and the Exalted before being in a position to turn to the Abject. There are reasons for this and if they haven t been apparent from the structure of the argument I will make them explicit here. The Elemental, in this formulation is just that; the stuff from which the particular subject is formed which requires that it be thought first. With respect to the reasoning behind the turn to the Exalted, the argument here is that the Abject is a creation in response to the Exalted so it would not work logically to present the Abject figure prior to offering a detailed explanation of its causal agent. From this position there are three things that need to be accomplished in this section: 1. Elaborate the time signature that is unique to the Abject figure. Perhaps the figure is even Abject because of the time signature and not vice versa. 2. In doing this marshal the thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois regarding second-sight, double consciousness and two-ness. 3. Employ musical time or meter as the manner in which we come to recognize Abject time and in so doing establish the ground from which we will approach the destruction of the condition of abjection.

174 165 As a practical matter, in order to provide a coherent comparison between these figures, Elemental, Exalted and Abject, we have to employ the metric that has been the central concern from the start, time, and in so doing space. In thinking this I would first like to employ two elements of the media, one visual and the second a recent news account to offer a concrete way to consider the notion of Abject temporality. 7a: Interstitial Space One: Walker (2012) Tsai Ming-liang David Eng proposes the following reading of this 25 minute film that I offer here as a point of departure for thinking about the notion of Abject temporality. The Walker is not hurrying and he is not standing still: he exists at a kind of threshold between action and inaction, between activity and passivity. Within this liminal space where he barely moves, he remains opaque, inaccessible. His subjectivity is closed to us, without speech and lacking in expressive gestures he only displays his bowed head, his clutching of a baked good in one hand and a plastic bag filled with indiscernible objects in the other, and, again and again, his gradual and interminable steps. The Walker takes his time and offers it to us, embodied. 155 This passage allows us to view the red robed monk, the Walker, as a figure who is corporeally committed to his internal notion of time. The title of Eng s article, Slowness as an Act of Rebellion implicates agency in the slow movements of the Walker during the 25- minute film. This is an externalized argument that requires us to presuppose that the Walker is aware that he is moving slowly. I am not willing to grant that notion as a point of departure and instead propose that the discursive power in this short film is that we, the outsider, are allowed to glimpse the external manifestation of internal temporality that is unaffected by what we have described as Civil Time. From that perspective, the notion of rebellion on the part of the Red Robed Monk requires us to read him as aware of the nonconformity of his position or potentially more controversially, that the monk is rebelling

175 166 against his own internal time and slowing himself down as a reaction to his dissatisfaction with the pace of time that he has become invested in that is the general will/time of his environment. I am proposing that we are witness to the raw, organic pace of a subject s internal time and the notion of it being rebellious, conforming, whatever; are all reactions based upon the viewer s investment in a particular time signature that does not allow for this brand of radically different temporality. I am questioning whether this liminal space where he barely moves is not the space of Hong Kong but the interstitial space between his internal time which is manifest as a corporeal existence that is out of synch with the necessity for renouncing individual time for the prevailing general time and the prevailing General Time. It is an error, if we allow for the possibility that in this liminal state, the Red Robed Monk may not be aware of his aporetic relationship with civil time, to read him as rebellious and necessarily Abject. The Walker, as I am reading him, is only composed of internal time and it is the relationship of the viewer to both individual time, collective time and the observation of the monk that allows the characterization of his motion as rebellious. What the filmmaker has placed before us is internal temporality, auto-affection presented to the viewer in unmediated fashion. I am defining mediation, in this instance, as the duty for participation within a social order: in this case for the Red Robed Monk, to forgo his internal time and join the collective general will. The Walker is objectively free but there are costs to that freedom. He is subjectively Abject, not by nature but by the manner in which his internal time signature is recognized by the prevailing social order. It is up to that system to position him within the triad of Abject, Elemental and Exalted. As a practical matter, there is always the possibility that the Walker is on the correct time and everyone else is out of synch rendering him putatively Exalted but not having closed the loop in failing to impose

176 167 this temporality on that of others seemingly Abject. The next example demonstrates the imposition of Abject temporality on the putatively Elemental subject. 7b: Interstitial Space Two: Chemical Manipulation of Internal Time Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives. Speaking to Aeon magazine, Dr Roache said drugs could be developed to distort prisoners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly. "There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said. 156 There is much to deal with here outside of the dire moral implication of this type of thinking in and around new and ever more draconian methodologies of punishment. I will mark that and leave it aside for now and focus on what this thinking demonstrates with respect to the implications of internal time as a neuro-biological process and tampering with it across several registers: 1) the internal notion of time for the altered subject; 2) the exchange after this alteration for this subject in entering Civil Time; 3) the implication of this alteration upon Civil Time; and 4) the affect of this process on the internal time of those who have imposed this alteration. The marks the possibility that what we have taken as a metaphysical process arising out of Kant s Critique of Pure Reason has been identified by scientists as a bio-chemical reaction that can be altered chemically. What this seems to call us to admit is that internal time is the status quo of the life of the subject and therefore altering, or accepting other modes of time are a secondary additive or subtractive process. This seems, in my thinking,

177 168 to lend support to establishing this internal and un-altered time as a component of Elemental or Ontological Being. What we have noted with respect to the existence of internal time is that the forgoing of it as the primary mode of existence for that of a collective is an essential element of the Elemental Human becoming a citizen and or subject of a social order. Second we have seen that the ability to exist as a subject that has not forgone individual time for a collective but is positioned to require the participation of other subjects in a temporality of this subject s choosing is the sine qua non of Exalted being. What we are seeing here is that with respect to the time signature of a subject qua three elements: 1) that subject s internal time; 2) that subject s relationship to Civil Time and; 3) establishing this subject as existing outside of internal, civil and Exalted time, we have located the Abject. Stated differently, both the Exalted and Abject subjects, like all human subjects have internal time signatures, however, these extreme actors have temporalities that can be witnessed by the other while maintaining the integrity of their internal time signature: in substance, the time of the Exalted is not only internally but externally Exalted or loved. On the other end of this continuum there is a subject whose time is internally and externally Abject. What I mean here is that it seems that internal time has three possibilities that dictate the nature of the subject under consideration. First, internal time can be exchangeable for participation in a social ordering of time without undermining the subject s affection for his or her time signature: this is Elemental Being that is coterminous with citizenship. Second, internal time can exist outside of the relationship with Civil time but is the normative mechanism for establishing the validity of the process of combining the internal times of Elemental beings that will be accepted as citizens: this time is Exalted temporality. Third, internal time can be excluded from the calculus of combined civil time forcing an

178 169 auto-dis-affective relationship on the part of the self for the self and, first, the same process of hatred for this subject by the normative temporal order: this is Abject temporality. What we are marking here with this profoundly immoral attempt to chemically reproduce what society has perfected through its processes of exclusion of certain subjects is the explicit relationship of certain actors to the manipulation, for purposes of social exclusion, the internal time of the Other. When this punished subject re-enters the common reckoning of time it would seem that the individual would be hopelessly unable to ground themselves temporally: the punishment began on July 27, 2014 at noon, lasted until July 27, 2014 at 8:00 pm but the abjected subject believes that it is July 27, This causes the impossibility of reconciling the self with the self: the corporeal being is 8 hours older but believes that it is 1,000 years older and poses the same insurmountable problematic of acceptance by society. This then forces Civil time to ask of the Exalted (the lawgiver) to adjudicate this exceptional time. It would not seem possible, even mathematically, to reconcile this asynchronous actor so the excluded figure who was punished by this alteration becomes doubly denied by the social order: now the aftermath of the punishment establishes the impossibility of reentering civil society because of the disproportionate shift this inclusion would cause for the existence of normative temporality. Finally, the internal time of the Elemental and Exalted subjects of this social order must necessarily ask of the Abject the impossible: conform to civil time or continue to suffer exclusion, establishing what I want to employ to further contextualize the Abject Subject by labeling them as Beings Out of Time. This would allow us to view the Elemental subject as Beings Within Time and the Exalted as Beings who Establish (the Common reckoning of )Time.

179 170 8: Being(s) Out of Time: A brief methodological note is in order. At this point in this project we have reached what I term an Intellectual Choke Point or a point of inflection in that the thinking here proceeds forward and backward from this position. It would have been possible to start the project here and work forward or backward from this point and illuminating my reading of the future and the past of this critical node in the intellectual genealogy that is explored here. Instead I have elected to proceed in narrative fashion all the while knowing that the effort was headed toward this goal: W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk is, in many ways, the urtext for this project and establishes several critical concepts that will be examined here in careful fashion: 1. The veil; 2. The color-line; 3. Second-sight; 4. Double-Consciousness; and 5. Two-ness The argument is that Du Bois has, with these theoretical constructs, fundamentally established what we are meaning when we approach the Abject Subject/Body. The Five Critical Concepts will be decentered in many ways, mutatis mutandis, to take into account extensions or elaborations I believe the work of Du Bois and the secondary critique thereof is sympathetic. As a practical matter, it is not possible to think Africana Political Philosophy without having a firm grasp on these concepts. That holds, obviously, for this project as well. First, several points of methodological order: 1. Du Bois articulates two types of Veil in the text of Souls, this effort depends on establishing that distinction; 2. Second-sight, Double consciousness and Two-ness comprise a tripartite theoretical construct and it is problematic to separate Double consciousness from the paradigm and marshal it as a stand-alone phenomenon; and 3. This is about temporality.

180 171 Beginning with the last of these and focusing on the purpose of this section in the context of the larger project, we have consistently approached the understanding of these subjects relative to their relationship to time. What we have done with the previous two examples; The Walker and the chemical alteration of the subject s sense of time is to identify what constitutes the Abject: a complex relationship with Civil Time that we derived reading this phenomenon alongside the resituating of Rousseau s Social Contract as a rigidly constructed paradigm for the institution of common temporality. Now we have the Abject figure defined and constrained behind a threshold that is fundamentally about the imposition of radical modes of mortality (think here of the punishment of Korah). The task now is to begin to define the consciousness of the Abject figure as it exists post the imposition of Abjection, in short, what is it that the Abject figure knows about him or herself? Du Bois poses this question in his canonical formulation of the problematic: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a halfhesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville, or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. 157 This important passage maps onto, and as I have mentioned, is much of the motivation behind, the foundational framework of this project. What Du Bois proposes here is some coherent and apparent separation between subjects that takes on the similitude of a difference across disparate worlds. The first concern here is to identify this barrier between subjects and define for the Abject subject, what it feel[s] to be a problem. This I

181 172 argue is the essential point of what I chose to label Du Bois Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness: second-sight, double-consciousness, and two-ness. 8a: Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness: The relevant passage is rendered here in its entirety: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 158 In spite of, or maybe even because of, such broad based familiarity with this formulation I intend to pay close and careful attention to the language employed by Du Bois beginning with the use of adverbs with respect to the elements of Tripartite Consciousness he names here: only, always, and ever. xii These are absolutes for which Du Bois poses no obvious protocol for redress. What this implies vis-à-vis the work we have done to this point is that the structure of the barrier to a return to Elemental Being is constructed of such impenetrable or insurmountable stuff that these subjects are experiencing a permanent condition of abjection. This raises an important question that must be situated in order to orient the notion of permanent abjection against the concept of cognition. In short, if these are absolute and permanent conditions that only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world, how then does the Abject subject know that he or she is anything xii I owe this insight to a series of conversations with Professor Kenneth Haynes of the Brown University Departments of Comparative Literature and Classics.

182 173 potentially other than what he is? What I am striving for here is made coherent in Hans Blumenberg s analysis of Poincaré s thought experiment regarding Copernicus. [Poincaré] started from the question whether there would ever have been a Copernicus if our Earth were continually surrounded by an impenetrable and always unbroken blanket of clouds. Put another way, the problem ran: Would we know that the Earth turned on its axis and went around the Sun if we had never been able to practice astronomy? Poincaré did not yet know anything of the technical possibilities of piercing even a blanket of clouds of this sort with flying machines and rockets, nor did he know anything of a nonoptical astronomy such as has arisen in the form of radio astronomy. How could mankind located inside an atmospheric cave ever have learned that Earth belongs to a planetary system and ultimately to a universe made up of worlds, and that it moves, in this universe in multiple ways? Without the daily view of the daily rotation of the heaven of the fixed stars, would not any conjecture that was directed against the overwhelming evidence that the ground on which we stand and live is at rest have been impossible? Nevertheless Poincaré comes to the conclusion, in his thought experiment that even without astronomical optics men would have achieved clarity about their cosmic situation and motion. Only they would have had to wait much longer for the advent of a Copernicus. 159 To repurpose Poincaré s thought experiment here we would wonder if a subject that exists in a world which yields him no true self-consciousness would ever be aware that there is potential beyond the condition of subaltern being if one is always looking at one s self through the eyes of others, [and] measuring one s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity? By posing this seemingly insoluble problem through characterization of the condition as omnipresent we are tasked with carefully re-reading the formulation to ascertain where Du Bois has located an escape from this condition.

183 174 Rather than focusing first on the terms of Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness it may be useful to focus on the results of the conditions to insure that we have fully absorbed the situation proposed by Du Bois. 1. no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world ; 2. sense of always looking at one s self through the eyes of others ; and 3. two warring ideals in one dark body Each of these conditions is related to one of the three conditions of Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness and proceed in a cause and effect relationship that leads me to investigate the rigid sequentiality of the structure and, as has been the method of inquiry, to relate this to time. It is useful to revisit the passage and work through the sequencing. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 160 This passage requires careful attention particularly in light of the fact that I am positing that Du Bois employs an important turn of phrase that delineates three things: 1) the world ; 2) a particular way of seeing it and; 3) the affect of the first two. First, the Negro, in this account, is gifted with this way of seeing in this American world, leaving open the question of whether, in Du Bois formulation at the time, second-sight might be present in other worlds or in other peoples. Second, it is the world which yields him no true self-consciousness. The implication being that second-sight is only a way of seeing that which exists independently of awareness of the fact. Stated differently, Du Bois is proposing that America, as it exists does not provide for the existence of true selfconsciousness for the Negro. This is different than a false notion of self-consciousness existing because of a way of perceiving the self. For instance, it doesn t matter whether you

184 175 believe in or are aware of gravity as such or not. It acts independently of cognition. Finally, the last phrase but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world requires that we deal with the cause and effect relationship between revelation of the other world and only seeing himself through it. Lets first examine what Du Bois is proposing as if second-sight was not gifted to the Negro to ascertain its effect. This experiment requires that we begin with the phrase: this American world,-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. True self-consciousness, or just self-consciousness since as a practical matter it is possible to assert that self-consciousness is only self-consciousness when it is true is not possible in the American world. We have operationalized selfconsciousness from the earliest parts of this project to be synonymous with desire and what we have theorized as life represented by internal time. This allows us to propose that the lack of the possibility of self-consciousness on the part of the Negro in America is a product of the lack of recognized internal time: first on the part of the observer and as a secondary consideration on the part of the subject. What I mean here is that the Subject A has internal time A T. When that internal time is subjected to the possibility of communal acceptance and it is then rejected (think the Red Robed Monk or the chemically altered temporality of the prisoner) by the Lawgiver and therefore Elemental subjects as well, the message received by Subject A is that time A T is substandard and there is no affection, externally or internally for this essential component of the subject s being. It is not that the subject s internal time signature does not conform, as a we have seen recalling Rousseau on the unlikely nature of individual desire finding itself synchronized with the general will, this internal time is viewed as a wholly unacceptable way of being and cannot be considered for inclusion in the collective. Subject A develops an

185 176 Auto-Dis-Affective Relationship with A T and therefore is granted no true self-consciousness by the world in which it lives. We need to return to Kant here briefly to recall his proposition regarding time as internally given while space is an external relation. This rejection of the internal coherence of internal time troubles the possibility of this subject resolving itself in space. With Kant we may imagine the creation of the Negro as an elimination of an internally coherent system of temporality by an externally imposed perception that does violence to the subjectivity of the oppressed subject. Recall Kant proposes the following: But how (inasmuch as in addition to sensible intuition I can present, at least as possible, a different kind of intuition) can the I who thinks be distinct from the I that intuits itself and yet be the same as if by being the same subject? And hence how can I say: I as intelligence and thinking subject, cognize myself as an object that is thought, viz., I so cognize myself in so far as in addition I am also given to myself in intuition-except that I cognize myself, as I do other phenomenon, not as I am to the understanding but as I appear to myself? The question involves neither more nor less difficulty than does the question as to how I can be an object to myself at all, viz., an object of intuition and of inner perceptions. Yet so it must actually be, as we can establish if space is already accepted as being merely a pure form of the appearances of outer senses. For as regards time, which after all is not an object of outer intuition at all, we cannot present it to ourselves except under the image of a line insofar as we draw that line without exhibiting time in this way, we could cognize the singleness of the dimension. 161 ( 24) This represents what Derrida understands as the calling to self by the self. In this construction, ideally, the self, calling to itself is as if to an other, establishes, an autoaffection that allows the subject to touch himself and in this touching establish the pulse of internal time. The existence of a coherent sense of inner time allows the subject to turn outward and encounter the time signature of another subject. This cooperative (in the ideal sense) relationship of mutually agreed upon temporality establishes a coherent system of

186 177 time that the subject exists within and along with similarly situated actors. When there is a disruption in this relationship, there is a breach in the logic of mutually agreed upon temporality. This can take the form of encountering a system of time that is incoherent to the subject i.e. an 8-day week when we are conditioned to the 7-day week. Another form of this disruption, and the one that is relevant for this examination, is the inability of the self to call to the self and have a positive affirmation. Space becomes a by-product of outer senses and we must begin to understand how the establishment of space from the outside without the internal component of time from the inside affects this subject. What this appears to cause is a figure that is only body, perfectly oriented in space but without the proper sense of temporality. Consequently the determinations of inner sense must be arranged by us as appearances in time in precisely the same way as the determinations of the outer senses are arranged by us in space. Hence if concerning the determinations of the outer senses we grant that we cognize objects through them only insofar as we are outwardly affected, then we must also concede concerning inner sense that we intuit ourselves through it only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves; i.e., we must concede that, as far as inner intuition is concerned, our own [self as] subject is cognized by us only as appearance, but not in terms of what it is in itself. 162 ( 24) Here, Kant s exposition of the notion of intuition as distinct from cognition is on display and creates a figure, that in the absence of inward affectation, is devoid of intuition and only able to exist as an outward appearance to himself. Paul Guyer takes up this question in his text entitled Kant. Kant states that an intuition is our most direct or immediate kind of representation of objects, in contrast to a concept which always represents an object through a detour, that is merely by some mark or property that the object has. In his logic textbook, Kant defines intuition as a singular representation, that is, one that represents a particular object, while a concept is always a universal, which represents objects common to many objects.

187 178 [Ultimately], there is no difference between Kant s two definitions of intuitions and concepts 163 With this understanding, the result of Auto-(dis)Affection is without the immediacy of a singular representation and left only with this form of outward driven cognition of the self. Leaving a subject with spatiality but no immediacy or concept based on intuition, Kant has explored the possibility of existence in space without content. If from your experimental concept of a body you gradually omit everything that is empirical in a body-the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the impenetrabilitythere yet remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has now entirely vanished) and this space you cannot omit [from the concept]. 164 So we have an outwardly affected subject incapable of resolving itself internally and therefore exists out of synchronization with an internal sense of time. Recall that we are experimenting with a subject that lacks Du Bois second-sight and as such there would be no notion of either double-consciousness or two-ness since there would be no way for the subject, in this case, to understand that there is an alternative to this being; recall Poincaré s thought experiment. This subject is shrouded, or in the language of Du Bois veiled (more about this later) from awareness of its true condition or situated-ness. Now if we gift this figure with second-sight we can follow the logic and cause and effect relationship of Du Bois argument. Subject A now realizes that the rejection of time A T is not real or natural. There are at least two choices here to choose between; whether second-sight is seeing oneself through the revelation of another or is in fact a way of being aware that you are seeing yourself through the eyes of another; two very different propositions. This project will promote the latter. Second-sight will be situated as the cognition of the fact of a lack of true self-consciousness as opposed to a way of seeing that is itself the cause of this problem.

188 179 In the final analysis what I am proposing that this passage says is that second-sight is a form of consciousness that allows the Negro awareness of the fact of a lack of true selfconsciousness as a result of a separation between Black and White. This then is the sense of double-consciousness of always looking at one s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. Du Bois describes double consciousness as a peculiar sensation, not a mode of cognition as such. Second-sight remains the manner of perception and double-consciousness the sensation that the observation causes. Stated simply, the act of tickling an individual may or may not elicit the sensation of being tickled. That depends upon whether the subject is ticklish. Du Bois, in this account, positions the Negro as profoundly sensitive to the stimulation of second-sight. Therefore it seems clear that double-consciousness can neither exist without nor antecede second-sight. This leaves us with two-ness to address. Returning to the text: One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 165 Two-ness is situated here as a feeling that I wish to consider in relation to the notion of sensation. The way I would like to parse the difference is to propose that a feeling, in this context, requires a type of cultural awareness or perhaps a premonitionary stance in that sensations can be felt independently of context, cultural or otherwise. It seems here that Du Bois is using feeling in the sense of it being linked to an understanding of what the sensation of double-consciousness causes the subject to feel: two-ness and the rich descriptive through binary that follows. All of this leads me to conclude that second-sight is, in many ways, the most important of these canonical formulations in that, none of the others exist without its

189 180 presence. This assertion serves as the bridge to the question of temporality that exists here; one mode of which has already been addressed with respect to the which comes first analysis. The way I would like to get at temporality here is related to the nature of second sight as the sine qua non for Du Bois. What I am proposing here is that without a form of being that allows a perspective situated at a remove from the norm, there is no possibility of awareness of even what the prevailing mode of being might be. This relates directly to the previous exegesis that reveals that double-consciousness is a sensation resultant from second-sight. Without this way of seeing the sensation could not exist. So how do we translate this to time in order to facilitate a coherent relationship between this mode of being and those previously examined here? The first indication that this thinking on the part of Du Bois is translatable to the language of time employed here is its relationship to genealogy. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil The footnote provided in the Norton Critical Edition regarding this passage is useful. 7. In African American folklore, seventh sons as well as those born with a caul, a membrane that sometimes covers the head at birth, are reported to have special abilities, such as predicting the future and seeing ghosts. 166 These figures are not just seventh sons, but seventh sons of seventh sons, etc. establishing a complex and pure genealogical relationship with enhanced senses. We see this in Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man with the figure Peter Wheatstraw, the blues-singer who is pushing a cart loaded with hundreds of pounds of worthless blueprints who is able to recognize the Invisible Man as a youngster from the old country 167 in spite of the protagonist s efforts to hide or forget his heritage. Ellison leaves little doubt regarding the powers of Wheatstraw:

190 181 Oh, I ll do that. All it takes to get along in this here man s town is a little shit, grit and mother-whit. And man, I was bawn with all three. In fact, I maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesan draisedonblackcatboneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreen s- he spieled with twinkling eyes, his lips working rapidly. You dig me, daddy? 168 Du Bois has granted these powers of second-sight to all Negroes so the question becomes what is this veil with which they are born. I mentioned above that there are twoveils in the text and noted the critical importance of differentiating between the two. This is a long and close reading of this text but it is impossible to proceed further without unveiling the difference between the two representations. 8a2: The V(v)eil(s): W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America: contains the following provocative passage in the opening chapter The Black Worker ; Beneath the Veil lay right and wrong, vengeance and love, and sometimes throwing aside the veil, a soul of sweet Beauty and Truth, stood revealed. 169 This sentence is rich for examination from a number of perspectives but the threshold issue that this essay is exploring is the presence of the canonical trope of the Veil. This essay draws our attention to the fact that in the same sentence it is rendered as a proper and improper noun; upper and lower-case, which implies that Du Bois is writing about two distinct ideas. If Du Bois is referring to the same thing, why is there no pronoun after the initial presentation of the Veil and perhaps more tellingly why, if he merely intended to emphasize the point by direct reference in both instances, the second is lower-case? This may appear to be a pedantic point however the argument presented here is that a careful reading of Du Bois introduction of the trope in The Souls of Black Folk

191 182 demonstrates that the Veil and the veil do different work in the project of construction of true consciousness. Generally, exegesis of the concept of the veil is directed to Chapter I of Souls, Of Spiritual Strivings. This effort, however, focuses first on Du Bois Forethought were the Veil is first revealed and it is here that the author provides a road map, or perhaps a legend for identifying the separation of the two-concepts in the text. This portion of this project will carefully examine the Forethought and Chapter I of The Souls of Black Folk. Ultimately, later in this section, I will propose an intellectual genealogy of the Du Bois account of the two concepts and finally give a preliminary account of how the separation of the Veil and the veil is the essential move in the structuring of the Du Boisian knowing subject. At the outset of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois provides the reader an admonition that must be taken seriously. Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. 170 Taking up this challenge by carefully unpacking the text of Paragraph 3 of The Forethought, Du Bois provides us with the architecture of his project that specifically draws our attention to the central concern of this segment; differentiating the Veil from the veil. The first sentence of Paragraph 3 frames the scope of the Du Bois project. I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. 171 In sentences two through five of this paragraph, Du Bois describes the structure of the chapters that lie ahead. First in two chapters [Chapter I Of Our Spiritual Strivings and Chapter II Of the Dawn of Freedom ] I have tried to show what emancipation meant for them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter [Chapter III, Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others ] I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, [t]hen, in two chapters [Chapter IV Of the Meaning of Progress and Chapter V Of the Wings of

192 183 Atalanta ] I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil (my emphasis), and thus have come to the central problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have two chapters [Chapter VI, Of the Training of Black Men and Chapter VII, Of the Black Belt ] studied the struggles of the massed millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present relation of the sons of master and man. 172 Paragraph 4 further contextualizes the journey that Du Bois has mapped in the proceeding paragraph. Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within (my emphasis) the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,- the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All of this I have ended [Chapter XIV, Sorrow Songs ] with a tale twice told but seldom written. 173 Note here that Du Bois steps within the Veil by implication asserting that he has the power to come and go as he pleases to this place. Further, please note that in the footnotes to the Norton Edition of this text, Note 3 specifically referencing the initial appearance of the term Veil, reads See Exodus where Moses covers his face after speaking to God; also Isaiah 25.7 prophesies that the Lord will destroy the veil that has spread over all nations. 174 I argue that these concepts are not the same. The veil of Moses in Exodus is a product of the fact that he has been in the presence of the Divine and it causes his face to shine from the experience. After he gives the Law of YHWH to the people he covers his face to hide its transformation from the masses. When he visits the Lord, however, he removes the veil from his face. This, I propose is analogous to Du Bois Veil. The veil in Isaiah is a taint on the nations of man that the Lord will remove and is unrelated to the consequences of being in the presence of the godhead. This

193 184 conflation of two unrelated concepts is identical to the concern illuminated here with respect to Du Bois Veil and the veil. xiii The Forethought makes final reference to the Veil in the last sentence. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil. 175 The Veil as a proper noun will not appear again until its articulation as promised in Chapter IV. What is going on here? There are 47 references to the term Veil or veil in the text of Souls. Thirty-one of them are Veil and make appearances exclusively in the chapters he references in Paragraph 3 of the Forethought. However, as mentioned above, most reference to the veil as a concept in the thought of Du Bois is pointed to its presence in Chapter I of Souls. Du Bois only uses veil with a small v and his important description of second sight, double consciousness and two-ness are related to the veil not the Veil. A close reading of Chapter I should establish a normative understanding of the veil in the thinking of Du Bois which will provide a point of contrast for the Veil as it appears later in the text. xiii A careful reading of Exodus is instructive. Robert Alter s The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton 2004 pp ) offers the following translation of the relevant reference in Exodus. And it happened when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the Covenant in Moses s hand when he came down from the mountain, that Moses did not know that the skin of his face had glowed when he spoke with Him. And Aaron, and all the Israelites, saw Moses, and look, the skin of his face glowed, and they were afraid to come near him. And Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the chiefs in the community came back to him, and Moses spoke to them. And afterward all the Israelites drew near and he charged them with what the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. And Moses finished speaking with them, and he put a veil on his face. And when Moses came before the Lord to speak with Him, he would remove the veil until he came out, and he would come out and speak to the Israelites would see Moses s face, that the skin of Moses s face glowed, and Moses would put the veil back on his face until he came to speak to Him. The author offers the following commentary: 29: the skin f his face glowed. The sense of the verb would seem to be had begun to glow since the condition continues. It makes sense to see something terrifyingly luminous-a reflection of the divine fire glimpsed by the people from the foot of the mountain-rather than a disfiguration of Moses s face. The notion of divine radiance enveloping the head or face of a god, a king, or a priest appears in numerous Mesopotamian texts, and so would probably have been a familiar idea to the ancient Hebrew audience. 33. a veil Richard Elliott Friedman interestingly connects this with the covering and curtain in the Tabernacle: the site of holiness, he proposes, has to be partitioned off, enveloped in layers, and yet it remains accessible to the people.

194 185 The ironclad integrity of the separation that Du Bois subtly imposes on his reader is evident in Chapter I. This chapter is not referenced in the sentences that describe the author s project, to [sketch] in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil 176 and Du Bois is meticulous in his use of the un-capitalized veil. There are four references to the veil in this chapter, all of them canonical and all of them generally conflated with the Veil of The Forethought and Chapters IV, V, VI and VII. Chapter I s essential conceptualization of second-sight and double consciousness are the exclusive product of the veil and are not to be lumped with the Veil; Du Bois tells us so and is particularly careful not to do so himself. So what of the veil? Few tropes have more traction in theorizing around subaltern self-consciousness than the Du Boisian conceptualization of double-consciousness, two-ness and second-sight which have been effectively located as phenomenon that have as the necessary and sufficient condition the veil. The trope, as we have stated is not present in the Forethought but makes its appearance in Chapter I Of our Spiritual Strivings in Souls. In Paragraph 2, Du Bois alludes to the veils presence: I remember well when the shadow swept across me. 177 The story is a familiar one. The young Du Bois has his calling card refused by a girl in his class. [t]hen it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down the veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. 178 There are two concepts, beyond the veil itself, that require our attention here. First, that Du Bois proposes that he is not wholly different from those on the other side of the veil in heart, and life and longing. Second that he had, at this point, no interest in tear[ing]

195 186 down or creep[ing] through the veil. When Du Bois refers to the Veil, he walks within it and seems able to come and go as he pleases. The veil, in contrast, is something that might be torn or requires stealth to penetrate as opposed to the easy relationship and access he portrays with respect to the Veil. So what are we to make of the fact that the young figure in this description is able to perceive himself independently of the perspective of white viewers? The evolutionary nature of the development of consciousness seems to be what Du Bois is gesturing us toward. It appears that this development is based upon the increase of awareness of the veil as an ever more oppressive barrier to black engagement with the other and perceptions of self as the subject evolves. As the text continues, after first assuring the reader that he was disinterested in the world on the other side, that position becomes untenable. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep those prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophany, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry The shades of the prisonhouse closed round us all; walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the stretch of blue above. 179 Du Bois self awareness at the point of his initial contact with the veil seems to be a naïve stage of development that becomes troubled when his fine contempt begins to fade. Gesturing at the presence of those within black culture who have special expectations and abilities, he draws a bright line between himself and other black boys for whom the strife was not so fiercely sunny. But we should note that as he grows older and more aware, the veil/prison house closes round and becomes tall and unscalable. The sky that Du Bois

196 187 inhabited in his contempt for the white world has become distant and unreachable. It is in reality a product of a false sense of self. In the next paragraph, Du Bois introduces second-sight, double consciousness, and two-ness. This returns us to our point of departure and facilitates a closer reading of the passage that concerns us here. 9: Abject Time: The detour above was precipitated by the need to deal with the genealogy proposed by Du Bois employment of the mythology of the Seventh Son in relation to the perceptive abilities of the American Negro. This birthright, however, was only one causal factor of the special sensory position granted by second sight. The other is that the Negro, this seventh son, is born with a veil. The convention of capitalization that I have meticulously explored renders this the veil that exists between the black and white worlds. Understanding this, the question is how does this facilitate second-sight? Recall the proposal advanced here regarding how this barrier between Elemental and Abject Being is constituted in the first place that is related to the exclusion of certain subject s internal time signature from the universe of those that are recognizable as components of the structure of Civil time. In approaching this question of Abject time it is useful to continue to frame the analysis first in terms of genealogy as the mode of both marking and establishing temporality that is relevant. Genealogy in terms of ascertaining the status of a subject based upon ancestry has been a constant in this project most prominently with respect to the sanctions we located in the Old Testament of the Sons of Ham as well as Korah and his band. By marking the coherence of the subject s relationship to a social order by his or her relations we have established a type of counting that goes for the Abject as well as the Exalted. With

197 188 respect to the latter, one need only explore the notion of royal blood and its manifestation as a counting of monarchs (Louis XIV, XV, XVI ) or even popes to locate the essential element of genealogy in marking out the progression of time through the life spans of sovereign rulers. The same goes for the Abject, most prominently in the condition of slavery that is also passed as a birthright. Cursed be Canaan, the lowliest slave shall be to his brothers. The figure of the slave is useful here and will be situated as the exemplar of the Abject Body. Orlando Patterson proposes that the condition of slavery is defined as the permanent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. 180 This concept of natal alienation needs to be parsed since it is obviously related to the positioning of genealogy as a type of, or even exemplary, temporality. As a practical matter, there is on the one hand the type of natal alienation that Patterson references as a definitional component of the enslaved condition with the following compelling passage where he describes what he has established as the second of the three constituent elements of slavery : Substitute for death in war, natal alienation and generally dishonored. 181 With respect to natal alienation, Patterson writes the following: Not only was the slave denied all claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living blood relations but, by extension, all such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. Formally isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he was also culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited means of their natural

198 189 forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. 182 This seems generally true and Patterson may have accounted for this in qualifying the question of genealogy as a process of freely integrating, but he also does not seem to take stock of the essential fact that the enslaved body is alienated in every aspect of genealogy except for that of slavery. What Patterson is proposing, translating his claim into the language of this project, is a Being without time, which may be possible but does not seem to be what is going on here. This being has a certain type of time (genealogy) that is understood as subaltern to the point of affecting the lives of future generations: it is not a question of agency for at least two reasons. Patterson is correct in that this element of enslaved genealogy is not freely incorporated into the lives of the enslaved but perhaps the converse presents a more interesting way in which to study this phenomenon. Just as the status of enslaved genealogy cannot be denied it also cannot be claimed by bodies that are unrelated to this genealogy. The same goes for royalty. With respect to the enslaved condition, Patterson is succinct on this question of agency and bondage: Voluntary servitude, however, is not slavery. 183 The claim advanced here is that it is a form of hyper natal relation that causes the enslaved condition to persist across generations. Patterson approaches this question of biology and slavery but does not seem to allow for it to represent at least one way in which the concept of natal alienation is in need of clarification. With respect to biology he posits: Enslavement by birth was, naturally, the consequence of earlier forms of enslavement, but in all societies where the institutions acquired more than marginal significance and persisted for more that a couple of generations, birth became the single most important source of slaves. Of the great majority of slaveholding societies the stronger claim may be made that birth during most periods was the source of most slaves. 184

199 190 This does not, at least in my reading, meet the requirement established by Patterson for natal alienation, slavery and consequently social death. This does not mean that I mean to discard it as an essential element of the enslaved or more generally, Abject condition. On the contrary, I am proposing that the Abject body faces a profound form of natal alienation but it is not from the genealogy that created the enslaved or Abject condition in the first place but from the paternal embrace of the state as a possible participant in the establishment of Civil time. Patterson gives support to this proposal in his separating social death into two ways in which it was represented socially. 185 In the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside-the domestic enemy, [h]e did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture In sharp contrast with the intrusive conception of death was the extrusive representation. Here the dominant image of the slave was that of an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior. 186 This insight by Patterson allows us to return to Rousseau and further contextualize our understanding of Abject time and its incompatibility with Civil Society/Time as well as presenting the possibility of refracting a reading of Agamben and his reading of the exception. The question of the enemy came up in The Social Contract where Rousseau asserts that transgression of the law is an attempt to undermine the very constitution of the state itself and therefore the criminal is treated as an enemy and subject to death. [S]uch an enemy is not a fictitious person, but a man, and therefore the right to war makes it legitimate to kill him. 187 Here we witness death as a tool to establish the law as well as its maintenance. Patterson s social death as a by-product of the domination of slavery is meant to be understood, along with expulsion, the curse, alternative modes of coercion (Korah swallowed by the Earth) and simple corporeal death, as modes of law establishing or

200 191 maintaining violence in the mode of Benjamin s Critique of Violence. What I have sought to accomplish is to understand these varied modes of Abjection as discernible through the deleterious effect this violence has on the internal time signature of the subject in question. Agamben brings us to this conversation in his text, State of Exception where he lays out the terms of dealing with the enemy of the state in Roman law. The expansionist ambition of imperial Rome continually established circumstances in which enemies, formerly external to the state find themselves newly resident within the borders of their antagonists. The Romans, upon learning of a situation that endangered the state would issue a senates consultum untimatum (final decree of the Senate) which allowed the state to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the social order. At the base of this senate's consultum was a declaration of tumultus (that is, an emergency situation in Rome resulting from a foreign war, insurrection or civil war), which usually led to the proclamation of iustitium, literally standstill or suspension of law. 188 What interests us here is the enslaved actor as a specific type of enemy whose ubiquity threatened the existence of the state whose viability, they at the same time, supported with their labors. This phenomenon is best exemplified by the designation of a Roman citizen as hostis indicatio. In exceptional situations where a Roman citizen threatened the security of the Republic by conspiracy or treason he could be declared hostis, public enemy by the Senate. 189 This is a state distinctly different from that of external enemies who were protected by the ius gentium [laws of people]. 190 The internal enemy, in our case the enslaved actor, was radically deprived of any legal status and could therefore be stripped of his belongings and put to death at any moment. What auctoritas suspends here is not simply judicial order, but the ius civi, the very status of Roman citizen. 191

201 192 The enslaved actor is subject to a permanent state of auctoritas, a perpetual state of exception in the firmament of the social order. The hostis indicatus is a legal description of the natal alienation and dishonor we described above from Patterson. The legal formalism respecting the presence of individuals who, at their base, represent a threat to the state, is made concrete by the property relationship; the substance within the form of the hostis indicatus. From this perspective we have identified the two figures that are situated at a remove, demarked in important ways by types of death, from the Elemental and Human. I have proposed that much of this is predicated on established modalities of time that are a necessary and irreducible component of subjectivity that find themselves recognized and in that process adopted, respected, disavowed or misrecognized. This requires that we take up the question of the aesthetic quality of the bodies in question. 10: The Aesthetic Corpus: This project, in many ways, both from a perspective of narrative and logic, begins with thinking surrounding the aesthetic as it relates to what I have labeled as the Exalted and the Abject. Recall that employing Burke, I have asked that we situate at opposite ends of a spectrum of sovereignty the king and the Negro. The challenge becomes orienting this binary within the intellectual genealogy that we are excavating that takes up biblical or mythological notions of the sublime. Clearly, as we have noted, Ham, as the patriarch of a genealogy of subaltern subjects, exists independently of the specific question of race or more generally the aesthetic that seems to preoccupy the thinking of Burke as he meditates on the beautiful and the sublime. The next logical and required movement of the project in order to maintain consistency of analysis is to examine the three modes of subjectivity that have been developed with respect to the abstract subject followed by temporality and to focus the

202 193 same attention on the aesthetic. To ask the question, for this paradigm, what does the Elemental Corpus look like and how might the extreme figures of the Abject and Exalted be recognized? To briefly review what we have accomplished to this point, we know what we mean by the Elemental or bare Human as an idealized form that exists in a liminal space that ranges from the radical coterminous existence of space and time to the separation of the two at the point of the Fall. In spite of Michelangelo s effort to give form to these ideas the point of the examination of his masterpiece was to work back to the discursive foundation of that aesthetic; not to take his aesthetic as the point of departure for our understanding of the mythology that is represented. The next step was to examine how the idealized bodies represented where invested with elements of individual and collective temporality. What I wish to accomplish now is to build upon the internalized notion of time to establish the externally recognizable shell of the subject that I have labeled the Aesthetic Corpus. I will cover the Elemental, Abject and Exalted Aesthetic Corpus that will be situated as the political space of the body that becomes available for inclusion in political projects as well as the vehicle for the alteration of the subject. This corpus is composed of the two aspects of ideal being (body and time) that takes on the third of corporeal existence. To employ Kantorowicz s canonical formation as a point of departure, these subjects have three bodies: idealized, temporal and corporeal. 11: Point of Order: The Look We have been looking but have failed to define what that means in the context of this effort. Much has been written about what it means to gaze upon an object and decidedly less about what it means for the experience of the looked upon subject and what that subject feels upon adopting the awareness of the looking upon of the looked upon self. Recall that in the earliest moments of this project while thinking with Burke it was made

203 194 explicit that the observing child was only one of the subject positions that is important here. We are concerned principally with what the subject, regardless of position, sees first and foremost when it looks upon itself. This is of vital importance because following the logical trajectory that has been proposed here, the subject has a series of related components of being that stack one upon the other to deliver an image, a way of perceiving and marking it, a decision of its relationship to the idealized self and then its relation or non-relation to a collective and finally the beauty or sublimity of the figure that is observed. This is a robust tool for considering the looking that I am referencing here because the vision that the subject has about itself is implicated and, perhaps in many ways defined by the perception of this subject by actors that exist at a distance from it. I am advancing the proposition that perhaps Du Bois essential argument regarding the true self-consciousness of the subject is applicable here in that perhaps what all subjects seem to know about themselves at some level is by taking the measure of the observation of that self by some other. The essential point seems to be what that second hand observation says about the relation of the observed to the collective question of normative being. 12: The Elemental Corpus: Earlier in this project I proposed that it is possible for the Elemental subject to exist alone. I do not intend to abandon that position but to offer a further context for dealing with the question of the Elemental Corpus and its gaze upon itself. There have to be at least two types of what I will call Observational Events for the Elemental Being. The first of these is the ontological first look of the Elemental subject upon its ontological desire that marks the first awareness of the existence of the vitality of internal time. This is the gaze of the self upon the self that has no external influence and is purely self-referential and does

204 195 not require an external tool for observation. This is the moment when the eyeball can look upon itself without mediation. This is observation of the possibility of observation itself. The second type of Observational Even that follows logically and sequentially the first form is the observation of the self that has achieved awareness of its internal time signature and the relationship of that signature to collective or civil time. To the extent that this second look achieves awareness that the internal time signature, retains its individual character, and is accepted as a constituent part of civil time, the subject sees itself as Elemental and eligible to be a Citizen and necessarily Human. 13: The Exalted Aesthetic Corpus: It is important to remain committed to the logical chain of Hegel s mechanical causality in building the extreme versions of the subject, Exalted and Abject. The stuff from which these actors are constructed is Elemental being in its manifold representation that we have covered here and in dealing with the aesthetic nature of corporeal being we are tasked with keeping account of foundational aspects of the nature of the extreme subjects. The argument here posits that it is possible for an Elemental being to progress through the phases of observational events and conclude that in spite of being a member of an established collective, it is that subject s individual time signature that is worthy of at least two radical relations to collective and individual being. First the figure believes that its time signature is recognizable by the collective but not as a constituent part but superior in some discernable fashion. Revisiting the notion of the lawgiver in Rousseau and repurposed here through the lens of time, we have a figure who views itself as above the status of the common collective time signature and establishing some form of boundary between itself and other forms of being.

205 196 Second, this figure s time signature is recognizable by other members of the collective as admirable in its aberration and perhaps establishes a goal or limit state for a type of being. There is affection of the self for the self as well as affection for this actor by others. In the first instance we can think on Narcissus and in the second Alcibiades. The subject revels in the gazing of the self upon itself in its difference from it Elemental roots and further is able to command the admiration and affection of those of its community. This is difference that establishes a positive notion of its existence. This notion of self-love creates the desire to impose, if not standards of the individual on all others then its judgment about the coherence and acceptability of the being of others with respect to the collective. Here we can return to Burke and think carefully on what he proposes occurs when the sublime figure, in this instance, the Exalted is witnessed by the Elemental Observer and further, how this alters the being of the observed subject. Recall first what Burke proposes as the experience of the sublime: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. 192 This requires that we address the question of whether the sublime figure, upon gazing upon itself, is astonished. If so, what are the results and if not why isn t it the case? It seems clear that the first possibility is not the case, at least not for the Exalted subject. Astonishment requires an element of surprise that would not seem to be a constituent element of notions of extreme auto-affection. This figure cannot be astonished by its

206 197 sublimity because as it progresses through the observational events, its hyper-normative relationship to the collectivity is ever more apparent. This self-referential notion of superiority allows for the existence of the Exalted figure both for itself as well as for the other subjects. Without this, we arrive at the logic that proved the undoing of Korah: We are all holy. The Exalted figure cannot buy into this logic without collapsing into Elemental being. As a practical matter, we are now tasked with identifying what comprises the barrier that exists between the Elemental and the Exalted; and effort that is made increasingly more difficult in that the intention here is to remain committed to positioning the body as a political space. This is taken up by Merleau-Ponty when he proposes, with respect to his meticulous examination of the body, that: [t]he contour of my body is a border that ordinary spatial relations do not cross. 193 I am adopting here the important concept, employed by Merleau-Ponty, of Body Schema that he expands beyond its understood utility. Thus we are making our way toward a second definition of the body schema: it will no longer be the mere result of associations established in the course of experience, but rather the global awareness of my posture in the inter-sensory world, a form in Gestalt psychology s sense of the word Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and it can develop its parts rather than laying them out side by side because it is the darkness of the theater required for the clarity of the performance, the foundation of sleep or the vague reserve of power against which the gesture and the goal stand out, and the zone of non-being in front of which precise beings, figures, and points can appear. If my body can ultimately be a form, and if there can be, in front of it, privileged figures against indifferent backgrounds, this is insofar as my body is polarized by its tasks, insofar as it exists toward them, insofar as it coils up upon itself in order to reach its goal, and the body schema is, in the end, a manner of expressing that my body is in and toward the world. With regard to spatiality, which is our present concern, one s own

207 198 body is the always implied third term of the figurebackground structure, and each figure appears perspectivally against the double horizon of external space and bodily space. We must, then, reject as abstract an analysis of the bodily space that considers only figures and points, since figures and points can neither be conceived nor exist at all without horizons. 194 This passage is of vital importance for this project in that it allows me to be reminded of the presence of the homo liminalis. It is in the transition and movement of the subject relative to the idea, time, and corpus of itself that we are able to locate the instantaneous nature of its appearance as it approaches itself and lingers in the zone of nonbeing. Recall the schematic that provided the final point of departure for describing this phenomenon in a multi-dimensional fashion:

208 199 The vital space or in this language, time that concerns this project is that marked by the grey hatched area that represents the zone of liminal being that is inclusive of the barriers between modes of being as well as elements of both the old and new subject. As I am attempting to carefully unpack the essential elements of transitional being between, in this case, the specific figure of the Elemental being to the Exalted; there is a way in which it can be defended that it is only the existence of the possibility of transformation that the points of departure and arrival can be established at all. Adopting here the discussion above that parsed the disparate viewpoint with respect to causation articulated by Patterson on the one hand and Ricoeur on the other, I am proposing a third way that accommodates both of their accounts by proposing that it is the movement between, in the case of Ricoeur, the voluntary and the involuntary that establishes their existence. Moving closer to this thinking, it then is possible to imagine that it is perhaps more fundamentally true that it is not even necessarily the existence of the possibility of transition between modes of being that allows for the existence of the other but the barrier or threshold. What is beyond it may be anyone s guess but it is the existence of a point of separation that is the sine qua non of alternative states of being. This, I would nominate as the double horizon of external space and bodily space that I have taken note of in the passage from Merleau-Ponty that is the possibility of establishing the body in the first place and then in order to ascertain the type of body we are concerned with, it is the horizons between these subjects that concern us here. Merleau- Ponty is helpful in shoring up the thinking here in his nuanced understanding of time and space as it relates to the corpus. Insofar as I have a body and insofar as I act in the world through it, space and time are not for me a mere summation of juxtaposed points, and no more are they, for that matter,

209 200 an infinity of relations synthesized by my consciousness in which my body would be implicated. I am not in space and time, nor do I think space and time; rather I am of space and of time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of my existence; however it can never in any case be total. The space and time that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain other points of view. 195 Accepting this way of thinking we can return our attention to what it is that marks the transition between the Elemental and Exalted being by taking stock of the barrier between the two. What is it, I intend to ask, that the Elemental figure begins to note about itself as it reaches the point of separation between itself and the potentiality of altering itself? More specifically, since we have marked a distinction between the temporality of these different modes of being from a perspective of internal, and collective time, I am confronted with the complexity of describing the possibility of overlapping time signatures in the zone between the two states of being. As noted above, Elemental being in question here recognizes several important elements of its internal time in its relation to the collective. First, it has the necessary affection for its internal time. Second, it remains intact and is recognizable by the collective and, third, it believes that its internal time, though recognized by the collective is worthy of a distinct type of being that is observable though not adoptable by the collective. In my mind, the fundamental question becomes, if this account is satisfying in some way, what the difference is between Exalted and Elemental time for this figure since it is the internal time signature of the subject that becomes exalted? This seems to turn on the question of the mode of affection experienced by this subject. The Elemental subject has Love for itself but it does not rise to the level of exaltation above the primacy of collective temporal identity. It is important to note that this argument does not propose that this figure is interested in altering or destroying the existence of collective time. On the contrary, it is imperative that collective time remain

210 201 intact in order to establish a point of differentiation that allows for the existence of the Exalted as an alternative Other. For purposes of addressing this question, it may prove useful to imagine the threshold that begins to form at the outer reaches of Elemental being as it trends toward the Exalted as a type of reflective device, perhaps a mirror that allows us to access this discussion through Lacan. Jacques Lacan s take on Freudian psychoanalysis is particularly salient here and will prove more so when I take up the situation surrounding the Abject Subject. What Lacan allows for is to begin to address the necessity of self-awareness in the psyche of the subject that facilitates situating the actor within the paradigm we have been addressing and makes possible awareness of the barriers that form the superstructure of the modes of subjectivity. Lacan proposes that: [i]t suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image-an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity s term, imago. 196 To translate this theorization into the language of this project generally and specifically as we are dealing with the metamorphosis of the Elemental subject into the Exalted we have to shift the terms of awareness that provide the central discursive framework into awareness of time. From this we can begin to imagine the subject that Lacan is addressing using the mirror stage, or in this case, reflection within the self upon the internal pulse of self-time, as the first step along this path of transformation. The notion of the imago forms a thick concept for this effort. In its Jungian sense of the term, the imago as employed by Lacan: is described as part of an imaginary spatio-temporal complex within which the subject identifies with the image of

211 202 the other. Identification with an imago is thus seen as the beginning of a process of alienation. In subsequent texts, [Lacan] the reference to the imago is replaced by the broader concept of the imaginary 197 This is certainly useful here but what is perhaps of greater moment is the use of the term in biology: the imago is the last stage an insect attains during its metamorphosis, its process of growth and development; it also is called the imaginal stage, the stage in which the insect attains maturity. It follows the final ecdysis of the immature instars. 198 Both of these ways of understanding the imago are important here as we think through the relationship I am charting between internal and collective time and the transformation (metamorphosis) of the subject from Elemental to Exalted. The argument here proceeds as follows. The Elemental figure in this situation has taken stock of its internal time signature and its relationship to the societal order and collective time. The figure in question forms the imago as it is proposed by Lacan in his employment of Jung and forms the mediating psyche between the knowledge of itself (internal time/self-consciousness/desire) and its social environment (civil time). This imago forms an idealized image that most prominently takes stock of the affection that the subject has for its internal time and the relation of that affection to the notion of a social order that absorbs or obviates the collective awareness and marking of individual time signatures. The imago formed by this figure finds this insufficient in that the idealization of itself renders its internal time signature eligible for existence outside of its internal realization but also as recognized by the larger collective. This is the zone that this figure enters that is theorized here to be a simulacrum for the biological process that is also known as the imago. In order for this figure to experience the metamorphosis of its subjectivity from the Elemental to the Exalted it has in its mind this mature state of being of the imagined notion of the primacy and need for collective recognition of its internal time signature. In order to realize this we

212 203 need to return to thinking surrounding the abstract, elemental or Nancy s ontological body that was framed above. What I argued is that the existence of all of these figures is deeply implicated with its ontological/elemental existence in the state of being that lacked historical referent and is only a futurity troubling the relationship of this body to time and space as we understand them. This is essential in providing the pathway that this figure must follow that includes this essential and liminal moment of non-being that allows the infinite possibility of a new formation of the subject that is dependent upon its previous manifestation as a point of departure but has been substantively left behind as the status of the subject in question. All of this depends upon this relationship between the self and the way that it sees itself vis-à-vis an imagined state of being. Again Lacan is useful on this point: The form would, moreover, have to be called the ideal-i -if we wanted to translate it into a familiar register-in the sense that it will also be the root-stock of secondary identifications, this latter term subsuming the libidinal normalization functions. But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will asymptotically approach the subject s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, as his discordance with his own reality. 199 Here Lacan s language allows me to situate it along the final paradigm of this social reality that was proposed at the closing moments of the Presuppositions that leans heavily upon the relation between the hyperbola and the asymptote. (Figure 15) Here the schematic is reproduced again to orient the discussion.

213 204 Returning to the transformation that interests us here we can now address it against the figure above. The x-axis, at this stage is perhaps more properly understood as measuring the relationship that the figure in question has with its affective relationship with its internal time. What we see from the graphic representation is that the Elemental subject in this situation trends toward positive relationship with internal time rather than neutral (0 on the x-axis) or negatively. In doing so, the figure enters what we have marked as Lacan s mirror stage and in reflecting upon itself develops an imago that would find itself altering its presence along the x-axis to that marked by the foci in this diagram at P 2 which marks the appearance of Exalted being along its hyperbola that traces itself asymptotically against positive relation with Law and negative relation with Chance. We here have to take stock of what it means to the metamorphosis of this figure as it strives to become Exalted in order

214 205 to realize the imagined possibility of situating its internal time signature as independently viable and recognizable. We have noted the notion of a positive rather than neutral relationship with the notion of internal time or control of time. Along the trace of the hyperbola that represents the Exalted subject we next encounter potentially positive or negative relationships with the y-axis or the Control of Space. In imagining this multi-dimensional relationship, a figure that has a positive relation with self-time and positive relationship with space approaches the asymptote of the idealized positive relationship with Law. What this marks is a type of absolute predictability of the life prospects of the figure in question that marks an approach to absolute control of time and space: this can be framed as the absolute ruler. More complex in some ways is explaining the notion of the Exalted figure that exists within Quadrant IV of this diagram that features a positive relationship with time but a negative relationship with space that approaches asymptotically the negative measure of Chance. The exemplary figure here, from a perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition, would be the passion and crucifixion of Christ. xiv Recall that I am situating the body as a particular type of political space. As the figure loses control of space or its body it is subject to the whims of chance rather than the predictability of law. Absolute loss of control of space results in corporeal death. It should be noted and marked as something for further exploration that only the absolutely Abject can have a double negative relationship or stated differently, the possibility of Time and Space being negatively related to the life of the figure in question. Returning to the phenomenological experience of this figure we can take these proposals and begin to posit what it is that this figure sees about itself as it conducts the selfxiv I owe this insight to a series of discussions with my graduate school colleague Megan K. McBride, Brown University Department of Religious Studies.

215 206 examination I have laid out that leads to the imagined notion of exaltation that is fulfilled through a process of the metamorphosis of the subject. Again we can return to the discourse on the mirror phase by Lacan in his essay The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. Indeed, for imagos-whose veiled faces we analysts see emerge in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness-the specular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world, if we take into account the mirrored disposition of the imago of one s own body in hallucinations and dreams, whether it involves one s individual features, or even one s infirmities or object projections; or if we take note of the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearance of doubles, in which the psychical realities manifest themselves that are, more over, heterogeneous. 200 Here, in using this tool to examine the phenomenon at hand I want to focus on this question of the veiled faces, penumbra, the imago of one s own body and finally doubles. This exegesis will provide the bridge to the understanding of the Abject. Veiled faces jumps out here because of the importance the veil in its various manifestations holds for the work done here on Du Bois but I believe that Lacan is marshaling the term in a fashion that is related to the essential notions of masking and persona that we will see in detail from Fanon, Deleuze and Arendt. What this seems to propose in my reading is that the imago, in serving as the mediating term and bridge from one perception to the next creates a type of persona or mask in the political sense for the subject. It is this covering through a process of imagination on the part of the Elemental subject that forms, at least as we are bending Lacan to our use here, the methodology for the transformation of the subject through primarily the shifting of the terms of being along the x-axis of the subjects relationship to internal time. Lacan seems to mark the appearance, from a perspective of pathology of figures who have adopted this veil but have not fulfilled the transformation from one status to the next, creating a pathos.

216 207 Next we have this complex formulation of a penumbra of symbolic effectiveness. It is first, in my mind, important to mark the penumbra as a physical manifestation that I will employ in examining the Abject by taking up the umbra but first here to parse what Lacan means by this formulation. Figure 34 The central problem in unpacking this formulation is assigning the identity to the two essential elements for the creation of a penumbra, umbra, and antumbra, which would be the light source and the object that casts the shadow. I would propose that the text accommodates the notion that the light source would seem to be the gaze of the subject and the object, in this formulation, would be the individual time signature of the subject. This would leave the penumbra, etc. as the possible points of focus of observation of the result of the observation by the subject of its internal time signature. For Lacan, this question of the symbolic looms large as the cornerstone of his theory: the subject s relationship with the symbolic is the heart of psychoanalysis. 201 So what we have here is the essential question

217 208 for this effort of the relationship of this subject s regard of its internal time signature, the relationship of that signature to civil time and a re-visitation of the self-analysis of internal time as a relation to the symbiotic relationship of individual and collective temporality. In this formulation by Lacan, I would argue that the subject that he is encountering is providing an insight for the analysis of the result of the subject s observation of his own time signature. The passage leading to the one quoted above states that [t]his gestalt is also replete with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue onto which man projects himself, the phantoms that dominate him, and the automaton with which the world of his own making tends to achieve fruition in an ambiguous relation. 202 Here for Lacan, the object is the projection of the self onto the statue that serves as the idealized self and in whose shadow we witness the visual phenomenon marked here. The argument I am presenting is that the barrier between these subjectivities, Elemental and Exalted provides the reflective device against which the subject can view its internal time signature at some remove. For the Elemental subject whose ambition is exaltation, the imago created is witnessed as the horizon of possibility that attends the veiling of the Elemental identity with that of its desired futurity. Here we have a doubled image. The subject has in its mind the internally normative and affective relationship with its internal time. As it nears the threshold of this alternative mode of being, that initial reflection of the current Elemental status of the subject forces a recalibration of the desire for a type of subjectivity that creates the imago of the Exalted subject. It is the need to resolve this desire with the fact of the reflection that provides the engine for crossing the barrier and rendering the imagined state real for this subject. The Penumbra, in that it is neither reflection nor strictly shadow but the projection of the light of self-consciousness beyond the object of analysis is the path for the metamorphosis of this subject. It is affection not for the self as currently constructed but affection for the self as

218 209 constructed as a future that is directed by artificial self reflection that provides the hyperaffective relationship that alters the mode of being of this subject. Why, we must ask, is this any different than classical notions of narcissism as it is related to the myth of Narcissus? Why, in this state of hyper-affection for the self, does this figure not find itself paralyzed in a never-ending cycle of looking and looking again to reaffirm how much the subject loves itself? In this formulation there are at least two important reasons for this. First, the subject is in love with a potential self and in order to reach it there must be movement toward that goal. Second, unlike Narcissus, this subject is aware of those around him, specifically, as I have proposed; aware of the collective time signature around him and it is the desire for differentiation of the individual time signature from the collectivity that drives this metamorphosis. As a practical matter, the Exalted subject needs to be aware of the Elemental and vice versa: recall, one cannot be Exalted alone, and therefore requires the presence of the other to establish differentiation. 14: The Abject Aesthetic Corpus: What I have proposed with respect to the transformation from Elemental to Exalted subjectivity is that the barrier that operates between the two is substantively the question of the level of affection the subject has for its internal time signature as it relates to the collective. In the opposite direction, Elemental to Abject subjectivity, the task is to unearth the same series of relationships so that I can offer some account of the experience of that metamorphosis to another type of absolute Other. We have already established the inner workings of internal time for the Elemental subject and how that relationship can tend toward establishing itself as accepting of its role in the collective derivation of a civil time: the

219 210 citizen, or leads to a type of dissatisfaction with that erasure of individual identity and the drive for exaltation. Abjection presents another set of difficulties. Recalling the chain of Hegelian mechanical causality and its relationship to the claim advanced here regarding the observational chain of events, we can trace this process with the Elemental subject bound for Abject subjectivity. First it is clear that, as a practical matter, it is unlikely that an actor would become Abject as a product of its own agency. With that in mind, it is first important to note that the process of abjection is involuntary in a way that the process of exaltation is unlikely to be. This requires us to take note of the presence of a third party or force that drives this figure toward abjection, but first to take a run at establishing the inner working of the observational events that inhabit this process. This figure, that begins as Elemental, takes stock of its time signature and in this initial phase in the sequence recognizes it as its own and is likely to have primordial affection for itself. At this point, the figure desires to fulfill itself through participation in a collective and attempts to contribute its time signature to the calculus that derives the collective group signature. This is the initial event of rejection. The argument presented here is that this individual time signature is either unrecognizable by the collectivity or recognized but rejected. These are important in their differentiation that is not significantly different than a sound that occurs at a frequency that is inaudible to human ears or one that is audible but deemed caucophonous. The interest here is in the second. It does not necessarily contribute to the disaffection that we are pursuing here on the part of the subject if it is aware that it is simply not heard as opposed to heard and rejected. In the next step of the observational sequence the subject in question returns to itself and attempts to resolve the rejection of its inner time signature by the collective with the irreducible nature of individual time that causes the self to ask the self a series of questions. What is it about my time

220 211 signature that the collective doesn t like? What is it that is different about me and other individuals who have had their time selected for inclusion in the collective? Is it possible to either alter the terms of the collective or render the individual time signature acceptable to the collective? A series of negative responses of the self to the self after an interrogation of the collective establishes auto-disaffection or a profound hyper dislike of the individual time signature that is the opposite of the hyper-affection the Exalted figure uses to construct its imago and pathway to exaltation. The first problematic that confronts this account is the same that I have put first in the mind of the rejected Elemental time signature: What is it about this time signature that the collective doesn t like? The argument here is that there is noting ontological detestable about any individual time signature qua itself. Establishment of negative notions of the differentiation that is an irreducible component of individual time is posited as a function of the relationship of the Exalted subject to the collective. Much of this turns on the claim presented earlier that it is possible to be Elemental alone but both the Exalted and the Abject depend upon multiple subjectivities. The challenge here is to develop an account of the process of abjection through the relatively abstract notion of collective time that then becomes the foundation of the same process that attends racial, aesthetic, gender, sexual, or ethnic Othering. The internal time of the Exalted subject, just like every other Elemental subject is particular. That particularity becomes the basis for this positive typology of differentiation that constitutes the exaltation of this figure s time signature. In order to deal with the question of how the Exalted subject contributes to the construction of a collective notion of time that dis-includes certain individual temporalities it is necessary to return to Rousseau to form an intellectual genealogy that will include Patterson and Agamben on the question of

221 212 the abject other. It is the Lawgiver that will draw out attention again and the construction of the enemies of the state that we find in the work of Agamben (the homo sacer) and Patterson. Rousseau s text has proven important here particularly as it provides a framework around which I have been able to improvise and translate the General Will into a way of understanding temporality. The goal here is to focus on the importance of laws as a function of sovereignty and their relation to the lawgiver that gives us a framework from which to understand the role that the Exalted and Elemental subjects play in the creation of the Abject subject. In order to accomplish this, close attention will be given to Chapter 12 of Book II of The Social Contract. In this chapter, Classification of Laws, Rousseau illuminates relations that concern us here. First, there is the action of the whole body politic on itself the laws which regulate this relation bear the name of Political Laws, and are also Fundamental Laws The second relation is that of the members to the body politic amongst themselves, or of each with the entire body: their relations among themselves should be as limited, and relations with the entire body as extensive, as possible, in order that each citizen shall be at the same time perfectly independent of all his fellow citizens and excessively dependent on the republic It is from the second relation that Civil Laws are born We may consider a third kind of relation between the person and law, namely that of disobedience and its penalty. It is this which gives rises to the establishment of Criminal Laws, though at bottom these laws are less a specific kind of law than the sanction behind all laws. (my italics- MS) To these three sorts of laws must be added a fourth, the most important of all I refer to morals, customs and, above all, belief: this feature, unknown to our political theorists, is the one on which the success of all the other laws depends 203 This requires translation into the terms that are being employed in this project. Much of that is fairly straightforward: the first of the relations, Political Laws are

222 213 synonymous with the adjudication of Civil Time that includes the multiplicity of internal times by the lawgiver or the Exalted figure. This Civil Time, in my reading, would be related to the second relation described by Rousseau. Here we can ascertain the positive relation forged by individual and collective time signatures under the aegis of Political or Fundamental laws that provide a framework for this interaction. The third relation proposed by Rousseau is where I locate the possibility of Abject subjectivity that is subsumed under the notion of criminality. Recall that the criminal, in the eyes of Rousseau: attacks the society s law, [in so doing]he becomes by his deed a rebel and a traitor to the country: by violating its law, he ceases to be a member of it, indeed he makes war against it such an enemy is not a fictitious person, but a man, and therefore the right of war makes it legitimate to kill him. 204 That is one aspect of this text that has been explored here but what is provocative is the second sentence quoted that relates to this question of criminality. It is this which gives rises to the establishment of Criminal Laws, though at bottom these laws are less a specific kind of law than the sanction behind all laws. What I take this to mean is that, employing the language of Rousseau, at bottom, it is death or the threat of it that looms behind the entire social contract. In thinking on death, as I have in several contexts here, it is important that we draw it close to the question of temporality and return again to considering the barrier between the Elemental subject and the Abject as affective of the temporality of the subject in altering its relationship to itself qua itself as well as to the collective time signature through a relationship with death. It is the notion of mortality on the part of each of this figures that marks the difference between Abject, Elemental and Exalted corporeal being. The Elemental figure lives out its life to its natural end. The Exalted, again thinking of Kantorowicz, outlives corporeal being in several registers. The Abject is understood to be Socially Dead

223 214 (Patterson) or unnaturally kept alive beyond the point it should have died (again Patterson considering slavery as an alternative for death in war) or unnaturally killed (Agamben and the sacer). All of these relations are established by the role of laws, all of which Rousseau implicates as explicitly or implicitly relations of criminality, that establish the terms around which a type of Elemental time becomes Abject. The problem now is to determine what it is, if we are committed to this framework, that the Elemental bound for Abject commits with respect to the structure of civil time and its relation to law, that causes this transformation. With respect to the metamorphosis of the Elemental to the Exalted that momentum is provided by desire. What is it for the transformation of the subject in the opposite direction. Several things here seem important to admit in order to have some chance of establishing this causal relation. First the fact of this transformation being forced or coerced is important to establishing the cause and effect relationship. Understanding this, the question is then necessarily addressed to the structure of a system to inquire why it becomes necessary of desirable to create the Abject subject. It is imperative here to shift the terrain in some sense surrounding the Abject, subject, in its inability to fit into the larger social order, as exhibiting a form of psychopathology. I wish to propose an alternative viewpoint. The fact of the creation of the possibility of abjection by the Exalted is demonstrative of the pathology of that figure and the behavior of the Elemental subject that are observed as abject is a logical set of behaviors to being inserted into a system that is born of a type of madness. Stated differently, it isn t the Abject figure that is insane it is the Exalted that created the terms around which the figure performs as such. So, what is it about the pathology of the Exalted figure that leads to the creation of the structures of Abjection? What is it that is introduced

224 215 into the structures of civil society that causes the purposeful misrecognition of certain actor s individual time signature? 14b: Mechanics of Mis-Recognition: Lacan proposes the following with respect to misrecognition that is important here: Misrecognition is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organisation of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached. Hence it cannot not be conceived without correlative knowledge. If the subject is capable of misrecognising something, he surely must know what this function has operated upon. There must surely be, behind his misrecognition, a kind of knowledge of what there is to misrecognize. 205 So, the fact of the misrecognition of the individual time signature of certain actors by the collective is not at all ignorance of that temporality but a willful desire to establish a systematic structure for its recognition as misrecognized. Prior to addressing the mechanics of the actual process of misrecognition it is necessary to develop an account of the desire on the part of the Exalted subject to do just that. One obvious possibility is the desire to punish. We have seen this in the biblical accounts here but also in the brief discussion on the scientific work being done to develop regimes that affect the inner working of time for a convict. What Rousseau marks as punishment for the transgression of the law is the death of the enemy. What Patterson establishes as a substitute for death is the enslaved condition which he calls Social Death. All of these conditions are dependent upon the exercise of power by the Exalted subject. Unpacking this will require taking a careful look at the substructure of Presupposition #2: The Abject and the Exalted do not interact directly. To accomplish this it is necessary to decenter the classical understanding of Hegelian dialectics generally and the Master/Slave dialectic specifically as direct encounters between these two

225 216 subjects. Hegel has been a constant interlocutor and it is time to engage this complex relationship directly if not dialectically. 14b1: The Master/Human/Slave Dialectic : This is a point of inflection for this project in that this dys-torsion of Hegel is foundational to the construction of the paradigmatic depiction of this social order that I have been employing. Methodologically, this represents a crossroad for my thinking that requires careful exegesis. To establish the discursive point we have to deal with the dialectical relationship as proposed by Hegel and then translate that into the terms of temporality employed here in order to then articulate the (mis)(re)reading of this essential theory. First, as a practical matter, the focus here is the master/slave dialectic of the Phenomenology that takes up the relations of mastery and servitude after the confrontations of the state of nature exposed in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit have been resolved. We are all familiar with the point of departure here. I will quote from Terry Pinkard s translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit 206 throughout this text. First it is important to establish the broad structure of my reading practice for the Phenomenology. As a product of my reading of Hegel it seems difficult to reduce an experience to a specific moment or case of this or that within the system without contextualizing that understanding or claim with the essential complication of the temporality proposed by Hegel and the separation between the tools of his phenomenology and actual phenomenological process or system. Taking the second of these claims first it seems clear to me that the tool of Hegel s Phenomenology is represented by 90 (A: Consciousness) 230 (B: Self-Consciousness). These sections include the familiar journey through Consciousness that includes sequentially; sense-certainty, perception, force and understanding and then transitions to the walk through Self- Consciousness: truth of self-certainty, self-sufficiency and non-self-sufficiency of self-consciousness: mastery

226 217 and servitude and finally freedom of self-consciousness; stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness. This, I argue, allows the subject under consideration to take these tools and then enter the fray of the phenomenological system explicated in , the journey through Reason to Spirit then Religion and finally Absolute Knowledge. This separation is important for several reasons and relates directly to the first of my claims regarding temporality in Hegel. First, if an actor is characterized as a case of one of the stages of the tools of the phenomenology, she is in fact not yet prepared to journey through the levels of the system. The tools of the phenomenology must be assembled because they are used over and over again throughout the system of the phenomenology. A close examination of the table of contents of Hegel s text illustrates this important structural distinction: Preface Introduction A: Consciousness B: Self-Consciousness C: (AA) Reason (BB) Spirit (CC) Religion (DD) Absolute Knowledge Consciousness and Self-Consciousness are structurally represented in the table of contents as different things than Reason, Spirit, Religion and Absolute Knowledge. So, accepting this, when I am attempting here to address in some detail a single moment of the tool of Hegelian Phenomenology it is in aid of establishing the basis for which that aspect of the working apparatus functions within the totality of both the entire functioning machine and then the process of achieving Absolute Spirit. The Master/Slave dialectic is just one such moment but one that assumes profound proportion in this intellectual genealogy for its rhetorical valence in considering matters of bondage and servitude. Further, Alexandre Kojéve s canonical Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, provocatively, centers the Master and Slave dialectic in Hegel s account of self-

227 218 consciousness. 207 This is important in several sense, most prominently for this work in that a native of the formerly enslaved islands of the French West-Indies would immediately find the logic of Kojéve s reading tantalizing. In other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. If the human reality can come into being only as a social reality, society is human-at least in its origin-only on the basis of its implying an element of Mastery and an element of Slavery, of autonomous existences and dependent existences. And that is why to speak of the origins of Self- Consciousness is necessarily to speak of the autonomy and dependence of Self-consciousness of Mastery and Slavery. 208 Kojéve s reading of the dialectic explicitly requires the positive fulfillment of the encounter to be the sine-qua-non of self-consciousness. Kojéve s origins of selfconsciousness is located in the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman and the argument advanced here is that this reading of the text becomes the centerpiece of Fanon s understanding of the dialectic and this project is never far from considering his work. As is apparent from Kojéve s reading of the Phenomenology, we can immediately identify an instance where this project is at odds with canonical readings of Hegel. By proposing that in man s nascent state the human is an Elemental being capable of stable existence rather than always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave, I have made a significant departure from the standard reading of Hegel. This is perhaps the best place to start in examining the text of the Phenomenology that, on this matter runs from For self-consciousness, there is another selfconsciousness: self-consciousness is outside of itself. This has a twofold meaning. First, it has lost itself, for it is to be found as an other essence. Second, it has thereby sublated that other, for it also does not see the other as the essence but rather sees itself in the other. 209 Without delay, I would like to translate this passage into the terms of this project, which establishes self-consciousness, as desire and time. By substituting time here for

228 219 self-consciousness, the passage reads: For individual time, there is another time: time is outside of itself. This has a twofold meaning. First, it has lost itself, for it is to be found as an other essence. Second, it has thereby sublated that other, for it also does not see the other as the essence but rather sees itself in the other. Here I read this relationship that we can label as self-consciousness or time as having two sets of relations, neither of which are necessarily encounters that are adversarial in the sense that Kojéve reads Hegel. The first is the relation of self-time to the self, which is ideally a relationship of affection. The second is the relationship of self-time to the formation of Civil time or perhaps in this language Civil or Collective Self-Consciousness. This is the result of either hyper-affection leading to Exaltation or hyper dis-affection, leading to Abjection, which can be framed within the context of the master/slave dialectic but is not the steady state of conflict that is proposed in Kojéve s reading. It requires first, in this formulation, a form of liberation rather than sublation of individual time from the collective to establish the Exalted subject that can then establish the terms of sublation and subjugation of individual time. From this point, it becomes useful to reconsider elements of 184 where Hegel presents the notion of extreme terms (Extreme selbst and even Extreme zersetzt). This passage is of significant import for this proposed reading to render it in both the English translation by Pinkard and the original German, which leaves open several important potentialities. 184 Was in jenem für uns war, ist hier für die Extreme selbst. Die Mitte ist das Selbstbewußtsein, welches sich in die Extreme zersetzt; und jedes Extrem ist diese Austauschung seiner Bestimmtheit und absoluter Übergang in das entgegengesetzte. 184 What existed for us in that process (Consciousness) exists here for the extreme terms themselves. The middle term is self-consciousness, which disintegrates into the extreme terms, and each extreme term is this exchange of its

229 220 own determinateness and the absolute transition into what is its opposite. 210 I am reading this passage as accommodating the extreme terms in Hegel s parlance as my Abject and Exalted and establishing the middle term that Hegel calls self-consciousness as time and the fundamental, constitutive component of my Elemental subject. What I wish to mark here is the architecture of the argument that Hegel presents that provides support for two essential elements of my fundamental argument: 1) that the Abject and Exalted; extreme elements are the foundation of the middle term, self-consciousness, or desire or here internal time; 2) that there is a temporality to the formation of the extreme terms through this process of disintegration that, in my reading, includes a moment when all three terms exist. This is in many ways a return to many of the more obtuse elements of Hegelian temporality in that these instances are themselves expansive in the relationship of past, present and future whereby the middle term, when it is perceived, is already divided into the extreme terms and likewise the extreme terms are themselves at the same time the middle term. Hegel proposes that this is a relationship that is fundamentally about struggle going on to propose that [t]he relation of both self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that it is through life and death struggle that each proves his worth to himself, and that both prove their worth to each other. 211 As a practical matter, and in separating this struggle between opposing figures from that in the state of nature that is actually a struggle to the death, this life and death encounter leaves the corporeal body alive so we must be describing metaphysical typologies of life and death. In 188 of the Phenomenology is an important moment in establishing Hegel s account of this disintegration into extreme terms. In my reading of this passage, Hegel proposes that the elevation of the self-consciousness into extreme terms is a process of alienation of elements of this middle term or Elemental being.

230 221 They sublate their consciousness, which was posited in this alien essentiality which is natural existence, that is, they elevate themselves and, as extreme terms wanting to exist for themselves, are themselves sublated. The essential moment thereby vanishes from the fluctuating interplay, namely, that of disintegrating into extreme terms of opposed determinatenesses, and the middle term collapses into dead unity (und die Mitte fällt in eine tote Einheit zussammen)which disintegrates into dead extreme terms which are merely existents and not opposed terms. Neither gives back the other to itself nor does it receive itself from the other by way of consciousness. Rather, they only indifferently leave each other free standing like things. 212 It is this thing that Hegel posits as the solution to the obvious fact that all forms of social conflict that require some form of hierarchical ordering do not end in the death of the lessor subject. If that were the case the world would ultimately be reduced to a last man standing who has defeated all comers which is obviously not the case in that it makes social order impossible. 189 is important here. Hegel posits what he calls the first experience (ersten Erfahrung) that I read as accommodating the argument I have presented here that inaugurates the introduction of discernible temporality into the ontological body. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience. It is by way of that experience that a pure selfconsciousness is posited, and a consciousness is posited which exists not purely for itself but for an other, which is to say, is posited as an existing consciousness, that is, consciousness in the shape of thinghood. 213 This moment of separation creates the oppositional subjects that for Hegel are either self-sufficient; for it, its essence is being-for-itself the master or non-self-sufficient; for it, life, that is, being for an other the servant. 214 With respect to the thing that serves as the mediating term here, the master relates to itself thorough its relationship with the thing as a an other consciousness whose essence includes its being synthetically combines with self-

231 222 sufficient being, that is, with thinghood itself. 215 This mediating consciousness, the thing, relates to it differently. The master relates himself to the servant mediately through selfsufficient being, for it is on this point that the servant is held fast.the master likewise relates himself to the thing mediately through the servant. The servant, as self consciousness per se, relates himself negatively to the thing and sublates the thing. However, at the same time the thing is for him self-sufficient, and for that reason he cannot by way of his negating activity be over and done with it all the way up to the point of having eliminated it, that is, the servant merely works on it. 216 It is this notion of being-for-itself on the part of the master and fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, in that fear consciousness is the it that is for itself but is not full being-for-itself 217 that characterizes the servant. The resolution of the roles of these subjects completes the process of ordering the hierarchy that Kojéve finds as imperative in that all human beings are either master or slave. Having walked through the high point of this section of the Phenomenology, it is necessary to translate this interaction into time intact and finally alter it to accommodate the reading that allows for the robust existence of Elemental being as an ongoing middle term. The point of departure for this thinking around this subject from a perspective of temporality can proceed from 189 and [t]he dissolution of that simple unity [which] is the result of the first experience. The first experience, in the understanding and language of this project would be the establishment of a coherent internalized notion of time which is the equivalent of life as we have operationalized it here. The auto-affection of internal time would cause the first dissolution, which, in Hegel s account, disintegrates the simple unity of self-consciousness into the confrontational subjectivities that have to resolve themselves as master or servant. It is this sudden turn to outwardness and the perception of a multiplicity of temporalities of other subjects that I would mark as establishing the point of

232 223 dissolution that Hegel proposes and I have translated as first the creation of the Exalted subject as distinct from Elemental being and the framer of the terms of the creation and maintenance of the Abject subject. There appears to be a fairly straightforward correspondence between the mediation that Hegel proposes is self-consciousness and the way I have described Elemental being here. The tension in tracing this relationship lies in the cause and effect relationship between the creation of the extreme terms in a process that Hegel calls disintegration that finds the substance of self-consciousness absorbed into the being of the extreme terms and then manifest as the palliative mediating phenomenon to destruction of the subject as the thing. As I have mentioned that is at odds with the account advanced here that leaves the Elemental or Hegelian self-consciousness intact in spite of its essential presence as the antecedent of both the Abject and the Exalted or Hegel s master and servant. The challenge here, in holding on to much of Hegel s account, is to develop a satisfactory explanation of why the thing as described by Hegel can be accounted for as either a left reading of the middle term of selfconsciousness or more completely situated as the barrier between the subjects: generally established as death in its various manifestations. Abandoning for the time being the former and focusing on the more, in my mind, promising notion of the latter, this represents the crux of the matter represented by the third purpose of this section, defining the departure from the Hegelian account of the creation of subaltern being. This is bound up in tracing two essential elements of the argument presented here. First, how I will account for the homo liminalis in this process of disintegration into extreme terms and second the plasticity of Hegelian temporality that allows for the recognition and integration or recognition and expulsion of temporality that is the crux of the account I have

233 224 provided of the creation of a temporal collectivity and then the relationship of that amalgam to the exaltation of some temporalities and the abjection of others. With respect to the first, and in some ways independently of the question of perspective that was central to the study of Burke early in this text, is the assertion of the Elemental being as the basic building block of the subjects here that, relying upon another Hegelian concept that I have employed liberally, mechanical causality, cannot simply dissolve without the extreme subjects dissolving as well. How this relates itself to the presence of liminal being as I have operationalized the term here is implicated in the question of transition from one subjectivity to the next that I have imagined as a staged process that is not at odds with the notion of disintegration that Hegel employs. Continuing on this line of reasoning, it will be developed in some detail as this project progresses that in order for the revolutionary subject to alter its subjectivity it must pass through this space of ontological being-ness that, if it were to be imagined as dissolved, would stress the formation of the imagination (or imago?) required for transitive being. The final point on this first important question is that Hegel asserts the necessity of mediation that elides the possibility of extinction of one of the oppositional subjects. Without the mediating term of the thing, conflict would necessarily lead, as noted earlier, to the extinction of all but the final remaining subject. That is not reasonable. What also seems unreasonable, as a matter of the phenomenology of the everyday, is the notion that an actor is continuously involved in conflict with others in order to establish the superior and inferior subject. The Elemental provides both a place of reference to mark what is inferior and superior but also a place of rest for the normalized existence of the average person that is not always in one combative scenario or the other.

234 225 But the real work done here must lie in a more complete account of the barriers and thresholds that exist between subjects whether they be in direct conflict as in Hegel or mediated more robustly as I am proposing. There still is a point of separation between subjects that allows the possibility of differentiation in the first place. Multiple objects cannot occupy the same space without in fact becoming that object and losing its uniquity. This is much about the account of the universal and the particular, which we are all familiar with, in Hegel s account but becomes even more interesting to revisit here against the imperative of collective temporality in a social order and barriers between subjects, with death as the common term. First it is necessary to establish the process of recognition of the self for the self, the auto-affection that establishes internal time. Recall earlier in this document the ontological body or the lifeless human is troubled by its desire to resolve itself through the establishment of life that situates it in a difficult relationship with the notions of past, present and future generally and specifically as it is explicated by Augustine s threefold present. At the point of resolution of this dilemma and the existence of resolvable time the self is able to observe the self and in so doing establish internal temporality that then becomes inclusive in the collectivity of civil time. Elements of set theory can be helpful in establishing what it is that is going on here across these possible instances of recognition or misrecognition. The particular nature of individual temporality is universal in the Hegelian sense in that since it is, for instance (A) (the particular), this assertion means that it is also not (B Z) (the universal) if we admit as axiomatic that the set of all possible individual temporalities is the set {A Z}. In forming the super set of collective temporality this seems to require more than the simple transference of the set of all temporalities {A Z} it requires a process of examining the fact that the individual I, as an individual being is composed of the

235 226 positive identification of the self as composed of temporality (A). I=(A). It is also necessarily made universal in this affirmation of individual identity by the negation I (B Z). When I joins collective time or submits in Rousseau s language, its individual will in favor of the general will, I Member of Collective = {A Z} which is particular and conversely universal in the negation of this relationship I Member of Collective {A Z} which I read as the sublation of the individual as such, since now the collective I is in fact not its own temporality, to the group. This language allows us to explore the process from a perspective of the formation of self-consciousness as the internal process that we have traced here for the most part before turning to examining the possibility of interaction between subjects. The way into this thinking is the complication of recognition and the possibility of misrecognition that I have established as the barrier between the three subjects that concern this project. What, then, is recognition of the self on the part of the self, recognition of the self on the part of the collective, and finally the misrecognition on the part of the self for it s self as a product of misrecognition by the collective. It is bound, we see, in the Individual accepting that by denying the primacy of individual temporality to be replaced by the collective, it, in fact, achieves a different type of subjectivity that elides the terms of absolute freedom that are implicated by the danger of the state of nature and the type of conflict that Hegel has progressed beyond this formative period by placing the thing as a form of mediation between subjects who find themselves beyond the state of nature. It is important here to retrace momentarily to Kojéve. Recall that he gives context to his formulation by situating it in the nascent state. In other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. Here the thinker, in my reading has conflated the master/slave dialectic of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit that is explicitly in

236 227 the state of nature and features this Manichean state of conflict with the dialectic of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is an interaction of beings occupying a societal order. In commenting on the Phenomenology and it is clear that Kojéve has, to the detriment of our understanding of what the structure of Hegel s argument is, missed that the stage that follows this primordial formation does not require binary existence as the sole way of being. At this point I have offered a way in which to understand the collective identity of the self-conscious middle term that Hegel employs as the starting point for types of extreme being. The move now is to resituate Hegel s insertion of the thing as the mediator between the three basic subjective modalities described here. Hegel s thing is that which is placed by the master, in my formulation the Exalted, between itself and the trial by death with the oppositional figure, the soon to become servant. One important note: the subjects here are not master or servant until the trial is over. The dialectic is defining not reifying in my reading. This requires that there be a transitive mode of existence that is not yet defined as either of the extreme terms. Recall that I have employed Hegel s assertion of death as the term here as a meta-relationship in that the corporeal body requires life to provide a platform for this addition of extreme subjectivities. What is required here is working through the first instance that concerns us; the transition from Elemental to Exalted by repurposing Hegel s thing as the barrier between the two. First, Hegel accomplishes much of this for me by asserting that the thing serves as a substitute for death in battle while still maintaining the characteristics of the life staking enterprise that is formative of self-consciousness. The foundation of this thinking is in 187 of the Phenomenology. The relationship of both self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that it is through a life and death

237 228 struggle that each proves his worth to himself, and that both prove their worth to each other. 218 The first step in the sequence that concerns us here is how the Elemental figure confronts the boundary of collective identity by crossing the threshold to Exalted subjectivity. How, the question must be for this (mis)(re)reading of Hegel, does this represent a type of death that can be situated as the thing? The argument requires that we deal with the collective temporality of the I that has substantively, as we saw above, sublated the particularity of individual timeframes for a collectivized particularity that negates the existence of individual temporality. The hyper-affection of this I causes it to desire a return to the primacy of its individual temporality while the context of the collective remains to avoid the paralysis of narcissism. The notation of that situation: I Member of Collective {A Z} and I Member of Collective {A Z} requires that it be altered to I Exalted =(A) and I Exalted I Member of Collective. This return to individual primacy on the part of the Exalted subject includes the recognition that attends the negation of its former membership in the collective. What does this have to do with death or, more carefully, how does this serve as a substitute for death that renders possible the metamorphosis of the subject? I have gestured at the utility of genealogy as a way to understand both sovereignty and its relation to temporality. When the figure I Member of Collective severs its relationship with the collective time of the hybrid civil collective it is alienated from that universal temporality creating the necessity of an alternative particularity. Failure to do so would result in the wholesale destruction of the subject in that it would have a relationship to neither universal nor particular temporality. A subject of this sort would be, for purposes of our understanding of life as the establishment of a coherent internal relationship with the question of time, dead or lifeless. In pursuit of this alteration in subjectivity, the actor has

238 229 indeed confronted the barrier that is death that I have deployed as Hegel s thing. What this makes clear is an argument for the continued existence of the Elemental figure at least in relation to the dialectical relation to universal, non-particular being that would be required in this thinking as a counterpoint to the existence of independent, self-supporting individual time. What then of the necessity of the Abject? For Hegel this is perhaps not as straightforward a matter as relying upon the negation of the master as the existence of the servant. Why, the question becomes must the figures who are not masters per se necessarily be servants? I have argued that this is not the case in that the negation of the master/exalted requires the middle term of self-consciousness for Hegel or the Elemental here. The answer here relies upon the Hegelian notion of the creation of extreme terms but requires that I maintain the middle, and in this case originary subject as a point of relation and mediation. However, this is a problem for Hegel s system as a whole and requires that we read across texts and employ the Philosophy of Right and its formation of the state and its actors as such to locate the possibility of a satisfactory account of the creation of the Abject figure that does not rely upon the notion of negation. There are several reasons in my thinking why we have to put significant pressure on this point. The first of these relates to the exceptional nature of the notion of the radical other as either Exalted or Abject. As a practical matter, both of this figures are outside of the norm but the subaltern figure is outside in a different way. Frank Ruda s text, Hegel s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel s Philosophy of Right is particularly useful in finding the relationship of Hegel s two texts to this question. Ruda s central argument is that solving the problem of poverty, that is arguably left unresolved by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right provides the transition from

239 230 Hegel to Marx by marking that there is a relationship between poverty as such and what Hegel calls the rabble that are adopted by Marx as the proletariat. The formula of the transition from Hegel to Marx-from the rabble to the proletariat-is therefore a formula that no longer hinges upon an invariant givenness of the political which philosophy only has to interpret in different ways, but a formula that understands politics, that breaks into philosophy under the name of rabble as an irritation and a disturbance that introduces the necessity of a transformation of philosophy, as an essentially subjective event in which issues of justice, equality and freedom are addressed. But to do justice to this transformation of philosophy one needs a systematic understanding of Hegel s failure that Hegel himself marks under the name of the rabble. 219 Ruda argues, that in not presenting a satisfactory account of either poverty, or, failing that, a solution to its presence within a society, Hegel situates the figure of the rabble as an outsider of the collective that is subject to the caprice of chance in ways that provide textual support for the figure of the Abject as an abstract creation of society that I have been groping to establish. The argument that I am making here is that by employing the multidimensional argumentation I have presented that alters the terms of the dialectical relationship between master and servant we are able to derive a continuum of relatedness between the Exalted and the Elemental figures based upon the common genealogical relationship of individual time signatures to a collective that renders the space of peaceful coexistence between the two figures as a product of temporal consanguinity. In creating the Abject, we need to resolve the alienation of genealogy that we interrogated earlier in this text that is so important to Patterson s account of Social Death. Similar to this rabble, I argue, society generates a figure that is outside of itself and in that non-relationship finds itself related through the discourse of domination that is a product of the separation and establishment of the Exalted figure as a hyper-self-affective actor that protects that status through overt and covert methodologies of coercive force; recall Rousseau. These rabble,

240 231 become unrelated to the collective in profound ways that Ruda extracts from his careful reading of the Philosophy of Right. the poor appears after the dissolution of the family as an autonomous person facing other persons but, and this is essential, does not find a representation in an estate that structures civil society. What is an estate? An estate constitutes itself through the mediation of collective labor and need therefore emerges for a logical product of the economical movement and its differentiation. The estate appears besides the family as the second basis of the state The estate to which an individual belongs is contingent but that he belongs to one is necessary. When we say that a human being must be somebody [etwas], we mean that he should belong to a specific estate (HOPR 197) Now, what does it mean not to belong to an estate? Hegel answers: A person with no estate is a mere private person and does not enjoy actual universality. (Ibid.) Being without an estate means to fall out of the representative frame of the state. Against this background, the poor or impoverished masses in Hegel s Philosophy of Right can easily be identified with what Jacques Rancière calls the parts-sanspart, the part without a part. 220 Here we have a point of departure that can be readily translated into the language of this project. Hegel s estate, here is the collective formation of individual temporalities. To be without an estate is to have an individual time signature excluded from the collective that renders it only particular and completely alien: Abject. From this point we can meet the challenge to develop an account of the relationship of the Exalted and Elemental to the production of the Abject, which I label as a type of contrived misrecognition or more clearly alienation. Returning to the nomenclature from above we have the subject I Individual 2 that has internal time signature C so I Individual 2 =C. The universe of possible time signatures includes C so it is recognized therefore C {A Z}. I Individual 2 =(C) and I Individual2 {A,B,D Z}. For this reasons that I have employed Ruda s reading of Hegel s Philosophy of Right to explicate, when

241 232 I Exalted I Member of Collective it eliminates certain time signatures from inclusion in the collective; in this instance C in order to establish an extreme term that is unrelated genealogically and therefore temporally to the collective. C I Member of Collective. This relates C to I Exalted in that they are both not members of the collective for very different reasons. I Abject I Member of Collective and therefore logically in this relationship of exclusion, I Abject = I Exalted except that there is a relationship of freedom to the decision on the part of the Exalted subject to become so when the alteration of the subject to abjection is coercive and in fact a loss of freedom. However, I have still not answered the question of why this process of abjection occurs. The answer seems to be related to the perception of the character of time on the part of the Elemental being after the separation that creates the Exalted figure. The metamorphosis of the Elemental to the Exalted first creates the possibility of separation. This awareness, in my mind, creates the terms of misrecognition on the part of Elemental being on how the separation that creates the Exalted is related to the collective construction of Civil or collective temporality. What I am proposing is that the separation of a time signature from the collective is not a subtraction nor could it be because time, as such is not a material condition that can be added to or subtracted from. The problem or mistake on the part of the Elemental figure is to understand time as a material condition that experiences a deficit that must be satisfied or necessitates a compensatory balancing to the hole created. This is the desire on the part of the Elemental figure that is a product of a misunderstanding of the ontological and thereby irreducible notion of time as material that creates the Abject figure as a source of resolving this loss. Elemental being creates the material condition of abjection based upon a misunderstanding that, in the separation of a subject from the collectivity of time nothing is

242 233 actually lost. This misunderstanding of ontology allows the existence of the three figures that concern this project and always have. What we find is that from a perspective of perception in the register of the material, the Elemental being can see both the Exalted and the Abject. The Abject and Exalted, as material beings, however, cannot witness one another. On the level of the ontological and actual character of time this situation is altered. The Elemental subject, mired in this error, cannot see the Exalted or Abject but these two extreme figures stare into the abyss of alienation from collective ontological time at one another as the radically other and the same. So in conclusion for this section, what I am proposing is that the abstract Abject subject can be situated within the Hegelian dialectical relationship by altering the notion of direct confrontation and situating the mediating term of the Elemental being as buttress between the thing I have represented here as coextensive with the barriers between the subjects, most commonly death. Having established an abstract way of perceiving the three figures that concern us here I can now take up specific instances of the phenomenon that most concerns this project, the Abject that then takes on the material conditions of perception that make how the subject appears relevant.

243 234 THIRD DIVISION Pursuance: Othello the Negro or The Purloined Body This is why a thought about the body should really ponder the body, be a feeling of its weight, and, in that, a touching, playing-displayed in accord with areality. Corpus Jean-Luc Nancy The purpose of working so painstakingly through the series of abstractions that have led to this point is to avoid a pitfall that seems to inhabit much of the study of the radically subaltern Other : that being the penchant to explicitly or implicitly situate one aggrieved subject or the next as exemplar of the case. The concern for this project is to deal with the wages of blackness in modernity by being able to situate it against the structure that I have attempted to assemble that establishes the mechanism for recognition of regimes of domination and oppression in their particularity without resorting to hierarchical statements that privilege one oppression over the other. There are certainly points of continuity for the usual list of oppressed peoples but also important points of diversion. What I intend to accomplish here is to establish the Black Body as a type of Abject subject that we have developed in the abstract and to note at the outset that there is something particular about the spectacle of blackness that will prove to be a feature that separates it from the abstract case. The explicit argument here is that Blackness is not an irreducible type of abjection and the black body, as such, deserves consideration in its particularity. Following Nancy and his meditation on the body in Corpus, he proposes that: The body is weight. Laws of gravity involve bodies in space. But first and foremost, the body itself weighs: it is sunk into itself, according to a specific law of gravity that has pulled the body so far down that it can t be distinguished from its own weight. From its prison-wall thickness, say, or its earthy mass piled up in a tomb, or its clingy burden of cast-off clothing, or finally, its own weight of water and bone-but always, first

244 235 and foremost, sinking under the weight of its fall, dropping out of some ether, a black horse, a bad horse. 221 It is this bad horse, the black horse that concerns us here. The point is to understand that bodies, as I have demonstrated, exist against a context that I have developed as the paradigm of the modern western state and are therefore, in many, ways animated by the politics of that perception. The body as a subject is constructed and made legible through its existence in a particular political space. What I wish to establish at the outset of this thinking is that the body that concerns us, in its abjection, is not just a product of its existence in a certain political space but is itself a political space with its own borders, temporality and conflicts both internal and external. If we allow ourselves to imagine the Black Body as a space of political construction that itself is legible as a political space and further that political space and borders are themselves coercive, the hint of the language of revolutionary change that populates the recovery of Black Identity can(must?) be read as analogous to the radical reconstruction of a political space: both the space of external context (the state) and the result of that context: the Black Body. This presents several dilemma. If the negative content of a political space is evacuated and refilled with an alternative reality that does not alter the coercive geographic boundaries of the state, what are the prospects for radical change? Further, understanding that the Black body exists as a politically constructed space of absolute Othering, as it evacuates itself, where does the empty frame come to rest in a world system that remains committed to a continuation of this narrative of black subalternity? Also, if there is an attempt to alter both the political space of the body and the contextual environment in which it exists, which comes first to the cauldron of destruction? In addressing this problem, this section of this project will work its way through a close reading of a literary genealogy that traces the problem of blackness as it will be established here that begins with Othello, and ends with Ellison s Invisible Man

245 236 with Melville s Benito Cereno providing the bridge between the two. But first I have to establish how this project understands blackness in relation to the language offered here that provides a space of abjection that the paradigmatic structure of sovereignty presented here requires to be filled in order to remain coherent. 2: Umbra: The Reducible I : The challenge here that provides the critical bridge to the next movement of this project is to propose a paradigmatic understanding of the technology of recognition that facilitated the coterminous relation between the barrier we have located between the Elemental and, in this instance, the Abject: Death and the critical question of blackness. Burke is one obvious source of this understanding but it is ahistorical to imagine that it was in the 18 th century that notions regarding the abject nature of blackness became normative in the western mind. Burke is obviously attempting to describe a phenomenon that he has witnessed so it is perhaps useful to propose a basis for this critical component of any examination of the black body. Plato s Phaedrus serves as the locus classicus of this formation and the source for Nancy s invocation of the black horse. Remember how we divided each soul into three at the beginning of our story-two parts in the form of horses and the third that of a charioteer? Let us continue with that. One of the horses, we said is good, the other not; but we did not go into the details of the goodness of the good horse or the badness of the bad. Let us do that now. The horse that is on the right, nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty and selfcontrol; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency he is shaggy around the ears-deaf as a post-and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined. (The Phaedrus 253d-e my italics)

246 237 Here, at one of the earliest moments of the Western philosophical tradition, the colors black and white are situated as coterminous with bad and good. In parsing this rich passage and without entering into the two-thousand year debate surrounding The Phaedrus, it is useful to extract the detail offered by Plato with respect to the relationship of the white and black horse to the notion of law on one hand and disorder on the other. The white horse is manifestly able to comply with the structure of societal order and resists the necessity of overt, explicit coercive force beyond its knowledge of the existence of a set of laws. The black skinned horse does not necessarily even respond to explicit coercive force, barely yield[ing] to horsewhip and goad combined. The other vital question is that of the aesthetic appearance of the horses: the white and black horses are structurally different independent of their color. The white horse is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose and the black horse is a crooked jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose. What I would like to do here is to separate, briefly, the question of color from the explicit reference to physical and metaphysical conformity or deformity with the notion of the idea of the horse as an abstract, irreducible subject. This allows us to think Nancy s ontological body or, in the language of this project, the Elemental, prior to the question of the relationship of color employed here that becomes either an outward manifestation of the relationship the subject has to the ideal or a type of conformity or deformity itself. Stated differently, is the horse white because he is good or is the horse bad because he is black? Likewise, is the structural beauty or ugliness of the horse a cause or effect of its relationship to the law? This draws us into the essential nature of the question of Elemental Being and the level of abstraction that occupied the previous sections. The argument here is that explicit in the discourse of abjection or exaltation is the need to relate the extreme figures to the notion of the idea surrounding the being of the subject in

247 238 question. What is the ontological horse like? This is directly related to the conversation surrounding the panel attached to the Pioneer space probe that represents a particular mindset regarding what it means to be Human. The implication here is how might the question of normativity become implicated in the creation and maintenance of extreme subjects? Or, returning to Burke, how do we relate the question of beauty and sublimity to the questions of the extreme subjects contemplated here? Can a figure be so intensely beautiful that in exaltation of that beauty the figure is sublime and alternatively can a figure be at such a distance from the understanding of normativity and elementality that it becomes hideous and also sublime? A second order question that reorients the point of observation from the perspective of the other to the subject is whether the internal gaze of the subject upon itself can be causal of exaltation or abjection and what of that is related to the external gaze of the other? Melville, even before we turn to Benito Cereno, may prove useful here. But it is the whiteness of the whale, Melville writes, that above all things appalled me. 222 The passage quoted here, from the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale of Moby-Dick, presents in clear terms, that which appalls Ahab about the animal. It is not, after all, that he is a whale. They are whalers and have a symbiotic relationship with the creatures, on whose existence their enterprise depends. It is the fact that the whale is white and that whiteness has a broad and in many ways contradictory effect. The question that seems to confront the reader presents a confusion of cause and effect and mirrors that raised here: is the whale white because he is evil or is he evil because he is white? Was Moby Dick at some point or another a normally hued sperm whale whose internal malevolence bleached his skin or was he born white, which caused his psyche to turn to evil?

248 239 This relates to the imperative of keeping track of the Elemental or Ontological Body that, through a process of metamorphosis, becomes Abject or Exalted. It is not the body itself that is ontologically abject or exalted. If that were the case, what hope would a subject so embodied have of escaping that condition or for that matter of what would the moment of transition consist since an object cannot be moved to where it already rests. Abjection, as I am employing it here, relates to both Melville s disposition toward the color white and the color before us here, black. Melville, in my reading is decentering the Phaedrus, and calling attention to a notion of non-conformity that is irreducible and unattached to color in the way Ahab perceives the whiteness of the whale that is coterminous with the way Plato understands the blackness of the horse. It is necessary here to separate the physical presence of the black body and its perception as a negative marker: blackness. I am concerned here with how blackness attaches itself to the body of the human that is phenotypically black. Stated differently, I am endeavoring to move the point of causation away from the color of the horse that occupies the attention of Plato, Nancy and the discourse of race in its modern manifestation to the question of compliance with the law as an objective set of criterion. Stepping back another level. If it is true, as Plato proposes that the black horse is a crooked jumble of limbs, the question is whether, as the law is constructed, the physical make up of the horse renders it physically capable of compliance or performance that meets the standards set by the law. More tellingly, it is important to mark that the horse s skin color, is in fact situated by Plato as just one in the series of physical deformities that he lists: The other horse is a crooked jumble of limbs with a short bullneck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes. So we have come full circle and perhaps found the point of access to the questions that seem to wander around in a jumbled mass in every possible direction: Is black skin a causal element in the inability to conform to

249 240 the laws as established by society? Or, has society established a set of laws that render it impossible for black skin to be in conformity with the laws and if so, why and how? Addressing this question from the perspective of the umbra and the related phenomenon, particularly its relationship to the penumbra which I have situated as implicated in our understanding of Lacan s mirror phase and its employment here in addressing the metamorphosis of the subject from Elemental to Exalted is required. Recall that in the previous chapter, I nominated the roles in the formation of the penumbra in this fashion: the light source would seem to be the gaze of the subject and the object, in this formulation, would be the individual time signature of the subject. This would leave the penumbra, etc. as the possible points of focus of observation of the result of the observation of the subject of its internal time signature. Recall also that Lacan calls this the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness, accepting this what I am reaching for here is the umbra of symbolic effectiveness. Revisiting the diagram from the previous chapter is useful. (Figure 34) The black shadow of the umbra, in its constitution obliterates at the same time the light source and the awareness of the presence of the object that produced it. The umbra,

250 241 therefore, as a type of symbolic representation of effectiveness is alienated from the elements of its production, as such, this is synonymous with the practice of mis-recognition that assembles the possibility of the Abject. But it is the blackness of the umbra that draws the attention of this project. Holding in abeyance for the time being the cause and effect relationship that I have illuminated that turns on an understanding of the relationship of the phenotypically black body has to the question of it being a manifestation of the fact of evil or the causal mechanism of evil itself, we can work backward, in some sense, from the closing moments of Lacan s essay on the mirror phase, represented by the penumbra and employ Du Bois and his Tripartite construction to address the question of what the self sees/knows about the self. Lacan s mirror, to be clear, is related to Du Bois second-sight in a fairly complex manner that must be accounted for in order to develop a satisfactory understanding of the argument I have presented that it (second-sight), represents the sine qua non of Du Bois paradigm. This is an effect of what I proposed at the conclusion of the last chapter as the mistake that the Elemental subject makes in reacting to the abdication of the Exalted figure from the collective formation of Civil Time as a material event that creates a deficit that is then closed by the material formation of the Abject subject. The question that Du Bois, in my reading answers through his second-sight is why the Abject subject doesn t make the same mistake as the Elemental and accept the material necessity of abjection to fulfill the conservation of momentum that would attend an understanding of time as a property that can be added to or subtracted from. Second-sight, I will argue is the ability of the Abject subject, in this case, Du Bois American Negro, to observe the material mistake through ontological frameworks. Catherine Malabou points in this direction in her text, The Heidegger

251 242 Change, which meditates on the substantive differences between change, transformation, and metamorphosis. She writes the following, which provides an articulate formulation of the problem I am groping to identify and provide satisfactory solution: In each thing, which is to say in everything, there is a line of demarcation between two modes of being: the metaphysical and the ultrametaphysical. This line in each thing, which is to say in everything, is like a parting of the historical waters. Everything is at once united and sundered on account of this incision that, like a joint, assembles and braces it between two modes of presence. 223 This tends to complicate matters. The argument is that what I have identified as the substantive existence of time as the ontological force of abstract being for the Elemental subject has two possible perceptions of its nature that are Malabou s metaphysical (time perceived as a material object) and ultrametaphysical (time perceived as ontological). This, and here I agree with Malabou, is in each thing, which is to say everything. The complication then exposes itself in that the barrier between modes of being, what I have marked as exemplified by death, has a meta and ultrametaphysical component of its perception as well. Then, naturally, this must go as well for the Exalted and Abject subjects that contain within themselves the same partition between the meta and ultrametaphysical perception of what we are concerned with here: time. The most complex of these relationships of internal and external doubling is represented by Du Bois subject, the Negro which is the focus of this text. Recall the essential passage that we are taking up here from The Souls of Black Folk. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one s

252 243 self through the eyes of others, of measuring one s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 224 Taking the understanding from Division 2 that the order of these events matters we can begin at the end without risking misunderstanding the cause and effect relationship that flows from second-sight to two-ness. Accepting that, I wish to begin at the end, with two-ness, to illuminate the complication of meta and ultrameta bifurcation that confronts the Abject subject generally and specifically the Negro. This is most easily traced by following the three subjects that concern us through the series of meta and ultrameta partitions that I am adopting from Malabou. The Elemental, figure as we have seen, can exhibit hyper-self-affection and separate itself from Civil Time by becoming Exalted. This figure, like all, has a material (meta) and ontological (ultra-meta) perception of its presence both internally and externally. This separation creates the perceived meta (material) deficit on the part of the Elemental figure, that is both internally and externally meta (material) and ultra-meta (ontological) that requires that notion of the Abject in this case represented by the dark body that is resultant of the assemblage of what Du Bois calls the veil or the color-line, which itself is partitioned into material and ontological presences both internally and externally. The Abject figure, dark body, is likewise partitioned into a material and ontological presence both internally and externally perceivable. Du Bois renders this several orders of magnitude more complex by, in my reading, situating the meta/material presence of the Abject figure as the Negro and the ultrametaphysical/ontological presence as the American. Recall that I have carefully rendered the body of the Abject as an abstraction that is not necessarily black but necessarily other. Du Bois employs the same structure. Recall from the

253 244 passage that [o]ne ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. The partitioned parts of the dark body are likewise partitioned into a material and ontological presence, what I read as blackness (material) and alienated time (ontological). Second-Sight, therefore is the ability/gift of this dark body to perceive, through what is legible as the perceptive component of Hegel s mechanical causality, the series of ontological presences that lead to a terminus at the irreducible or Elemental figure that I argue exists behind what Du Bois marks as the Veil (note the capitalization) and Fanon calls the zone of non-being. What I mean by this is that there is a chain of perception on the material and ontological level, the separation of which creates both the condition for actors mired in myopic misrecognition of the truth of their subjectivity and in being able to perceive both of these presences the pathway to the possibility of transformation, change or metamorphosis. This is the homo liminalis. Malabou, in the chapter quoted above remarks that: All things indicate, in ways entirely their own, an ontological improvisation that interrupts their presence to themselves and allows them to invent the style of their de(con)struction. 225 Second-sight provides the method for this resolution of the mistake made by the Elemental subject in misrecognizing time as material and reducible and creates the condition for the solution to the conundrum of Du Bois only, ever, and always of subaltern existence. It is important to follow this chain of perception in order to identify the fissures that provide the bridge, or what Malabou calls the way to interrupt their presence to themselves, between the dual presences. Recall that the Elemental subject as such, and this goes for every subject outlined in this section, is split into Metaphysical and Ultra-metaphysical presences. What I want to

254 245 explore here is the notion that it is not a standard trait of the human subject to be able to perceive both of these presences. This harkens back to the early moments of this text that proposed the unity of space and time prior to the Fall. It is a trait of the Ontological Body to see both and, according to Du Bois, a gift to the Negro. The question that I hope to provide a satisfactory answer to engages an understanding the conditions of the subject that render it possible for the Negro to achieve this return to ontological seeing and unity of space and time. If we agree that the Elemental figure is the basis for the other subjects and that the partitioning of the subject renders one type of seeing as possible while the other is obscured, we can trace the outline of what each subject can see about the other along the continuum that exists here. But first we have to deal with the corollary to Du Bois second-sight that would logically be present for the Exalted subject. Here we can employ Kantorowicz s canonical text on the matter of the material and immaterial nature of the sovereign, The King s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology to uncover an account of the doubling of the Exalted figure that mirrors that of the Abject. Kantorowicz makes great use of The Norman Anonymous where the notion of this twin nature of sovereignty is central. The king is a twinned being, human and divine, just like the God-man, although the king is twonatured and geminate by grace only within Time, and not by nature and (after the Ascension) within Eternity: the terrestrial king is not, he becomes a twin personality through his anointment and consecration. 226 Kantorowicz sees no parallel figure with which to compare this phenomenon, at least outside of the twinned nature of the Christ s presence in human form on Earth. With the King s Two Bodies the doctrine of the persona mixta seems to have no direct relation. The duplication expressed by the concept of persona mixta refers to temporal and spiritual capacities, but does not refer to bodies national and politic. 227 I here

255 246 necessarily part ways with Kantorowicz in that I have located a direct relation to this persona in the Abject figure. Understanding this, it is an interesting juxtaposition to employ Du Bois Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness as the framework with which we can ascertain the visual capacity of the Exalted figure. Cutting to the heart of the matter, in that the Exalted subject is a creation of a hyperself-affective relationship with the self and creates the imago as the idealized goal of its desire; this figure is necessarily enthralled with itself and, represents the metric against which the Elemental figure measures its relationship to the ideal. The Exalted being, from this perch of hyper-self-affection is aware of the separation of the material and ontological but through a process of preservation of the continuum of sovereign being, employs its agency to keep them separate. This is virtually all about the threshold/barrier of death. The allure of Exaltation is in many ways a relationship to elongated subjectivity with respect to time through genealogy. The nature of sovereignty resides in its ability to outlive the death of the corporeal body. In this way, the benefits of ontological being are based through consanguine relation to the Exalted subject. This is exemplified by the notion of royal blood and the temporality created by the counting of the sovereign and the adoption of a new name to commemorate the consecration that Kantorowicz marks. Louis XVI was required to be stripped of his sovereignty and restored to his Elemental self, Louis Capet, in order to be executed. It is without question the purpose of the adoption of a royal name and the subsequent sequentiality of that event that is meant to demonstrate the separation of sovereignty from the human inevitability of death. From this perspective, it is argued that the Exalted figure has a form of second-sight that operates in counter-point to that described by Du Bois terminating in a phenomenon of two-ness that allows the existence of the two competing influences (material and ontological: mortal and immortal: metaphysical and ultra-

256 247 metaphysical) to exist harmoniously in the same body. It is this harmony that is a direct result of the nature of exaltation being a product of the agency of the figure in question that provides the distinction between the otherwise alike figures of the Exalted and the Abject. The Elemental figure is not so fortunate and, as I have proposed, as a result of its misunderstanding or, in this instance, misperception, continues the fractured relationship to time and space that is a result of the Fall. As such and in no small way due to the imperative of mortality, it is death that obsesses the Elemental figure and in that vein it finds itself myopically focused on the materiality of being and unable to bridge the gap with the ontological self. In short, second-sight, is not a gift that Du Bois would attribute to this subject. It is in fact this limited visual acuity that renders the figure Elemental and steward of the material conditions that create the Abject subject. The Elemental subject is able to see the material conditions of each of the other subjects, inclusive of itself and only relates its internal ontological vision of time as having a point of terminus, death, that is also read as a material condition. This vision of the material also allows it to only see the physical attributes of the barriers between subjects and manifests itself in the hyper-visuality that we witnessed of the Elemental child in Burke as he views the sovereign on one hand and the Negro woman on the other. In substance, the argument would be that the Negro, as a creation of this paradigm is a material subject that has been forcibly separated from its ontology. This can be thought along with much of what I referenced here from Orlando Patterson s description of Social Death. As far as the Abject figure is concerned, the canonical manner in which to frame what we are dealing with here is through Du Bois and Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness. Here, focusing our attention on the experience of the Abject figure, specifically the Negro, and armed with this account of seeing across and within subjectivities we have to revisit Du

257 248 Bois point of departure and accomplish two tasks: First, understanding the relationship of all of this to the separation of veil and Veil and second, translating this into time in order to remain consistent across the movements of the discussion. But prior to delving more closely into Du Bois on this point, there is invaluable thinking in Jacques Derrida s Seminar 11 from the The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1 that is useful here. This deals specifically with the seeing across subjectivities that troubles me here specifically with this question of mediation between the perception of the Exalted and the Abject for one another as material or ontological objects. 3: Du Boisian Consciousness, the John Coltrane Quartet and Radical Modes of Being: In 8a2 of Division 2 of this project I proposed that in Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk, he has deliberately illuminated two essential concepts: the separation between black and white, (what I would call the Abject and the Elemental) the veil or color-line and the locus of the true self, (what I would call the Ontological Body) the Veil. To be direct, what I am arguing is that the paradigm proposed by Du Bois requires little adaptation to lend support and in fact be generative of the foundational structure of the continuum of sovereign being that is so important for this effort as well as providing a vehicle for border crossing by the subaltern subject. First it is a natural segue way from the section prior to this to focus initially upon the threshold between the Elemental and the Abject, what Du Bois labels as the veil that I equate with his color-line and what I effectively label as like, if not the same as, death. At the outset of Chapter 1 of Souls, we recall from Division 2 of this project, Du Bois situates the colorline as equivalent to the question of what it is like to be a problem. This question and separation between black and white is synonymous with the veil that concerns us here and from the previous chapter. It is not possible to move forward on the trajectory I am

258 249 pursuing here without resolving the issues of the veil and Veil, the color-line and its relationship to the two that I will employ as the bridge to the essential concept of the zone of non-being for pinning down the homo liminalis. The architecture of the paradigm that I have presented from the outset allows me to defend the view that Du Bois veil is coterminous with the color-line or the division between black and white that I have established here as the result of a materialist (mis)reading of time on the part of the Elemental subject. This project is pursuing the material form of abjection that preoccupies Du Bois, (skin) color. In accordance with the argument of this project, it is necessary to account for the material and ontological characteristics of the color-line, or in the language of Malabou, the meta and ultra-meta physical aspects that contain within it the terms of its de(con)struction. The material aspect of the color-line is just that; color, as we have seen it represented from Plato forward. The ontological aspect; time, is a more complex matter to unpack and it is bound up in the impossibility of catching a glimpse of it from the perspective of material modes of being that presents the central problem. In working around that problematic, it can be perceived indirectly through its effect on the material subject. Recall that Augustine employed the psalm and its recitation as a way of describing the phenomenon of past, present, and future. Here, I would like to think of ontological time as it is represented materially through musical meter. Specifically, from the perspective of the Abject subject, the notion of alternative and radical modes of time has found material representation in the artistry of jazz music, specifically rhythmic innovation. It seems to me that framing cognition of the material representation of the true nature of time against its manifestation as the temporality of music might serve as a productive way to approach the complex relationship of second-sight to Being. What I am

259 250 saying here is that the awareness of the listener that a piece of music has an anomalous time signature is only possible from a normative understanding of what represents standard time:. Standard time, in the language of this project is the relationship all of the subjects represented here have to the notion of Civil or collective time. With respect to the western mind and as far as musical time signatures go, it is 4/4 that represents standard or Civil time. From this perspective, it is clear that creation of an alternative time signature is an act of agency of the sort that is representative of the separation from Civil time that is the unique providence of the Exalted subject or an act of revolutionary effort at self-redefinition on the part of the Abject subject. Two concrete examples of what I am describing will prove useful in making this concept legible. In the first instance, there is an act of agency in the separation of an Elemental subject from normative time as fulfillment of a project of exaltation. The key here is that the subject in question has an individual time signature that is acceptable as an inclusion to the creation of the Civil, temporal collective. For this we can employ the example of the Dave Brubeck Quartet as, in the first instance, closely related to the whiteness and acceptability of this band and their art. I have nothing against Dave Brubeck and I am in fact a big fan of his work but understand it to exist in a different relationship to the western canon than black jazz. Brubeck s existence firmly within the mainstream provided the platform for the effort to separate his work from the notion of normative time through an act of sovereign creation. What I want to focus on here is his well-known album Time Out. The album s title is a reference to the fact that Brubeck s compositions have time signatures that will be unfamiliar to listeners of western music and jazz particularly; the most well known of the recordings, Take -5, is in 5/4 time throughout the piece. Blue-Rondo a la Turk, the first track, shifts through unfamiliar time-signatures in

260 251 a predictable pattern. Again, this album, from the perspective of temporality is interesting in relation to the listener s positioning that facilitates cognition of its otherness. The shifting relationship to the normative notion of 4/4 is what renders the album curious yet accessible from its ontological relationship to the creator who is acceptable and recognizable to the larger civil collective. The Abject subject has a different relationship in its lack of recognition by the civil collective and therefore the manifestation of this ontology in material musical time is distinct. As the title of this section explicitly references, I would like to pursue an analysis of the John Coltrane Quartet to investigate this claim. The ensemble in question, in the eyes of this essay, at its most evolved form, was composed of Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums with the occasional addition of multi-reedist Eric Dolphy. This ensemble is exemplary of the relationship with temporality that I am intending to expose here. Stated as simply as possible, this group had no relationship with time-signature as the tradition of western music situates it. The group, as distinct from Brubeck s experimentation with time, does not appear to establish a normative temporality, exotic or otherwise, around which the group will perform a piece of music. Each individual artist seems to operate in their own time, which in moments, will find itself synchronized with that of one or more of the performers but the poly-temporal nature of the performance in fact elides the question of specific rhythmic form. The first step here is to consider the fact of blackness as an indelible marker of jazz generally and Coltrane et al specifically as the place from which this innovation occurs. From this perspective, we have to recognize that the creation of alternative time signatures on the part of these subjects is an act designed to recapture or perhaps force recognition of

261 252 the existence of the pulse as acceptable to the collective even in its individuality. Stated differently, the members of the Quartet are always already separate from the collective and misrecognized. This does not mean that they do not have time signatures that should have been recognized by the collective. They in fact should have been. The art is therefore designed to achieve recognition rather than separation, which is a different project from that of Brubeck, but in its aim for acceptance, itself radical and revolutionary. To understand this claim we need to first situate ourselves in the position of the Elemental observer of this music. From the perspective of the listener, this awareness is based upon normative notions of musical time that a) comport with the tradition (4/4) or b) are interesting because of their distance from what is expected or marked as normative. The point here is that the Brubeck example allows the listener and the performer to be predictable within the prima facie unpredictability of the time chosen for the tune. Coltrane s Quartet, however, allows no such place of respite for the listener unless and until the desire to be aware of the poly-temporal and segregated nature of the time is resisted or fades; the sheer length of some of these performances, perhaps, lends itself to this state of awareness that I hope to defend as resultant of its recognition by the collective as rendering it eligible for inclusion. There is one important claim that this argument presents for the question of revolutionary praxis: material or ontological. This indicates that revolutionary activity on the part of the Abject figure has to first pass through the Elemental space and comprises a separate effort at separation in order to journey from Abject to Exalted. In search of a similar exemplar of this phenomenon on the part of the revolutionary praxis of the Abject subject we can examine the performance of One Down, One Up that can be found on a recent release of Coltrane s live performance at the Half Note on March 26, 1965 on Impulse Records. The piece opens with an extended bass prologue by Jimmy

262 253 Garrison, which sets the character of the entire piece. Garrison establishes for himself an elasticity of time in the lower registers that, when listened to in isolation from the other musicians, is offering a performance that has no relationship to the typical role that the instrument plays in jazz as the bedrock of the established time. In short, the bass in this paradigm is a-temporal in its poly-temporality. In fact, Garrison s bowing and fingering are constantly altering the time in which he operates against a seemingly un-established norm. Some thinking is required here based upon this notion of a-temporality and plasticity that is dependent upon the perspective of the producer of the time or the observer. First and foremost, in dealing with Abject time, it is the already excluded nature of it with respect to the normative collective. So from the perspective of the Elemental observer, the time in question is already a-temporal and excluded as well as misrecognized. From the perspective of the Abject figure, there would be a series of observational events that have already taken stock of the unacceptable nature of its individual time signature relative to the collectivity. This is where we encounter Du Bois conceptualization of second-sight and what it tells the individual about itself: principally that the exclusion it is suffering is an awareness of its misrecognition and exclusion. The second moment as the necessary next step in this logic is double-consciousness that, recall, is an awareness that the subject under consideration is not observing itself but the understanding of the self based upon the misunderstanding by the Elemental of the ontological and material conditions of time. This yields what Du Bois calls no true self-consciousness that, in coordination with second-sight produces the doubled (actually four-fold) figure that he represents through the concept of two-ness. This music represents the desire to undermine this series of conditions that lead to the necessity of a type of counter-narrative to civil time to shatter the exclusion that is attendant misrecognition of the individual time signatures as eligible or welcome to the

263 254 collective. Recall, it is Civil time that the Abject figure is excluded from and it is the collective gathering of individual times to form civil time that is the necessary and sufficient condition of this abjection and must be replaced. The argument made earlier in this text related the establishment of civil time to Rousseau s general will that required the marginalization of individual will to the formation of the collective will. Recall, the individual will, as such, is criminalized when it becomes first philosophy over the general will; it, the individual will, does not cease to exist. In fact, the argument advanced here is that without an individual will/time, the subject would be unable to be recognized and would be materially and ontologically dead. Following this, the exclusion of an individual time that then prohibits participation in general normative time, marks the Abject subject as criminal in its inescapable individuality. Shifting the perspective back to the Abject subject desirous of acceptance into Elemental being it becomes necessary to establish a time signature that is recognizable and can be added into the general time. In accomplishing this, the Abject individual temporalities are combined to form a collective that is accepted into the mélange of Civil time as a minority and likely 2 nd class presence but accepted non-the less. Returning to Du Bois by way of this thinking we have the Abject, material subject that exists as an excluded personage from the collective: Du Bois one dark body. By creating a collective and therefore recognizable form of already understood to be marginalized temporality we have the formation of the first of the doubled persona in Du Bois formulation of two-ness : the Negro. The second of these is the acceptable percentage of the person (cue the 3/5 Compromise) that is American. This is one way of reading the notion of Du Bois as providing a path to marginalized recognition by the Elemental collective. There are at least two elements of the formation of this Abject collective

264 255 time signature that need to be marked before returning to this thinking and bending it in an alternative direction. The first of these returns us to thinking through the poly-temporal nature of the late Coltrane Quartet that creates, arguably, a truly democratic form of collective time in that each individual is at liberty to maintain individuality without the necessity of conforming to a general, accepted notion of temporality. The second is to recall that this hyper-identification with individual time for the Abject subject is at odds with the separation of the individual from the collective on the part of the Exalted figure which is an act of reification of the primacy of individual identity not the recognition of its lack of worth in the eyes of the collective. But there is an alternative reading that Du Bois text seems to accommodate. Recall the first lines of the passage that preoccupies my attention: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. The focus here is on the term world. Stated simply, would Du Bois categorize the Abject, Elemental and Exalted subject positions as distinct worlds? Or does the process of exclusion from the collective formation of Civil Time create the Abject as a world unto itself that is distinct from the combination of Elemental and Exalted that would form, in Du Bois terms, this American world? Both of these proposals are substantively alike in that the relationship of the Abject to the Elemental and Exalted individually or collectively is a relationship of one alien state to another. Further, this allows us to understand that within each of the subject positions there also attends the same tripartite separation of the subject on the level of the material engagement with the irreducible nature of ontological time. The

265 256 journey from here allows us to take up the question of non-being as the space for the realization of the homo liminalis. 4: The Phenomenology of Non-Being: There are two passages that have haunted this entire project and addressing them explicitly here will provide a test of the infrastructure that I have constructed so far. The passages form a bridge to the final consideration of this project: the revolutionary subject, however; as far as the intellectual genealogy that I have constructed is concerned, they form the only way forward. The first we have seen before; Du Bois employment of the veil and Veil in a single sentence: Beneath the Veil lay right and wrong, vengeance and love, and sometimes throwing aside the veil, a soul of sweet Beauty and Truth, stood revealed. 228 The second is what I deem to be the critical passage for Frantz Fanon s Black Skin, White Mask specifically and his entire system of revolutionary de(re)construction of the subject generally: There is a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, a bare xv ramp xvi from which a new emergence can arise. In the majority of cases, the Black is not able to benefit from this descent into a veritable Hell. 229 The argument in chief here is that Du Bois Veil and Fanon s zone of non-being are describing the same location which is in turn the space in which we can find a specific subject position which, in the terms of this project, is characterized as the space in which the homo liminalis exists and is in the transitory position of metamorphosis of subjectivity. The challenge here is to first insure that we identify the Veil as what I claim it to be, accomplish xv The French word dépouillée is translated here as bare but the connotation of the term is more akin to plucked clean like the feathers from a chicken or even a depilatory as in something capable of removing hair. This insight is indebted to a series of essential conversations with William Balang-Gaubert, Lecturer in French and Haitian Creole at the University of Chicago. xvi The French word, une rampe is translated here as ramp to emphasis this reading s understanding of this passage to be pointing to a place from which recovery is launched.

266 257 the same for Fanon s zone of non-being and finally define the homo liminalis through this exegesis. 4b: Of the (be)coming of John: The work of the separation of the Veil and veil results in the location of the resting place for knowledge of the true self that is uncomplicated by this division between Negro and American that is a threshold between the Elemental and Abject subject: the veil. Returning to the starting point of this essay in Black Reconstruction, beneath the Veil lay right and wrong, vengeance and love and a soul of sweet Beauty and Truth, stood revealed by throwing aside the veil (pp. 14) we can begin to construct an argument for how Du Bois proposes that the Abject subject find the true self. Having spent a great deal of effort separating the Veil and veil, before moving forward in the text it is necessary to proffer an explanation of how the concepts work in concert with one another and provide the essential knowledge that Du Bois requires as the way forward for the Negro mired in the logic that begins with second-sight. In form of summation of the thesis presented thus far it may be useful to employ a graphic depiction; perhaps a map, of the world of the form of consciousness that Du Bois presents.

267 258 Figure 35 The Black Subject can come and go as he pleases to the inside of the Veil and in so educating himself becomes a knowing subject -Black Subject 1 who processes a clarity of perception that then allows him to focus attention on the fact that the separation between white and black remains unaffected in its integrity by the project of education. Black Subject 1 remains imprisoned inside of what is now labeled by Du Bois as the Veil of Race/Color because this improved subject is prevented from fulfilling his or her promise. What I mean here is that this specific type or evolution of the Veil is formed by the relation of the knowing subject to the veil or color line. This position of informed objectivity renders the condition of the subject even more painful. The veil becomes more clear and in this clarity perhaps even more impenetrable. In witnessing this in action, it is perhaps most useful to read closely Du Bois allegorical chapter that takes up this theoretical point, Of the Coming of John but first it is useful to propose an intellectual genealogy for Du Bois employment of the Veil, which I posit is closely related to his careful study of the German romantic tradition and to begin with a brief examination of his biographical approach to this problem in Chapter VI of Souls.

268 259 As promised in the Forethought, the Veil reappears upon the stage in the opening moments of this chapter, Of the Meaning of Progress. It is important to note that Du Bois opens with a quotation from Friedrich Schiller, establishing with this epigraph the explicit intellectual debt to this stream of romantic thought. Schiller s On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas is a central text in the intellectual genealogy of the Veil that I propose herein) The quote from Schiller s Die Jungfrau von Orleans Act V, Scene I is where Joan of Arc questions her competence/worthiness to perform the task required of her. The text is translated as follows: xvii If you wish to propagate/announce your power, Choose those who, free from sin, Prevail in your eternal house! Dispatch your spirit abroad! The immortal, the pure, Those who do not feel, do not weep! Do not choose the tender virgin, Not the gentle soul of the shepherdess Linking the quest of Fisk students to the story of Joan of Arc establishes a monumental set of qualifications for the actors in his narrative. The Veil makes its appearance in the opening moments of the chapter. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that Tennessee, beyond the Veil-was theirs alone, and in vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the country school commission. 230 Here Du Bois utilizes the architecture between the Veil and the Black World that is a by-product of the existence of the veil/color-line. Fisk students exist within the Veil because it is a place of higher learning and is the locus of the training necessary to create the figures described by Schiller, these immortals. The world beyond the Veil because of their education, was theirs xvii Translated with the assistance of Prof. David F. Krell.

269 260 alone. It is clear that that this beyond the Veil cannot be confused with the spaces on the other side of the veil/color-line. Were that to be the case, Du Bois and his cohorts would have been seeking to teach a group of white students, not just blacks deprived of educational opportunities and it seems obvious that the world beyond this Veil cannot be the white world because it would render the entire project of establishing the place of African- Americans in white society moot if, as Du Bois proposes, it was already theirs alone. It is clear that the Veil presents an internal inner sanctum to black/abject life that renders those who are within it in explicit possession of that outside of it but still limited by the barrier (veil) between black and white. The second mention of the Veil in this chapter occurs after Du Bois, the protagonist of the narrative, locates a position as a teacher in a community with no school. It is at this point that we are able to locate the point of intersection between this chapter and Du Bois allegorical description of a similar circumstance in Chapter XIII s On the Coming of John. First the quote from Chapter IV: Come in, said the commissioner- come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month? Oh, thought I, this is lucky ; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I-alone. 231 Several questions present themselves here as challenge to the notion that the veil and Veil are sharply separate in this text and that the separation matters. Why is this Veil and its shadow not the same as the description Du Bois provides in Chapter I of his initial encounter with veil; remember[ing] well when the shadow swept across me? 232 Again, I wish to carefully note that in Du Bois account, the veil/color-line is a reality for all. The question for Du Bois appears to be the level of consciousness an individual possesses of the realities of the conditions that accompany the situation. The Veil, in contrast, for a talented

270 261 group of educated actors renders them acutely aware of the condition and when confronted with instances when even their objective qualification ( Yes, that certificate will do ) are still marginalized ( for they ate first, then I-alone ) the shadow becomes the intensity that these slights are granted from a position of intellectual achievement and status. The situation causes an even more ominous set of circumstances in contradistinction to the unidimensional reality of the veil/color line and the obvious distinction between black and white in this situation: Veil-veil/color-line/limitation of opportunity/acute awareness of that limitation, is a multi-layered and dimensioned problematic for Du Bois project of achievement of true self-consciousness. The shadow in this instance is cast by awareness of educational achievement that is not fully honored. Du Bois reaffirms this line of reasoning in my reading of the text in Chapter XIII. Black John, the protagonist, has improved his progress at college, far away from his upbringing in the Jim Crow south. As he leaves the confines of the academy and returns to the world, his experience echoes that of Du Bois in the previous discussion. [H]e had left his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men. He looked for now the first time sharply around him, and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restrains and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men did not call him Mister, he clenched his hands at the Jim Crow cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. 233 John had been raised under the coercive regime of Jim Crow. It wasn t that it didn t exist as a reality for him. The point seems to be that his consciousness of its unnatural nature of being became legible in the wake of his education. Obviously John s youth was plagued

271 262 with these same experiences but to use Du Bois formulation, prior to life within the Veil, his second-sight, which all similarly situated is gifted, yields him no true self-consciousness. With this understanding and focusing on the work that this notion of differences that had erstwhile seemed natural we have a clear view as to what the phony self-consciousness of second-sight yields: a world in which the marginalized subject is certain that that subjugation is not meant to be understood as such since it is, in this account and in the understanding of the subject under consideration, natural for the world to operate so. True selfconsciousness of the depth of the depravity of society that structures a reality that makes it natural for one to be less than the other through division along the color-line is made clear and more acute with the enhanced awareness of education. Finally, note in this passage the use of the color-line as something that confines, in my reading buttressing the equivalency of the veil and color-line. Du Bois at these moments, requires of his readers a commitment to an understanding of his utilization of the central terms explored here: Veil and veil and his use of World and world, which deserves its own exegesis and seems to be a distinction that is the product of the Veil-veil gravitational pull. In fine, the world becomes a much different place, a World, when education and temporal distance from the depths of the enslaved condition are in play. Returning to his biographical description of this phenomenon I have rendered the text here indulgently for its utility in understanding this important matter: I have called my tiny community a world (my italics), and so its isolation made it, and yet there was among us but a halfawakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more

272 263 years before had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some-such as Josie, Jim and Ben-to whom War, Hell and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought (my italics-ms). Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World (my italics-ms). And their weak wings beat against their barriers-barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last in dangerous moments against everything they opposed every whim. 234 This rich passage requires careful attention. Du Bois structures a carefully temporal argument against which all of the central concepts of Souls operate. Perspective with respect to engagement with slavery is the meridian against which Du Bois locates an actor s consciousness. Temporal distance from the enslaved condition allows the subject to become dissociated from awareness of the overt coercion of chattel slavery. That distance in concert with even the most introductory engagement with education (Josie, Jim and Ben, students in Du Bois school in Tennessee) are granted half-awakened thought that in turn cause the discontent of the subject to increase in direct proportion to the level of education. It is the inverse relationship between higher education and occupational attainment that frustrates Du Bois and it is that frustration that gives urgency and helplessness to his account that at this stage of his thinking, struggles for a solution to the impenetrability of the veil/colorline/problem. Note also that the barriers of this formulation consist of caste, youth and life; not race directly and one would need to reflect on whether life, in this conceptualization necessarily always accounts for it.

273 264 It is the contention here, that following Friedrich Schiller On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas), Du Bois is in conversation with the veil of Isis, which is the Veil that conceals nature. Everything that is hidden, everything full of mystery, contributes to what is terrifying and therefore capable of sublimity. Of this sort is the inscription on the temple of Isis at Sais, in Egypt. I am all that is, that has been, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil. It is precisely this uncertainty that lend the terrifying characteristics to people s images of the future and death. 235 In order to elide Du Bois s rhetorical trap, when referring to the Veil, I will use the German word Schleier to avoid confusion and pay homage to the roots of this construct in the German romantic vision of the sublime. What we are proposing here is that in the Forethought, Du Bois introduces the Schleier, which serves as the locus of the concept of the Talented Tenth. The veil remains as the distinct location of discussions of the essential concepts of second-sight, two-ness and double consciousness. The clearest exposition, in my view, of this concept is found in Chapter XIII Of the Coming of John and the key is Wagner s opera Lohengrin. In the text of Chapter XIII, Du Bois tells us the following regarding the evolution of Black John as he gains his footing in college: He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil/Schleier that lay between him and the white world. 236 It is easy to understand how this can be conflated with the veil and its presence between the black and white world but this, I propose is in error because of 1) the careful capitalization of the term and 2) the reason for the facts attendant the Schleier s existence. As a mentioned above, John is always and all of the time aware of the veil; he was a product of the segregated south. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good boy [b]ut they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him off to school. 237 How can we

274 265 imagine that this figure was only lately to become aware of the central aspect of his existence in the segregated South? It is through education that he becomes aware of the Schleier and its implication. The key to this discussion lies in Chapter VI in Souls where Du Bois writes, So wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil/[Schleier] 238. The unity here with Schiller s rumination of the veil of Isis is provocative. Thinking further, perhaps the figure to whom the most careful attention is due is John s mother and her imagination for the metamorphosis of her son. icon: In Hesse s Veil of Isis, A. Leslie Willson provides an important description of this The same temple at Sais contains the following inscription quoted by Plutarch in his recounting of the legend of Isis and Osiris [as above]. In Schiller s poetic parable, Das verschlurte Bild zu Sais (The veiled image of Sais) from the year 1795, a youth parched with thirst for knowledge becomes impatient with his by no means slow progress through priestly degrees, his introduction to the mysteries of Isis mentioned by Herodotus Upon inquiring about what stands hidden beneath the veil draped over the goddess he is told that Truth is there. 239 So what I propose here is that John s education is indoctrinating him with the same Truth that allows Du Bois to find himself above the Schleier. In Robert Gooding-Williams essential In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, the author focuses on this aspect of Du Bois s John and [t]he central theme of Lohengrin is the impossibility of a lasting union between what is supernatural and what is earthly. Lohengrin, knight of the Holy Grail, is a supernatural and divine being; Elsa, his bride is an earthly and profane one. 240 I agree with this but depart from Gooding-Williams in his conflation of this figure with the veil. Gooding-Williams proposes that [h]ere, indeed [Du Bois] reworks his earlier, Wordsworthian figuring of a white female disrupting a black male s fantasy of sublime freedom by shunning him (by refusing his visiting card). Adapting the theme of impossible

275 266 marriage to the life of black John, Du Bois suggests that a black man, if he refuses the cringing servility of the slave, and if he decides to act freely in the world of Jim Crow, will inevitably find that that world has drawn away from and repudiated him. 241 This is a familiar story for the racialized figure in America however; it simply has nothing to do with Wagner s Lohengrin. Lohengrin is never reviled or refused. He, in fact, through his sole action solves the created crisis of a decadent society and departs it of his own volition for his idyllic/sublime home beyond the water against the entreaties of his wife to remain. A quote from the revelation of the knight s identity from Act 3 Scene 2 of the opera is instructive. LOHENGRIN In a distant land, unapproachable to your steps, lies a castle called Montsalvat; within it stands a gleaming temple whose like for splendour is unknown on earth; therein is kept as the holiest of treasures a vessel blessed with miraculous powers: it was brought down by an angelic host to be tended in purity by men. Each year a dove descends from heaven to renew its wondrous strength. It is called the Grail, and blessed pure faith is bestowed by it on its votaries. He who is chosen to serve the Grail it arms with supernatural might; against him all evil deceit is vain, before him even the darkness of death yields. Even one sent by it into distant lands, called upon as champion for the cause of virtue, does not lose its holy power if he remains there unknown as its knight. Of so rare a nature is the Grail's benediction that it must be veiled from profane eyes: you must not then harbour doubts of its knight, and if he is recognised he must leave you. Now hear how I answer the forbidden question! I was sent here among you by the Grail: my father Parzival wears its crown; his knight am I, and Lohengrin my name.

276 267 KING, MEN AND WOMEN As I hear his lofty calling my eyes burn with tears of holy joy. ELSA The earth is reeling! All is dark! Air! Give me air, wretch that I am! LOHENGRIN O Elsa! What have you done to me? When my eyes first lighted on you I felt myself burning with love for you and swiftly learned a new happiness. The sacred power, the wonder of my order, the strength with which my secret arms me, I wished to dedicate to the service of that purest heart: Why did you wring that secret from me? Now, alas, I must be parted from you! KING AND ALL THE MEN Alas! Must you leave us, noblest of men, heaven-sent? If heaven's blessing is taken from us where then shall we find consolation? Lohengrin is not a reviled subaltern other refused by a dominant culture. In point of fact, he represents the ideal. The work Lohengrin does for Du Bois s narrative comports easily if we consider the Schleier as the unique province of a special caste possessing Truth and unable to be grasped by the uninitiated when this figure is revealed. Du Bois is proposing a radical project of self-recognition for the talented black that occurs away from the profane eyes of Elemental culture encumbered with profane views of racial difference. What is occurring in the depths of the Schleier that Du Bois employs, when read in this fashion, is tantalizing for its implications for Africana existentialism. Returning to Willson s essay and the Isis trope, the author states: [t]he mysterious path crosses through a world unbounded by time, it is contained in a universe whose dimensions of infinity are borderless. The goal of the path is attained by an inward projection of the mundane Self into a transcending, spiritual, immortal state, into a perceptive and enlightened transcendental Self The inward goal was the revelation of the cosmic Self, the outward symbol of the mystery was the

277 268 veil of Isis which hid the contrapuntal key of that Self, the Beloved-or the Other Self. 242 It should come as no surprise that this description matches that I derived from the notion of the Ontological Body that is likewise without time in the common understanding and most importantly serves as the doorway through which any subject must pass in order to alter its being: this is the space of the homo liminalis and as promised at the outset of this section needs to be placed into conversation with Fanon s conceptualization of the zone of non-being. What I am arguing here is that Du Bois adopted mutatis mutandis this notion of the veil of Isis in order to construct the imagined state of being that bridges the gap between the material and the ontological with respect to relationship and perception of time. Prior to dealing with Fanon s employment of this theoretical position it seems prudent to place into the conversation the conceptualization of non-being that is essential in the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. 5: Being (Non)Being: In thinking carefully about the role nothingness and non-being play in the thinking here I will engage an intellectual genealogy that takes up Heidegger s Being and Time, Sartre s Transcendence of the Ego and elements of Ponty s Phenomenology of Perception. The nature of non-being as I am employing it here lies in its essentiality for the metamorphosis of the subject. The three stable subject positions that I have proposed, Abject, Elemental and Exalted, are separated by thresholds that require passage through liminal being (homo liminalis) in order to render possible the transition to alternative subjectivities. Trajectory toward the Elemental has as its goal the erasure of historical existence in order to present the space of infinite possibility that the zone of non-being provides. In this I differentiate my thinking on Fanon s employment of this notion from much of the current thinking that is most prominently represented by Lewis Gordon s interesting short take on this question that

278 269 centers itself on an employment of Dante s Inferno, specifically Cantos XXXII and XXXIV that echo the implicative title of the essay, Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing: Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth. This reading of Fanon as an echo of the Inferno proposes that, like the rings of hell that Virgil guides Dante through therefore: Fanon s work is replete with similar imagery. He is not imitating Dante. He is, however, speaking from that grammar of condemnation. They are familiar to us: There is the fire in him that simmers but is not extinguished and the hell that the black cannot fall to because of already having occupied it in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks. There is Fanon s famous reference to the zone of nonbeing-a zone neither of appearance or disappearance. 243 This is a compelling reading of Fanon s employment of non-being but I would like to take a different approach and examine the reference from a perspective of the thinker s engagement with the thought of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to start and trace that to the concept of ontological and empty being that is central to this project. First the relevant passage from Fanon with the predicate question that is relevant to the thinking here. What does man want? What does the black man want? Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that a Black is not a man. There is a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, a bare ramp from which a new emergence can arise. In the majority of cases, the Black is not able to benefit from this descent into a veritable Hell. 244 At the outset Fanon establishes a binary relationship between man and black man that he finds irreconcilable in that a Black is not a man. This assertion is productively situated within the cognitive dissonance that we have noted attends the misrecognition of time as a material condition that can be lost and gained rather than an ontological condition. Man, as Fanon is marshaling the term here, is ontology, Black man, is a material condition

279 270 that has been misrecognized or more accurately presented as an ontological way of being. The two things are not comparable as we have come to understand blackness to represent a lack from at least the time of the Phaedrus that is read as a material representation of ontological abnormality: The other horse is a crooked jumble of limbs with a short bullneck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency he is shaggy around the ears-deaf as a post-and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined. In the subsequent paragraphs, Fanon offers some clarity regarding the structure of this provocative statement when he defines first man then the Black: Man is not only the possibility of recovery, of negation. If it is true that consciousness is an activity/process or transcendence, we must understand that this transcendence is haunted by the problem of love and understanding. Man is a YES vibrating to the cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, confounded, condemned to watch the truths he has developed destroyed one by one, to stop projecting into the world the antimony that is his coexistence. 245 This passage requires careful attention in that I wish to argue that it represents Fanon s attempt to mark the meta and ultra-meta division that is the causal condition of the material and ontological binary that is plaguing this subject. What I am proposing is an alternative reading that situates this as an internal dialog between the meta and ultra-metaphysical selves inside of the physical body that is phenotypically black with blackness representing a linking of the corporeal body to the understanding of ontological abnormality referenced above. From this position, we can re-read this paragraph and the antinomy that is his coexistence as the paradox that is implicit in the two-ness of Du Bois. The body of the man in question is phenotypically black. The man here includes the possibility of recovery, of negation but is also haunted by the problem of love and understanding.

280 271 My reading here takes up the work done to this point with respect the ontological/elemental self as the location of a non-historical being that is invested with a temporality that is only futurity and what I have labeled as subaltern temporality. Love and understanding are conterminous with auto-affection and true self-consciousness. What I am proposing here is that we need to focus our attention on the notion of consciousness as an activity or process that Fanon marks here in relation to the larger question of non-being. The first question would seem to be whether we can link the notion of the zone of non-being and its existence as the locus for achievement to the first sentence above, Man is not only the possibility of recovery, of negation. This negation as recovery is the first step in the process of transcendent consciousness and the next step is love and understanding which I read as the erasure of what is the causal condition of subaltern temporality; the autodisaffection and subsequent lack of true-self consciousness that is a product of the materiality of the ontological displacement of Abject and Exalted time from the collective. The YES that Fanon references, is the recognition of the acceptance of this being s time as inclusive in the formation of collective time. This YES is a mutual handshake of acceptance between the keepers of Civil Time and the subject entreating for acceptance. This affirmation of being then repairs the gap that is the two-ness in Du Bois and the antinomy that is his coexistence here in Fanon. This coexistence, I am reading as an internal dialog for an important reason. There is obviously a way to read coexistence as that between black and white which would be related to Du Bois notion of the color-line as a type of separation but that would be situated logically prior to this question of non-being and negation raised here. The coexistence is between Man and Black Man which does not situate the notion of man as the White man which would further position that identity as

281 272 the ontological/elemental corpse which is not the case in this reading. The coexistence within Fanon is similar in many ways to the two-ness of Du Bois (Negro and American housed within a materially dark body) that here is represented by this question of Man and Black Man that are likewise enclosed within corporeal being that is encumbered with the confusion of the construction of a material lack that creates the Abject figure and the fallacy of ontological insufficiency. What I mean here is that neither the Black nor White Man are what I, or Fanon, wish to represent as the ontological or Elemental condition that we can call Man. Fanon marks this system of abjection in the following way: The Black is a black man, that is to say he has been established through a series of emotional aberrations in a universe from which he must be extricated. 246 I have established above what amounts to the series of emotional aberrations that at their base level are this confusion of ontological and material conditions of temporality. In sum, what Fanon means here is that the material and phenotypic corpus of a man that is recognized or described as Black is, based upon systematic and purposive pathologies, made into the black man. Likewise, it seems that the white man is also the product of a series of emotional aberrations that are remarkable in their relationship to a typology of selflove that allows for the notion that White is coterminous with ontological Man. The Black wants to be white. The White insists on achieving the rank of man. We will see that this book is an attempt to understand the Black-White relationship. The White is confined in its whiteness. The Black in its blackness. We will attempt to determine the[capacity or tendencies](la tendances) of this double narcissism and what motivates it. [At the beginning of our reflections we deem it inappropriate to explain the conclusions that will be read.] The desire to end a vicious circle has alone guided our efforts. It is a fact that Whites feel superior to Blacks.

282 273 It is still a fact that Blacks want to show Whites the richness of their thought, the equal power of their mind. How to cope? Earlier we used the term narcissism. In effect we believe that only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the abnormalities that are responsible for the structure of the complex. We believe that an individual should strive for the universalism inherent in the human condition. 247 There is much to deal with here but the foundational point that I wish to make is the emphasis Fanon places on the arrogation to the status of ontological humanity as the goal of the white man. If we allow for this ideological gambit to stand and be taken as real particularly by the black subject, then the logical trajectory that Fanon describes creates an insoluble condition that is tantamount to the triad advanced by Du Bois. By allowing that White is the same as Human, black as its negation, is necessarily inhuman if not merely subhuman. In order for the black to recover humanity under this regime she must necessarily become white, hence Fanon s controversial statement that follows close behind these passages: As painful as this finding may be, we are obliged to say that for the Black there is a single destiny. And it is White. 248 Which renders the sentence that opens this thinking: The Black wants to be white. as both a wish and a fate. However by replacing the term white with its goal human then the passage can read, perhaps more profoundly: The Black wants to be human followed by As painful as this finding may be, we are obliged to say that for the Black there is a single destiny. And it is Humanity. It is the acceptance of the notion of whiteness as human-ness that creates the dysfunction of dis-affection for the self that is the Fanonian way to describe what Du Bois calls second-sight, doubleconsciousness and two-ness. The question that Fanon and Du Bois are taking up is how to solve this binary existence that inhabits the material condition of the black body that finds itself fractured into two, incompatible beings: Negro/Black Man and

283 274 American/Human(White man) for Du Bois and Fanon respectively. The argument that I am advancing is that the solution lies in fracturing the relationship between whiteness as ontological/elemental human-ness. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to unravel the conditions that create this problematic, what Fanon calls a series of emotional aberrations. 249 In the parlance of this project the subject tasked with this resurrection must first become a transitional being capable of reaching the zone of non-being that allows for the erasure of the aberrant relationship with temporality that I have established as a result of the series of separations and exclusions described here. Before describing the figure of the homo liminalis as the vehicle for the transportation of this subject through the process of metamorphosis it is necessary to dig more closely into the zone of non-being and return to where this section began with the intellectual genealogy of this phenomenon. 5a: Heidegger s Not-Yet: Recall that for my purposes here I have elected to rhetorically render the linkage that Heidegger makes between being and time more explicit by allowing for the use of one term or the other to stand in for the title. From that perspective, thinking of non-being within the temporal context of the not yet [nocht nicht] is of particular utility here. As a practical matter it is apparent that Martin Heidegger s text Being and Time provides an important, though limited, framework for working through the central problematic presented here. In substance, what I am concerned with is Heidegger s essential formulation of Dasein as a normative way of being for certain subjects, the relationship of Dasein to societal formations that create what I have marked as the Abject subject, and the relationship of that subaltern to both Dasein qua the subject and Dasein with respect to structures of society. In summation, using Du Bois as the theoretical framework the question that presents itself is whether the

284 275 subject described by Du Bois that is encumbered with no true self-consciousness has Dasein as Heidegger would describe it. If she does, how is this possible? If she does not how do we understand Heidegger and his account of Being as it relates to the Abject subject? As point of departure, Heidegger proposes that [t]his entity which each of us is himself includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of Being, we shall denote by the term Dasein. 250 In order to unpack this formulation it is necessary to illuminate what Heidegger proposes represent the elements of Dasein and in doing so relate it to the central line of inquiry of this project. Heidegger, in inquiring into the ontical possibility of Dasein 251 writes the following: Dasein s Being finds its meaning in temporality. But temporality is also the condition which makes historicality possible as a temporal kind of Being which Dasein itself possesses, regardless of whether or how Dasein is an entity in time. Historicality, as a determining character, is prior to what is called history (world historical historicizing). 252 The challenge here is to relate this notion of the ontical possibility of Dasein as a pre-historical formation to this text in two ways: first as a way of defining the bare figure that has preoccupied much of this project that exists prior to what Heidegger calls history in two ways: first that it is a prototypically ontological being in that it has no history with which to relate itself to. This forms the bare figure of homo liminalis that is the vehicle for transformational processes of being. The second concern is an account of the figure, the Abject who lacks a relation to world history in the Hegelian sense (the African who is a nonhistorical being) and in the Pattersonian sense in natal alienation as a theoretical phenomenon and the reality of the fractured genealogy of Atlantic World chattel slavery. The first of these represents an understanding of being on the part of this project that works with the thought of Heidegger in substantial measure in that the Ontological Being

285 276 that I have abstracted would be in possession of Dasein as described by Heidegger. In the second sense, the Abject subject s fractured relationship with temporality implicates it as potentially lacking Dasein as described by Heidegger and therefore putatively not a knowing subject. What I mean here is that Heidegger s account requires a subject whose being exists as a thrownness that has an ontologically adequate conception of death 253 but this death is only an existentiell Being towards death [Sein zum Tode]. 254 The substantive departure here that requires us to rethink Heidegger s account in important ways with respect to the phenomenology of Abject Being in that the thrownness, I propose, that occupies the being of this subject is a Being Away from Death or a Being Towards Life in that this subaltern subject is already dead. A relevant passage for considering this problematic for Abject being is found in the opening moments of Being and Time s Chapter V of the Second Division Temporality and Historicality. But death is only the end of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein s totality is closed round. The other end, however, is the beginning, the birth. Only that entity which is between birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking. Accordingly the orientation of our analytic has so far remained one-sided, in spite of all its tendencies towards a consideration of existent Being-a-whole and in spite of the genuineness with which authentic and inauthentic Being-towards-death have been explicated. Dasein traverses the span of time granted to it between the two boundaries and it does so in such a way that, in each case, it is actual only in the now, and hops, as it were, through the sequence of nows of its own time. Thus it is said that Dasein is temporal. 255 In practical fashion, the canonical understanding of the Abject figure (Patterson s socially dead subject) as lacking the traverse between birth and death in that the slave is a product of the birth and death that arrive at the same instant or more radically, a birth that is presaged by being a witness to its own death requires that we employ Heidegger in two ways.

286 277 First as establishing the circumstance for the creation of this Abject subject in and through this understanding of the necessary condition of Being-toward-Death for whole and second, as a point of departure to formulate the reflective, phenomenological consciousness of the subaltern subject. As has been the constant refrain in this project, we witness Death as the central phenomenon for examining the metamorphosis of the subject and I insist that we understand that journey toward death as a type of normative temporality and in that representing the fundamental element of time as a collective experience. But the notion of death as a coherent collective organizing principal, for Heidegger and the type of being that preoccupies him, there is necessarily the anticipatory nature of being-toward-death. Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and provisional possibility driven out. Only Being-free for death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude. Once one has grasped the finitude of one s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one-those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly-and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]. This is how we designate Dasein s primordial historicizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen. 256 It is by carefully considering several notions that circulate around this question of death, the notion of a traverse from birth to this being-granting terminus, and the implication of the series of nows as the temporality of Dasein that draws my attention. There are several typologies of the putatively corporeal alive though metaphysically already dead figures to consider along with the question of enslaved being that Patterson posits as socially deceased. We can add to this thinking the death row inmate who is preternaturally aware of the place, time, and method of his death. The same can be said of the suicidal

287 278 subject each of which entreat us to pressure Heidegger s notion of the transitional nature, temporality and toward-ness of death when in these instances, as a metaphysical apparition, it has already arrived but exists along side the corporeally alive subject; recall the primordial Adam as human but not alive. Heidegger seems to present a different question that causes us to consider the implication of the relationship between being human and Dasein in that the subject lacking Dasein as understood by Heidegger, in that he or she lacks the possibility of a transition between birth and death, leads one to question, in Heidegger s terms, the humanness of this subject. In this, the slave, death row inmate, or suicide bomber would all seem to lack temporality in their fractured relation to Dasein and as such lack being in its relationship or similitude to time that I have proposed. This is, for Heidegger a question of historicity that, as noted above, can be related to Hegel s troublesome yet, in my mind, predictable, reference to Africans as non-historical beings. Heidegger posits: We contend that what is primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is what we encounter within-the-world-environing Nature as the very soul of History It can be shown that the ordinary conception of world-history arises precisely from our orientation to what is thus secondarily historical. World-historical entities do not first get their historical character, let us say, by reason of an historiological Objectification; they get it rather as those entities which they are in themselves when they are encountered within-the-world. 257 Heidegger s thinking calls for a feed-back loop for the historicity of Dasein that is roughly and usefully equivalent to the type of definitional interactions of subjects with the environment that we have seen in thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Du Bois, Merleau-Ponty, etc. The question remains, as it always has, that this understanding on the part of Heidegger

288 279 appears to leave open the question of the character whose encounters in the world have negative implications for its Being-in-the-world at the level of ontological formation of the subject. The centrality of Du Bois in this project and I believe for our understanding of the Western philosophical tradition generally is to fill the hole created by the thinking of hegemonic European thinking that creates the conditions of subaltern being by this discursive emptiness that functions as an oversight but in my reading performs the erasure of the Other that it defines. This requires that we think carefully (again) about, in macro fashion, the implication of Du Bois formulation of Tripartite Subaltern Self-Consciousness (second-sight, doubleconsciousness, and two-ness) with respect, not to our understanding of individual or collective being but with respect to systematized philosophies of being. Stated differently, what does the Du Boisian way of knowing about the self know about its relationship to a system like Heidegger s that presupposes its explication of a universal way of being that arguably and necessarily excludes the self-consciousness of certain types of subjects that I have categorized as Abject? What this seems to be proposing is that the system of knowing that is outlined by Du Bois, when encountering one, for instance, like that which is explicated by Heidegger, is itself a product of what we have labeled, from Sartre, a type of reflective consciousness that appears to be unreflective. Prior to spending time on this thinking it is first necessary to consider carefully Heidegger s notion of Care that I wish to draw into an equivalency with the understanding put forward here of Desire, Self- Consciousness and Time being conditionally related to one another to the point of sameness by proposing that Heidegger s care is a time and a lack of care is in fact a lack of temporality that is implicated in the process of understanding Du Bois at the level of systemic consciousness and recognition.

289 280 5c: Lack of Care of the Self: In considering what he calls the structural totality of Being-in-the-world 258, Heidegger proposes that the primordial Being of Dasein itself [is]- namely, care. 259 To be more precise, Heidegger expansively posits that: Being-alongside something is concern, because it is defined as a way of Being-in by its basic structure-care. Care does not characterize just existentially, let us say, as detached from facticity and falling; on the contrary, it embraces the unity of these ways in which Being may be characterized. So neither does care stand primarily and exclusively for an isolated attitude of the I towards itself. If one were to construct the expression care for oneself [ Selbst-sorge ], following the analogy of concern [Bergson] and solicitude [Fürsorge], this would be a tautology. Care cannot stand for some special attitude towards the Self; for the Self has already been characterized ontologically by Being-ahead-of-itself, a characteristic in which the other two items in the structure of care- Being-already-in and Being-alongside - have been posited as well [mitgesetzt]. 260 In drawing the connection I am proposing between Care and Temporality with the relevant analogous terms for my account: Desire, and Self-Consciousness, it is imperative that we understand that Heidegger account bears relation, only in the negative sense to the subject that concerns me here and represents the centerpiece of the theorizing of thinkers like Du Bois and Fanon. Thinking with Heidegger, it is important that we take stock of the relationship of the notion of care of the self and its relation to two canonical points of departure for Western thinking: Know thyself from the Oracle of Delphi and the Cartesian cogito in structuring our understanding of normative notions of consciousness and, of course, how this thinking relates to sub-altern modes of being. Several questions present themselves upon careful consideration of the passage quoted above specifically the notion that Care cannot stand for some special attitude towards the Self. What needs to

290 281 be determined here is whether Care as employed by Heidegger in his text, is necessarily a type of concern or awareness of the self that is based on auto-affection or whether Care, as a category, can accommodate affection, indifference or dislike? As a practical matter, if Heidegger s Care accommodates the three possible relationships of the self to the self then things become much easier: the account of Being that Heidegger describes and that looms over our understanding of Western Man accommodates the subaltern as a type of being that has care in the sense of indifference or hostility toward the self. This, however does not seem to be the case and it is the contention here that Heidegger s formulation of the terms of Western knowing subjectivity necessarily excludes the notions of self-referential indifference or dis-affection as the context for the existence of Abject being. Stated differently, the obvious limitations on the thinking presented by Heidegger for modes of subaltern being is, in my reading, not a limitation but in fact a central component of the constitution of the subject that concerns Heidegger and employs the counterpoint of beings lacking in Care as he establishes it as necessary, dialectically, for the existence of the Being. The approach I wish to take in buttressing this claim is to briefly walk backward to the foundations of the notions of Care of the Self: the Oracle and Descartes, through the thinking of Foucault as a means of triangulating Heidegger here. In particular, I am interested here in Foucault s Hermeneutics of the Subject 261 and a reading of Lectures from the first hours of February 10, 1982 and February 17 th of the same year. Foucault tells us in the first lecture referenced here that in western thought, in some sense what we might label, Post-Alcibiades the practice of the self no longer appears as a complement, an element indispensable to or a substitute for pedagogy the practice of the self is an injunction valid for the entire course of life. 262 Here Foucault asks that we begin

291 282 to imagine that this creation of the subject requires that we apply ourselves to ourselves, 263 and most particularly a process of conversion, to convert to the self is, once again, to turn around toward oneself. 264 This is posed as a shift away from the need for care of the self in order to take care of others in the city-state properly. Now one must take care of the self for itself, the relationship to others being deduced from and entailed by the relationship one establishes self to self. 265 What is important for my thinking here is Foucault s discussion of death. He writes: However, apart from these few indications xviii, what seems to me essential, or anyway typical of Hellenistic and Roman conversion, is that if there is a break, it is not produced within the self. There is not that caesura within the self by which the self tears itself away from itself and renounces itself in order to be reborn other than itself after a figurative death. If there is a break-and there is-it takes place with regard to what surrounds the self so that it is no longer enslaved, dependent, and constrained. There are then a series of terms or notions referring to this break between the self and everything else, but which is not a break of the self with the self. There are the terms designating flight (pheugein) and withdrawal (anakhoresis). You know that anakhoresis has two meanings: the retreat of an army before the enemy or again anakhoresis is the flight of the slave who takes off into the khora, the countryside, thus escaping subjection and his status as slave. 266 Foucault s thinking around the metamorphosis of the subject takes up three themes advanced by Seneca: first the pirouette where philosophy spins the subject around on himself, that is to say it performs the action by which, traditionally and legally, a master freed his slave 267. Second is that in Hellenistic and Roman conversion you must turn to look towards the self and finally, third, you must advance towards the self as you advance xviii Here Foucault is referring to Seneca s Letter 6 to Lucilius where he proposes that [i]t s incredible, I feel I am now making progress. It is not just an emendatio (correction). I am not content with mending my ways; I have the impression that I am being transfigured (transfiguari). (Foucault pp. 212)

292 283 toward an end. This is not merely a movement of the eyes, but a movement of the whole being, which must move toward the self as the sole objective. 268 All of these formulations, in the language of Heidegger, presuppose Dasein in the normative sense of its presence. In its lack, employing the first of Seneca s metaphors, the slave cannot spin herself around. In order for this to be accomplished, the subaltern self must execute the self-same type of separation from the self that Foucault finds anomalous in order to create a type of mastery of the self for the self in order to facilitate an alteration in the subject. The thinking of Heidegger and Foucault do not include this possibility. The question of Conversion becomes important here and Foucault cautions the reader not to view this as strictly a religious much less a Christian notion. It is important from a perspective of philosophical practice as well. He makes a bold statement in this context that is worthy of further attention. He proposes that it seems to [him] that we cannot understand revolutionary practice throughout the nineteenth century, we cannot understand the revolutionary individual, and what revolutionary experience meant for him, unless we take into account the notion or fundamental schema of conversion to revolution. 269 The Christian account of conversion (metanoia) is deemed by Foucault to be very different from the Platonic notion of the same (epistrophe) in several ways. 1) Christian conversion involves a sudden change; 2) there is a transition from one type of being to another and 3) the fundamental requirement of renunciation of oneself. We can spend time on the details of the differences Foucault points out between the Christian and Hellinistic and Roman thought but it seems to me that the most important question proves to be whether in the Hellinistic/Roman formulation the self is something to which you return because it is given in advance or an objective you must set for yourself and to which you might finally gain access if you achieve wisdom or is the self an object you keep always

293 284 before your eyes and reach through a movement that in the end can only be bestowed by wisdom. 270 Foucault closes this lecture with a question of whether you look inside yourself to discover the seeds of the truth within yourself or does it involve having to look at yourself in order to detect the traces of concupiscence within you and flush out and explore the secrets of your conscience? 271 I take these final ruminations on the part of Foucault as coequal to the question I am posing with respect to Care as accommodating a variety of relationships of the self to the self. Heidegger seems definitive in proposing that the self is already self-referentially related to the notion of knowledge of the self as a condition of Care, again stressing the essential notion here that Foucault presents with respect to the revolutionary praxis of the self in the 18 th century. If, in Heidegger s account the self is already unreflectively in possession for reverence for itself then the notion of revolutionary alteration of the self requires an aberration with respect to the knowledge of the self for itself that must be generated by external influences akin to those articulated by Du Bois but seemingly absent, except by the implication I have proposed, in Heidegger. The second lecture that I have referenced from Foucault continues with the question of what it means to return to the self? He uses the metaphor of navigation to describe the process and notes that three types of techniques are usually associated with this model of piloting: first, medicine, second, political government; third, the direction and government of oneself. 272 In my reading Foucault gets back to the question of the relationship of the self to governance here as he states that I do not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing thorough theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self. 273 The last points I d like to focus our attention is Foucault s discussion of third and fourth century Christian knowledge of the self characterizing it as aesthetic monastic rather

294 285 than Christian in the general sense of the word. This model is linked to knowledge of Truth as given in the original Text and by Revelation the heart must be purified in order to understand the Word, and it can only be purified by self-knowledge; and the Word must be received for one to be able to undertake purification of the heart and realize selfknowledge. 274 This hinges on three points according to Foucault: 1) circularity between Truth of the text and self-knowledge; 2) an exegetical method for self-knowledge and 3) selfrenunciation. 275 All of this causes us to return to the essential point of transitional being: birth to death, of Heidegger and the proposition of its lack in the being of the subaltern as the place to draw into conversation Heidegger, Foucault, and Du Bois. The reference from Being and Time that is of interest here is located within the text s Division Two: Dasein and Temporality, subsection I Dasein s Possibility of Being-A- Whole, and Being-Towards-Death, 48 That which is still outstanding; the end; totality. This renders this element of Heidegger s thinking of real import here because of the stakes this project places on the notion of death as the ubiquitous barrier between the relevant typologies of being. In order to change subjectivity, the notion of dealing with death in substantial fashion is the sine qua non of the effort to become that which the subject is not but aspires to be. Heidegger, in the closing moments of 47 he makes an important distinction between dying and perishing. In our terminology the ending of anything that is alive, is denoted as perishing [Verenden]. We can see the difference only if the kind of ending which Dasein can have is distinguished from the end of life. Of course dying may also be taken physiologically and biologically. But the medical concept of the exitus does not coincide with that of perishing. 276 This distinction stands within the context of this project as clarification of the genealogical temporality that exists separate from the corporeal being of the Abject or Exalted

295 286 subject that is explicit in Kantorowicz and Patterson. Perishing in the process of altering subjectivity is one way of realizing failure in the effort; the other would be a return to the point of departure. Passing through the barrier or threshold of death and arriving at the other side as an altered subject would signal success at least in the alteration of status if not qualitatively for the quality of life of the corporeal being in question. For Heidegger, this question of the not-yet in relation to death has implications for the ontological being of the subject in question. In the following considerations, the variations in which we are chiefly interested are those of end and totality; there are ways in which a Dasein gets a definite character ontologically, and as such they should lead to a primordial Interpretation of this entity. 277 In considering the role of the homo liminalis as the vehicle for transportation of the subject from one static subject position to another (i.e. Abject to Elemental) the role of the not yet or non-being as causal of an alteration of ontology is central for the imperative of the erasure of the misunderstanding of material and ontological relationships to temporality that creates the Abject and facilitates the continued existence of the Exalted, for Fanon and Du Bois in their revolutionary prescription for self-consciousness of the subject. If, for Du Bois the primordial/ontological understanding of the Negro as lesser that is implicated in secondsight or for Fanon the notion of White as Human is not erased there is no possibility of this figure altering its subject position. Heidegger is of great utility here in framing the not-yet as an awareness of the material opening that is perceived to have been created by the departure of the Exalted figure s individual time from that of the collective. With relation to what entities do we talk about that which is still outstanding? When we use the expression we have in view that which indeed belongs to an entity but is still missing. Outstanding, as a way of being missing, is grounded upon a belonging-to. For instance, the remainder yet to be received when a debt is to be balanced off, is still outstanding. That

296 287 which is still outstanding is not yet at one s disposal. When the debt gets paid off, that which is still outstanding gets liquidated; this signifies that the money comes in, or, in other words, that the remainder comes successively along. By this procedure the not-yet gets filled up, as it were, until the sum that is owed is all together. Therefore, to be still outstanding means that what belongs together is not yet all together. Ontologically, this implies the un-readiness-to-hand of those portions which have yet to be contributed. These portions have the same kind of Being as those which are ready-to-hand already; and the latter, for their part, do not have their kind of Being modified by having the remainder come in. 278 What this passage means for the thinking put forward here relative to the notion of Exalted being, through the separation of its temporality from that of the collective and having that ontological change read as a material debt to the temporality of the collective that subsequently requires the creation of the Abject subject as a form of material compensation, is that the opposite operation is a manifestation of the not yet as nonbeing as homo liminalis. The notion of the outstanding is the critical step here. The Exalted temporality is considered to be outstanding in that it is created as a quantifiable loss to the community at large. The notion, however, of the Abject temporality as outstanding is implicative of the first step toward it being resituated as acceptable to the community rather than excluded for its Dasein. Once it is considered outstanding it is then owed to the community rather than expelled from it. This is the notion of outstanding as belonging to that, in its appearance deeply harms the notion of the Abject as other qua the collective. The Exalted figure, which has willfully separated its time from the collective, has created the appearance of a deficit that is only possible in its nature as already understood to belong. The question that must be dealt with here is the creation of the Abject as separate from the collective as a form of compensation that is however, employing this language of debt, in a currency that is unacceptable or at least unrecognizable. This is substantively why

297 288 the notion is advanced here that all subjects, including the extreme actors, are fundamentally Elemental beings. With this understanding it is possible to understand the creation of the Abject subject as creating the compensation at the point of separation and the further existence of the newly abjected actor is itself not measureable in the calculus of the completeness of the collective with respect to the loss of the extreme subjects. This means that in substantive form, or with respect to this misunderstanding of temporality as a material and therefore compensatory object, that the Exalted and Abject, in order to maintain the integrity of the paradigmatic structure must exist in oppositional equivalency to one another. Here death and perishing become important to distinguish. Material death on the part of the Abject in a resolved and coherent paradigm would therefore require material death on the part of the Exalted to balance the equation. This would be unacceptable and is legible through the qualification that we have explored by Hegel in that the life and death struggle between master and slave is mitigated by work on the thing. What I am pointing toward here is that one of the important mechanical aspects of the homo liminalis is to serve as the point of transition between the ontological and material. To whit, in the case of the transition from Elemental subjectivity to the Abject death serving as the threshold it is clear that in order to reach Patterson s social death the notion of material deficit that creates the necessity of the Abject, in that transition has to have a moment of translation from the material to the ontological in order to elide the loss of the corporeal aspect of the subject s being. This is the being toward death that Heidegger exposes that allows the question of an ending to be separated into what we have marked here as meta (material) and ultra-meta (ontological) conditions beyond the question of perishing. It is the material death (perishing) of the ontological conditions of being that troubles the entire structure and I characterize as total revolution; this concept will be

298 289 explored more thoroughly in Division Four. Remaining focused on the essential notion of the not-yet which has been carefully considered in terms of the economic and debt it is useful to follow Heidegger s conversion of the discussion to the terms of ripening that enables us to see, in a different register, how time operates across this thinking. Ripening is the specific Being of the fruit. It is also a kind of Being of the not-yet (of unripeness); and, as such a kind of Being, it is formally analogous to Dasein, in that the latter, like the former, is in every case already its not-yet in a sense still to be defined. But even then, this does not signify that ripeness as an end and death as an end coincide with their ontological structure and ends. With ripeness, the fruit fulfills itself. But is the death at which Dasein has indeed fulfilled its course. But in doing so, has it necessarily exhausted its specific possibilities? Rather, are not these precisely what gets taken from Dasein? Even unfulfilled Dasein ends. 279 This facilitates the situation of the homo liminalis, along with the zone of non-being and Heidegger s not-yet, as meeting the primary requirement of knowing subjectivity in this project: a discernible typology of time that is internally sensible to the subject in question. This is how I read Heidegger s Being of the not-yet. In being in the transitional phase between unripeness and ripe there is the not yet of becoming ripe that is analogous to what I am seeking to pin down with respect to the transitional essence of homo liminalis. Along with the not-yet we have to be cognizant of what I will call the not-anymore which is the point of departure for the subject or object engaged in this process of metamorphosis. In the language of this thinking the homo liminalis (not-yet) is bracketed and defined, in this case, by the not anymore of Abject and the to be of Elemental being. The question that Heidegger places in the foreground is the ontological implication of the metamorphosis of the subject as it reaches or fails to reach the goal of its transition. What remains of the ontology of that which was coincident with the not-anymore? That being Heidegger s question, this project is primarily interested in the implication for ontology of this space of

299 290 the not-yet, non-being, or the homo liminalis. In approaching this question through the ultimate goal of resolution of the search for a coherent methodology for true subjectivity that we find in both Du Bois and Fanon it is useful to approach this subject matter in provocative thinking on the part of Sartre which has as its principal preoccupation the question of ontological being. 5d: Sartre s I Think I Think I Hate Myself: With respect to Jean-Paul Sartre s part, it is clear that he and Frantz Fanon exhibited profound influence upon one another. A portion of the encounter that interests me here is in the form of questioning the efficacy of the prevailing (at the time) paradigm for liberation of the subaltern black from the condition of abjection; Negritude. Sartre proposes the following, which Fanon quotes indulgently in the text of Black Skin, White Masks, from the French philosopher s text Black Orpheus. In fact Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the Blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without race. Thus Negritude is dedicated to its own destruction, it is transition and not result, a means and not the ultimate goal. 280 Rather than revisiting Fanon s response to this claim there is much to address here relative to the central preoccupations of this project that resonate with the notion of the existence of transitional modes of being as a means to achieve a goal. In this passage from Sartre it is abundantly clear that he views the transitional mode of Negritude as a necessary stage though not to be confused with a place of rest in spite of its seeming distance from its point of departure, the Nigger, as a robust form of subjectivity that serves to solve the central problematic. With this assertion on the part of Sartre we have substantively his

300 291 answer to the question posed regarding the durable nature of the state of homo liminalis. Perhaps the question more apropos of this thinking would be whether, in Sartre s formulation, the transitional nature that we have marked as the essence of homo liminalis is analogous to the understanding he presents of the nature of Negritude? Obviously, in that Fanon quotes directly from Black Orpheus, there is utility in thinking through that text relative to the questions raised here that are echoes of the effort put forth in Black Skin, White Masks. However, in approaching the problems surrounding the articulation of the phenomenology and ontology of the homo liminalis and its role and relationship to the alteration of the subject, I intend to focus on Sartre s 1934 essay, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. xix The argument that I wish to present as the basis for this move to The Transcendence of the Ego as a starting point is based upon resonance I find in that text with a passage from Black Skin, White Masks that I have addressed before and will quote again. If it is true that consciousness is an activity/process or transcendence, we must understand that this transcendence is haunted by the problem of love and understanding. 281 The crux of the matter here is to proffer an account of the central concerns of Sartre relative to the theory of consciousness he presents in the essay and how it relates to the Abject figure that has a radically different relationship with the self than that which is presented in this thinking as the locus of the creation of the ego. We must first account for the relationship that Sartre s posits for the I and what it has to the notion of self-reflective production of consciousness. This initially requires careful thought around the nature of Kant s understanding that transcendental consciousness is nothing but the set of conditions xix I owe this insight to a series of conversations with William Balan-Gaubert of the University of Chicago.

301 292 necessary for the existence of empirical consciousness. 282 Sartre proposes to take a view radically different from Kant 283 that will facilitate a way into the I of the subaltern subject. If we associate with Kant, therefore, the question of validity, the question of fact is still not broached. Consequently, it may be posed succinctly at this point: the I think must be able to accompany all our representations, but does it in fact accompany them? Supposing, moreover, that a certain representation, A, passes from some state unaccompanied by the I Think to a state in which the I Think does accompany it, will there follow a modification of the structure of A, or will the representation remain basically unchanged? The second question leads us to pose a third. The I Think must be able to accompany all our representations. But should we understand here that directly or indirectly the unity of our representations is effected by the I Think, or that the representations of a consciousness must be united and articulated in such a way that it is always possible in their regard to note an I Think? This third question seems to arise at the level of validity and, at this level, seems to renounce Kantian orthodoxy. But it is actually a question of fact, which may be formulated thus: is the I that we encounter in our consciousness made possible by the synthetic unity of our representations, or is it the I which in fact unites the representation of the other? 284 Sartre s series of question that are founded upon the actual possibility of the existence of the I Think in that the thinking for the I in question as a closed point of reference needs to be adjusted for the Abject subject as I have defined it here particularly as it relates to Du Bois second-sight, etc. that I have positioned as foundational to understanding Fanon. Reading the subaltern I through the lens of Du Bois it is clear that the I does not think anything of itself except that which and that the Other thinks of it. Recall the critical passage:...the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

302 293 Returning to Sartre with this formulation it allows us to recast the final question in the passage to wonder at how the subaltern/abject I does not in fact unite the representation of each other but is only the representation of the other. What I mean here is that it is unclear whether the theory of consciousness advanced by Sartre is relevant to the figure who has what Fanon marks as an inferiority complex [that] can be ascribed to a double process: First economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority. 285 This is at odds with the process that Fanon adopts as the normative formulation that Sartre advances in the essay under consideration. The process described by Sartre begins with what he labels as consciousness in the first degree or unreflected consciousness 286 As Sartre theorizes this foundational step in the process of consciousness the inapplicability of it to the Abject figure makes itself plain. We should add that this consciousness of consciousnessexcept in the case of reflective consciousness which we shall dwell on later - is not positional, which is to say that consciousness is not for itself its own object. Its object is by nature outside of it, and that is why consciousness posits and grasps the object in the same act. Consciousness knows itself only as absolute inwardness. We shall call such a consciousness: consciousness in the first degree, or unreflected consciousness. 287 Fanon begins the process of the internalization of inferiority on the part of the black subject with the notion of the economic which militates against the Sartrean notion of unreflected consciousness as absolute inwardness in that economies require interaction among different actors. This can be articulated by proposing that Fanon s subject, which is similar in important ways to Du Bois subject, is not capable of unreflected consciousness which exists without the possibility of consciousness in the first degree that has dire consequences for the cogito of this figure, the understanding of which Sartre marks as reflective consciousness. 288 Sartre, in working through this thinking, demonstrates a

303 294 separation between the cogito of Husserl and the Cartesian understanding that I propose leaves the discursive space for a Du Boisian/Fanonian understanding of the same. A pure consciousness is an absolute quite simply because it is conscious of itself. It remains therefore a phenomenon in the very special sense in which to be and to appear are one. It is all lightness, all translucence. This it is which differentiates the Cogito of Husserl from the Cartesian Cogito. But if the I were a necessary structure of consciousness, this opaque I would at once be raised to the rank of an absolute. We would then be in the presence of a monad. And this, indeed, is unfortunately the orientation of the new thought of Husserl. Consciousness is loaded down; consciousness has lost that character which rendered it the absolute existent by virtue of non-existence. It is heavy and ponderable. All the results of phenomenology begin to crumble if the I is not, by the same title as the world, a relative existent; that is to say, an object for consciousness. 289 This notion of consciousness being an object for itself is the linchpin in developing a notion of Du Boisian/Fanonian consciousness that is distinct from that described above in the critique of Sartre and his own take on the matter. For Fanon, this thinking, through Sartre, allows a richer reading of this notion of love and understanding that haunts the transcendence of consciousness in Black Skin, White Masks. The process of consciousness on the part of the Abject figure is predicated on the internalization of the abjection that becomes the content of a misapprehension of Du Bois second sight or/and Fanon s series of emotional aberrations as consciousness in the First degree when it is only a reflected, interactive and coercive brand of reflected consciousness. This creates a point of ontological mis-re-memory in that the subject perceives an I that is positioned as the foundation of consciousness that is supposed to be unreflected consciousness but is in fact reflected consciousness. Sartre makes the important point that all writers who have described the Cogito have dealt with it as a reflective operation, that is to say, an operation of the second degree. 290 This inadvertently forgets the existence of consciousness for the Elemental

304 295 subject that is consciousness in the first degree and presents the central problematic for the Abject subject. Carefully unpacking this we find that Sartre proposes that the Cogito is in fact the synthesis of two consciousnesses: an indissoluble unity of the reflecting consciousness and the reflected consciousness (to the point that the reflecting consciousness could not exist without the reflected consciousness). But the fact remains that we are in the presence of two consciousnesses, one which is conscious of the other. 291 This would, if that were the crux of the matter, render Elemental consciousness, which I necessarily take Sartre to be describing, as not fundamentally at odds with the type of consciousness of the Abject subject that is most thoroughly described by Du Bois tripartite formulation. The separation between the two subjects, Elemental and Abject, at the level of the Cogito is thrown back to the point of departure which, for the former, is true consciousness in the first degree and for the latter is consciousness in the second degree mistaken for consciousness in the first degree. Sartre incisively brings into the conversation, returning to the consciousness of the I, the I that thinks and proposes that: the consciousness which says I Think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks. Or rather it is not its own thought which it posits as this thetic act. We are then justified in asking ourselves if the I which thinks is common to the two superimposed consciousnesses, or if it is not rather the I of reflected consciousness. All reflected consciousness is, indeed, in itself unreflected, and a new act of the third degree is necessary in order to posit it. Moreover, there is no infinite regress here, since a consciousness has no need at all of a reflecting consciousness in order to be conscious of itself. It simply does not posit itself as an object. 292 The situation for the Abject subject is related to the interaction of the two reflected consciousnesses, one of which, the Elemental, which meets the strictures posed here by Sartre and the other, the Abject, which does not. In substance, the notion of the superimposition of

305 296 the two consciousnesses fails here in that Abject consciousness is not true selfconsciousness in that, contrary to Sartre s account, this form of consciousness has a need for reflecting consciousness and is in fact only that reflected consciousness. It, Abject consciousness, is incapable of not posit[ing] itself as an object. This troubles the ego creation that is the central concern of Sartre in this essay and establishes the situation that concerns Fanon in that: As long as the black man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others. There is in fact a being for other, as described by Hegel, but an ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. 293 Here Fanon articulates the situation that establishes and maintains the existence of the Abject subject through the misjudgment of the material and ontological by the Elemental subject. To unpack this the dramatis personae must be delineated and situated on the proper team : The men, black and white, are material subjects and being for the other is a result of ontological perception of each for the other that is supposed to occur at the level of ultrameta perception but is encumbered with the employment of the ocular (material) to experience it: The black man [material/meta] has no ontological [ultra-meta] resistance in the eyes [material] of the white man [material]. The intercession of the material as the means by which an ontological being creates this cascading problem returns us, in many ways to the beginning of this project where we witnessed Burke placing in the experience of the formerly blind youth the accidental observation of the Negro woman: the first time the boy saw a black object, it gave him great uneasiness and that some time after, upon accidently seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight. 294

306 297 This scenario is repurposed here by Fanon in the opening to Chapter Five of Black Skin, White Masks, where he bears witness to the cry of another child who observes the black body and says: Maman, look, a Negro; I m scared! 295 This material response has affect on the ontology of the Abject subject and allows us to return to Sartre before pressing on. Not only is the observer afraid of the Negro but, due to the confusion of first and second degree consciousness, the Negro is also afraid of itself. Sartre, in his account of the constitution of the ego, which is not the direct unity of reflected consciousnesses 296, proposes that there is an immanent unity of these consciousnesses: the flux of consciousness constituting itself as the unity of itself. 297 This flux is essential for our understanding of the relation of this consciousness to what I have argued in this text. Sartre footnotes this passage as Cf. Vorlesungen Zur Phanomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, op. cit., passim. 298 I have addressed Husserl s account here in Division Two but it appears that Sartre s notion of flux is equivalent to the construction of internal time signatures that so much of this project depends upon. This flux, or continuous movement within the self, in Sartre s account, establishes the individual and a distinct form of ontological consciousness, that of internal time, that then allows for transcendent unity: states and actions. The ego is the unity of states and actions optionally, of qualities. It is the unity of transcendent unities, and itself transcendent. 299 For the figure that interests us, with the compromised relationship with internal time that we have marked and further, the fracturing relationship of that internal temporality to the collectivity, we trouble the formation of the ego as such for the Abject figure. To further problematize this thinking, Sartre, in his explanation of this logic focuses next on States as Transcendent Unities of Consciousness and in so doing proffers the following that requires close consideration. The state appears to reflective consciousness. The state is given to it, and is the object of concrete intuition. If I hate

307 298 Peter, my hatred of Peter is a state that I can apprehend by reflection. This state is present to the gaze of reflective consciousness. It is real Let us consider a reflective experience of hatred. I see Peter, I feel a sort of profound convulsion of repugnance and anger at the sight of him (I am already on the reflective level): the convulsion is consciousness Hatred, then, is a transcendent object. Each Erlebnis reveals it as a whole, but at the same time the Erlebnis is a profile, a projection (an Abschattung). Hatred is credit for an infinity of angry or repulsed consciousnesses in the past and in the future. It is the transcendent unity of this infinity of consciousnesses. Thus, to say I hate or I love on the occasion of a particular consciousness of attraction or repugnance is to effect a veritable passage to infinity, rather analogous to that which we effect when we perceive an inkstand, or the blue of the blotter. 300 Fair enough. There are two contexts that need exploration to parse the effect here for the Abject subject. What happens to the subject, like Peter, that finds himself the object of hatred on the part of the observer and further mistakenly perceives this sensation of hatred as consciousness in the first degree and exhibits what I have described as auto disaffection for himself rendering Sartre s self developmental flux as a process of selfhatred? Or, given this circumstance, can a figure like Peter, who has perceived the material condition of external hatred as the ontology of the self, be capable of forming recognitive interaction with other consciousnesses? To answer this problematic I will first lean on Shakespeare s Moor to form an answer to these questions. 6: I and I Hate the Moor. : If my sadness brought you gladness I d be glad to be sad If my feeling bad made you feel good I would always feel bad Whatever Makes You Happy Smokey Robinson & the Miracles

308 299 As a point of departure from Sartre s discursive employment of hatred we can examine in some detail Shakespeare s exemplar of it through his play The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice which is traditionally examined from a perspective of jealousy and envy but for the purpose of this project it is hate that forms the sine qua non of the narrative. As stated above, it is my intention to interrogate hatred as formative of a type of subject (the Abject) and in so doing further question the implication of hatred for the phenomenology of perception of the object of hated. In so doing, the improvisation on the famous quote from Iago in Act I. Scene 3 of the Othello; I hate the Moor, And it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets He has done my office. I know not if t be true, But I, for mere suspicion of that kind, Will do as if for surety. 301 serves as the title for this section, the implication being that Othello hates himself. It is clear, on the surface, that Iago hates the Moor and there is, at least in the mind of Iago, an account of why. By recasting the line as I and I, it is intended to shift the perspective to the internal dynamic of hatred that the Moor harbors for himself. In the earliest moments of the play, Desdemona, when questioned regarding the veracity of her love for the Moor says, I saw Othello s visage in his mind. 302 Immediately we witness the problematic that I have marked in dealing with Sartre s notions of first through third degree consciousness. The central issue here is how, what Desdemona proposes that she sees when she observes the Moor, is the product of the confusion of the material and ontological that creates that Abject subject as I have constituted it here? Recall the scenario in detail; the Moor has been called to account for what witchcraft he has employed to woo Desdemona. BRABANTIO: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter? Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her 303

309 300 Othello, for his part in explaining his marriage to Desdemona, refutes the enchantment but leaves the notion of his damnation untroubled. OTHELLO: Yet, by your gracious patience, I will a round unvarnished tale deliver Of my whole course of love, what drugs, what charms, What conjuration and what mighty magic- For such proceeding I am charged withal- I won his daughter. 304 In formulating his unvarnished tale, Othello references the access he was granted by Desdemona s father, Brabantio. Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes That I have passed. 305 Othello is aware from the outset that it is the unique nature of his personal narrative that interests first Brabantio and then his daughter. It is here that Shakespeare establishes the foundation from which Othello operates. We are immediately required to note the inseparability of Othello from the events of his life. I ran it through even from my boyish days To th very moment that he bade me tell it, Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i th imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence, 306 The question that inhabits this quote finds its answer in understanding that there is little of Othello that, in this regard, exists outside of his experiences. Who was he prior to the hardships he has experienced or are we to understand that the hardships might perhaps be a product of who he is? Perhaps it does not matter because the figure that has found his way to Venice and Brabantio s home has little choice but to define himself in this manner.

310 301 Lines leave little doubt regarding the effect these tales have had on Desdemona and their linkage to Othello s ambition. Which ever as she could with haste dispatched She d come again, and with greedy ear Devour up my discourse; which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimages dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively. I did consent, And often did beguile her of her tears When I did speak of some distressful strife That my youth suffered. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of kisses She swore in faith twas strange, twas passing strange, Twas pitiful, twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spoke. She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used. 307 This is a rich passage. Othello clearly characterizes Desdemona s interest in him as a product of the strange and pitiful nature of his personal narrative. What is ambiguous are the closing moments of the quoted passage. A charitable reading of Desdemona s request for Othello to find a friend that loves her allows us to believe that the woman was coyly hinting to the Moor that he would be wise to proceed on his own account. A less kind and perhaps cynical reading, and I propose one that fits with the argument presented here and for which I deem the text sympathetic, is that Desdemona is most interested in the story and would be pleased if it were to come from someone, anyone, else, whom she would immediately fall in love with. This is at some remove from the love at first sight that attends Romeo s first interaction with Juliet. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it sight. For I

311 302 ne er saw true beauty till this night. 308 The attraction that Desdemona has for Othello is disembodied or more correctly, in spite of his body. His stories become a costume or persona that exist independently of his corporeality and can, at least in theory, be positioned elsewhere to greater affect. The comparison to Romeo and Juliet, can be taken up tangentialy but I argue to substantive comparative value. Romeo and Juliet know nothing about each other at the point they become enthralled with one another. When they do find out the important aspects of their personal narratives it is in spite of them that they want to remain together. The body, in this case can be considered as a higher order actor than the narrative. Othello and Desdemona exist in contradistinction to this. The titles are definitive. The play is not titled Othello and Desdemona. The play is about the subjectivity of Othello and nothing more. Othello, he asserts, loves Desdemona because she pities his stories; not him. The question that presents itself here is to what extent subjects produce their stories or are produced by them. This is important in grappling with the implication for the Abject subject specifically who is constituted by a separation of material and ontological conditions. What we see here is more complex and speaks to why I view Othello as the prototypical literary representation of the homo liminalis in at least two registers: Most prominently we are allowed to witness an attempt to decouple the second order abjection of the body of the Other through the process of misapprehension of the ontological for the material that then becomes embodied as visual evidence of damnation. Desdemona, in focusing only on the narrative life of Othello has created a disembodied figure that marks one of two typologies of homo liminalis that require identification: The subject that reaches this point of transitory being can be trans-subjective or poly-subjective. I will spend more time on this later but briefly the homo liminalis can be witnessed, reflectively or unreflectively as; from an internal or external perspective, either in the process of changing from one subject position to another

312 303 or being multi-subjective in that the actor has either adopted or had forced upon it, a position that is not between subjects but has adopted aspects of disparate ways of being as a permanent condition. In first focusing here on the observational position of Desdemona and her gaze at Othello we can wonder how this can be construed as love particularly when we have both she and Othello marking pity as the foundation of their affection. For Othello s part, recall that he loves Desdemona because: She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. In ascertaining what this means, particularly with respect to the vision of the self that Desdemona witnesses when she observes Othello we have to present some account of how Othello himself views the events that make up his personal narrative. How does Othello, in unreflective fashion, perceive his personal narrative and understanding that, what is it that makes up the Othello that Desdemona observes? There is little of Othello that exists outside of his experiences. What does exist is implicated by masochism on the part of Othello, which in turn feeds the sadism of Desdemona and her father. This requires further thinking on the limitation of this type of love against the context of Sartre s transcendental subject. As the epigraph that opens this section, the opening phrases of Smokey Robinson s Whatever Makes You Happy emphasizes, it is the sadness of the figure that attracts and pleases the object of his affection. In order to maintain the interest of the person in question and therefore please himself, the protagonist of the tune has to make himself appear sad in order to hide from his lover the fact of his pleasure. Showing happiness would destroy the attraction for the unhappiness of the subject. Othello and Desdemona find themselves likewise engaged in love based upon hatred. Hatred here being operationalized as Othello s internal dislike for himself and the trials that he has endured. This places a great

313 304 deal of stress upon the paradigmatic structure of affection in that the point of departure of this relationship depends upon a lack of affection for the self on the part of Othello. Like Iago and for similar reasons, Othello also hates the Moor. What Desdemona is in fact in love with is Othello s hatred for himself; a hatred that is made accessible by the conversion of the manifold existence of the Moor into pure discourse. Hegel s take on aesthetics generally and tragedy specifically offers an effective tool for thinking through the implication of this transformation of corporeal being into a discursive being. With respect to tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy in particular, Hegel proposes that there is a strictly internal set of conditions that prefigure and constitute the tragic. In the text of his Aesthetics, Hegel focuses on Macbeth. So, for example, Macbeth s character is determined by his passion of ambition. At the start he hesitates, but then he stretches out his hand to the crown, commits murder to get it, and, in order to maintain it, storms away through every atrocity. This reckless firmness, this identity of the man with himself and the end arising from his own decision, gives him an essential interest for us. 309 Hegel is careful to focus our attention on the fact that Macbeth and the path that he follows, is a product of his own internal calculus. What shatters Macbeth, Hegel asserts, after he has done the deed is a storm from without 310 Without wandering into the thicket that is Macbeth, it is important to take stock of Hegel s reading of the work in order to frame the inclusion of Othello in this milieu. What is the internal directive of Othello? How is he formed and what are the external forces that share his foundation? The query that I wish to place at the forefront of this discussion is whether the Othello created by Shakespeare, because of his blackness/otherness is actually operating in contradistinction to the argument surrounding Macbeth. Stated differently, I argue that in Othello, there is a unity of inner and outer consciousness/subjectivity that does not demonstrate a breach from

314 305 external forces in opposition to inner firmness. This requires that we take seriously a distinction between the visual appearance of a subject named Othello and the notion of blackness as a thick concept in the Williamsonian sense; thick being a concept that has valence across a number of registers and robustly so. Othello, the individual, has a certain physical (material) appearance, whatever that may be, and this is making allowance for the debate that continues to rage as to whether Othello is explicitly black or an Arab who may or may not be black. The point is that he is read as Other and that concept is coded as black. This blackness may or may not be co-terminus with the presence of a black body but the Othering as black is the point here. That central concern is the preoccupation here; how much of who Othello believes himself to be is a product of what others believe about him? If that internal subjectivity is comprised of what the external world thinks about this Other then we have a substantially more complex figure to consider than that of Macbeth in a great sense in that he is not negatively physically marked as a character in the way that Othello and Richard III seem to be. The argument here is that the consciousness in its fullness of Othello is the product of an already-always understood instability and Desdemona s vision of the visage in her husband s mind is already infected with the seeds of disaster. Restating Hegel through his formulation regarding the external forces that shatter Macbeth in order to particularize the case for Othello, the phrase would read: What shatters Othello after he has done the deed, is a storm from within. The mandate now is to unpack this formulation and define the deed and the storm. What I take as the deed returns us to the flux of consciousness that we see in Sartre. The deed is the disaffection of Othello for himself that renders that affection between Othello and Desdemona as infected with the foundational lack of self-love that is the ontological being of the Moor. The storm within the Moor then becomes the visage that Desdemona witnesses when she observes Othello that she takes as

315 306 the Moor s consciousness in the first degree that is immaterial and is effectively only his existence as an exposition of the pitiful circumstances of his existence. It is useful here to examine the figure of Othello in relation to Hegel s Beautiful Soul. The key to this proposition is the notion that Othello s discourse allows a critical separation from the self and becomes its own object. Hegel writes: Here once again we see language as the existence of spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others. It is selfconsciousness which as such is immediately on hand, and as this self-consciousness, it is universal. Language is the self separating itself from itself, the self which, as the I=I, becomes objective to itself and which in this objectivity likewise sustains itself as this self, coalesces with others, and is their self-consciousness. The self likewise takes itself to be as it is taken to be by others, and this act of taking is precisely existence which has become a self. 311 This language of Hegel s echoes the important concepts I have presented here regarding the inward turn of the romantic artist. The content that language has acquired here is no longer the inverted and inverting, disrupted self of the world of cultural development. Rather, it is spirit which has returned into itself 312 With respect to the subject before us, when Othello represents his subjectivity in the form of his stories there is a cessation or perhaps advancement beyond the internally self-referential nature of the selftouching I have referenced. By telling the story the self is separated from the self or itself. Recall Othello s statement to his interlocutors; Which ever she could with haste dispatched She d come again, and with greedy ear Devour up my discourse In Hegelian terms, Desdemona has consumed the spirit of Othello. He has emptied himself through speech and there is little that remains of him outside or post this act. It is important here to briefly consider the question of agency that hovers over this claim. The argument I would like to put forward is that this is consensual inter(dis)course between Othello and

316 307 Desdemona. Brabantio, who Othello tells all of the same stories, never possesses him through them. Desdemona, however, takes all of him. The hollow object which it generates itself thus now fills it with the consciousness of emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as it becomes an essenceless object, and as it goes beyond this loss and then falls back on itself it merely finds itself as lost.-in this transparent purity of its moments it becomes an unhappy, so called beautiful soul, and its burning embers gradually die out, and as they do, the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into air. 313 There is much to deal with here, not the least important being the reappearance of the unhappy [soul] (unglückliche [Steele]) that throws us back to the moments following the Master/Slave dialectic, Freedom of self-consciousness; stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness. Setting aside for another project the provocative question of the relationship between the unhappiness of consciousness and spirit we can return to Othello armed with this mode of understanding framed by Hegel. The beautiful soul, which lacks all actuality, which is caught in the contradiction between its pure self and its necessity to empty itself into existence act to convert itself into actuality exists in the immediacy of opposition to which it so tenaciously clings -and thus, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, it breaks down into madness and melts into yearning tubercular consumption. It thereby in fact gives up its grim adherence to its being for-itself, but it only manages to engender merely the spiritless unity of being. 314 From this position we can begin to understand that at this point in the play, Othello exists only in his narrative and that is possessed/devoured by Desdemona. He cannot resolve himself as a being any longer without her and when questions arise about the veracity of the relationship and the being that possesses him, there are few options left to the unstable existence of Othello. Stanley Cavell, in my reading, takes this up in his Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare and his essay on Othello; Othello and the Stake of the

317 308 Other. Cavell meditates carefully on the question of whether Othello ever possesses Desdemona in wondering if their marriage is ever consummated. For some reason this moot question seems to occupy much of the ink on the Moor. I am interested in the hyperawareness of the corporeality of Desdemona by Othello and the possession by that body of his essence. Stated differently, in my reading, the unity of Othello and Desdemona occurred when she devoured his stories. He did not need to physically penetrate her. What we are witness to is the separation of the essence of the Moor from his corpus. Cavell proposes that he is beyond this concern and is focused rather with Othello s skepticism regarding the fidelity of Desdemona. Nothing could be more certain to Othello than that Desdemona exists; is flesh and blood; is separate from him; other. This is precisely the possibility that tortures him. The context of his torture is the premonition of the existence of another, hence his own, his own dependent, as partial. According to me further, his professions of skepticism over her faithfulness are a cover story for deeper convictions; a terrible doubt covering a yet more terrible certainty, an unstable certainty. 315 I am recasting this concern by proposing that Othello is aware of two separations: he from Desdemona and he from himself. His concern then becomes the location within his wife of the essential part of his essence. So, returning to the Hegelian statement that drives this portion of the analysis, I have presented an account of the deed, now, following Cavell, I need to close the loop by locating the storm from within which is inextricably linked to these separations. What I am proposing here is three-fold: First, that Desdemona exists to Othello, second, that his essence has been separated from his body and is possessed by Desdemona and finally he wonders at the betrayal of his body by his essence within his wife. I hope that it has been clear that I mean to take seriously the Hegelian notion of things being at the beginning what they are at the end. That being said, this question of the

318 309 storm from within includes the process of external recognition however I intend to trouble the notion of this with respect to Othello s character particularly because I question if there is a Moor that is self determined. One way of quickly describing the tension I am pointing to is to not loose sight of the Du Boisian notions of second-sight, which yields no true selfconsciousness and double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. 316 There is little reason to think that Du Bois is not useful here as raised earlier in this piece. With that in mind, the storm from within that shatters Othello is the storm from without that defines him as absolutely Other : strange and pitiful. In this formulation, the storm that we are searching for is the defining of the other as the exemplar of an unstable subjectivity. Using the terms that Cavell provides and keeping account of my proposal that Desdemona has taken possession of Othello s identity, the fact of Othello s skepticism with respect to Desdemona is at the same time skepticism about himself. The visage that Desdemona sees in the Moor s mind is the image of an unstable subject. Othello finds himself mired in a Manichean world that he struggles to resolve with respect to all of things except the most salient, his own subjectivity. By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I ll have some proof. My name, that was as fresh As Dian s visage, in now begrimed and black As mine own face. 317 Othello has reached a point of unity between the idea and the object and the proposal I place before us now is that the murder of Desdemona is more about recovering his subjectivity than jealously. What does this mean? Desdemona, recall, saw Othello s visage in his mind. In strictly Hegelian terms, Desdemona should be able to see herself in the mind of Othello; if that is not the case we

319 310 have a mystery to work out. Desdemona, in devouring the subjectivity of Othello through his tales has become Othello, or at least in possession of his essence. There is no textual evidence of Othello looking upon Desdemona and seeing anything other than the falsity that Iago places upon her. As a practical matter, we know nothing about Desdemona beyond her existence as the daughter who betrayed her father and likewise her husband. I argue that when looking at Desdemona we are viewing Othello and when Othello murders her he is extinguishing the essence she has taken possession of and is, in actuality killing himself. With this reading we can view with new eyes the answer Desdemona gives to her lady s question regarding who has harmed her. Desdemona s response Nobody, I myself. 318 Othello is a non-person because she possesses him and in essence is him so when the corporeal Moor smothers her she is indeed smothering herself and in the act, Othello is also killing himself within his wife. There is no Desdemona in this register. Othello kills himself twice; first the ultra-meta or ontological being that has come to rest in Desdemona and finally the meta or material physical body which can no longer exist in this world. This allows us to confront the barrier of death that lies between subjects as a form of nothingness that is the primary reason for the existence of this portion of the text and the location of the homo liminalis. Othello, in his existence that I mark as that of a homo liminalis, is at the outset, what I have described as poly-subjective, or what we can label as the Sovereign Negro, both Abject and Exalted and markedly non-elemental. The pressure to resolve his instability, both internal and external forces him to confront death. This allows, at the outset for the fact of his assuming the mantel of authority within the context of a social order that would otherwise find his presence repugnant or at least one to be marginalized. He has cheated death over

320 311 and over, of the corporeal sort, and that acumen facilitates his position of authority. This is apparent in the final scene of the play where Othello takes his corporeal life: OTHELLO Soft you, a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know t. No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unusèd to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus. 319 This passage is of critical importance for framing the relationship that Shakespeare establishes here between service to the state and the possibility of an altered subject position. The statement on the part of Othello, in my reading, is divided into two parts, the first of which fractures the relationship of his service to a positively altered subjectivity position in the societal order: I have done the state some service, and they know t. No more of that. This can be taken one of two ways or the text may accommodate both. Othello is asserting that he will no longer be of positive service to the state and/or the fact of his previous service does not bear upon the weighty matters at hand. In either case, the text then situates the subject Othello as indelibly abject and it is these fundamental flaws that render his demise inevitable. Speak of me as I am, he demands with no extenuating circumstances. This seems to imply that it is, at least in the mind of Othello, the fault of his constitution that formed the terms and conditions of his demise.

321 312 The second part of this statement establishes death as a vehicle for the transformation of the subject to the fore. Contrary to his opening exhortation to ignore the service he has rendered the state he raises, what I take as an episode of the destruction of his ontological self in demonstration of his desire to separate himself from the material conditions of his abjection by punishing another Muslim who has traduced the state. This formulation bridges the gap between the material and ontological conditions of abjection that have been described here. The Turk physically assaults the Venetian and in so doing undermines the integrity of the state. It is Othello s killing of the Muslim that restores order to the relationship between the state of Venice and subalterns who would challenge it. It is this relationship to death and Othello s employment of it that serves to destabilize societal order. In the first instance, Othello, as a warrior and having the reputation of one who cheats death is able to situate himself as what I have marked as the Poly-subjective homo liminalis. He, at this stage exemplifies what I call the Sovereign Negro, both Abject and Exalted at the same time with an added layer of complication that necessarily re-establishes while, at the same time de-coupling, the relationship of this hybrid being to the foundational subjectivity of Elemental being. A recent essay by Donald Hendrick in PMLA proposes the following with respect to this passage: Othello begins his lengthy written-at-a distance play summary Set you down this (360) with his state-service tale, proceeding through his jealousy tale as he discovers to us the final concealed weapon, performing his last story, of having once slain a deceptive Turk ( who traduced the state ), by slaying himself, simultaneously acting out his story: I smote him thus (365-65). As if composing his own magnificent magic act, the born-again entertainer carries out his feat using the traditional trick of bodily substitution himself for the Turk along with the foundational magic maneuver, concealing a small movement with the larger. His stage dagger would undoubtedly have been a trick one, like those illustrated in the era s magic 2 handbooks (Scot 295; Hocus Pocus). 320

322 313 Othello (the General), like any leader in the Western political tradition, is invested, by virtue of his office, with additive components to the corporeal body, the most important of which being that of sovereignty and the legitimacy it must enjoy and convey. This notion complicates the existence of any individual who comes to represent the state but it becomes particularly vexing when a third component is added to Elemental and Exalted being; that of the Abject. Abjection, as we have witnessed, at least from its referent in the Phaedrus, in Western ideology came to be coincident with blackness by this time in the development of the modern s creation of and engagement with the Other. The Negro is therefore antithetical to agency much less its highest expression as sovereign over the lives of others. As a practical matter, Othello in this regard can be productively contrasted against a similar historical figure who has reached the point of command through force of arms: Napoleon. Steven Englund s Napoleon: A Political Life opens the subsection of his chapter Power(III): Naming It (From Citizen Consul to Emperor of the French) on the Coronation with the epigraph A servile pope has anointed a black demon. The sentence in French le pape serf a sacré un noir demon proposes that the elevation of Napoleon by the pope is to sanctify the profane. The purpose of Napoleon s coronation, which contemporaries referred to as sacre, was as multifaceted as the ceremony itself was eclectic, but one thing we may assert with certitude is this: the event s significance for the anointed one was not spiritual, as was the case with many rulers and their sacres. There were a dozen reasons Napoleon wanted a coronation-the prestige it would confer in international royalist and Catholic milieu, where the usurper desperately needed cachet; the foundation it would give his dynasty ; the further pacification it might effect among Frenchmen still divided by religion-but its personal religious meaning was not one of them. Napoleon Bonaparte was a self-made man, and he worshipped his creator. 321

323 314 The question that is foregrounded here is that of the legitimacy of that which is deemed illegitimate. In practice whether the divine cloak of sovereignty might mask the flaws of the body at least so far as he would then be considered the embodiment of authority made secular and therefore, in this formulation, Exalted. The requirement here is to propose the existence of that which, even in the abstract is deemed to be impossible, to encompass in one body the Exalted and the Abject. This must be marked as significantly different than the two-ness we have witnessed in the thinking of Du Bois and is implicit in that of the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks. Recall that I parsed Du Bois language in this manner: One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 322 What this seems to propose is that there is a way to accommodate the American as Elemental (citizen) and the Negro as Abject within the phenotypically dark body as the vessel for this bifurcated mode of existence. However, in approaching the literary figure of Othello or, for that matter, the historical figure Toussaint L Ouverture, the body remains as it is represented in Du Bois but contains, at the same time the Elemental (human/citizen), the Abject (Negro/Moor/Slave), and the Exalted (General/Governor). Here we can see the important distinction between the Abject figure as black that occupies our attention in this project and Napoleon who was characterized as a metaphoric black demon ; Othello and Toussaint L Ouverture, based upon the cultural standards of the day were understood to be the sub-human thing itself. Othello and likewise L Ouverture, in his existence, must be carefully considered as a product of these three profound juxtapositions of existential Being. He is clearly a corporeal entity, a fact of the state of all living creatures but that being is phenotypically black and is presupposed to be Abject. Societal order, as just that, ordered, accommodates or more

324 315 appropriately creates the stable existence of the figure that is black and Abject. Othello, for his part, threatens the integrity of this paradigm by, in multiple instances, crossing the barrier of death that separates his subjectivity from that as Elemental and human. Shakespeare represents this in first Brabantio and then Desdemona s fascination with the life of Othello, which is in fact only life in that he has spent his time eliding death. This tends to fracture the structure of Venetian/western societal order. The most obvious opportunity to observe this is in the complication that the basic human interaction between Othello and Desdemona causes in the lives of the conspirators and her father. The additional subjectivity, Exalted, is what allows for the possibility of the relationship with Desdemona. As we have noted, the only way that this complex mixture of subjects is possible is at the level of the ultra-meta: material conditions do not allow for the existence of multiple objects in the same place. In this conversion of all of Othello s multiplicity of subjectivities into pure discourse we witness the existence of the homo liminalis as the poly-subjective rather than transitional subject. In thinking on the stress this exerts on the structure of Venetian society we can employ Du Bois conceptualization of two-ness in that the state as such stands in for the body and within it are located constitutive elements that are in contradiction to one another and contrary to the ideal construction and integrity of it. The existence of the General as a constitutive element of the state is acceptable in that he exists to defend its integrity. The contra-distinctive existence within the body of that which does violence to it (the Turk/Muslim that traduces the state) presents similar stress to the integrity of the project as that inherent in the Negro and American occupying the space within the dark body. The question then naturally becomes what strength, in the case of Othello, holds the warring subjects together and on the other hand what forces seek to cast out the contrary forms of being that threaten the integrity of the enterprise.

325 316 The text of the play seems to be sympathetic to a reading that allows for Othello s continuous service to the state to allow for this tenuous structure to hold. So long as his life is at risk for the benefit of Venice his counter-constitutive existence is counterbalanced by this service. Othello knows this. It is his courtship of Desdemona and the interruption of the imperative that Abject subjects are prevented from co-mingling with the collective temporality in the context of genealogy that serves to destroy the delicate balance Othello has struck between his Abject and Exalted subjectivities. It is the explicit fear of miscegenation that drives multiple figures to hate the Moor. Recall the contrivance on the part of Iago that he has been cuckolded by Othello that he employs as the fuel for his plot to destroy the general and in so doing restore the societal order. Earlier in this section I attempted to take off the table the question of material intercourse on the part of Othello and Desdemona, a preoccupation of commentators that speaks to the brilliance of the Bard in tugging relentlessly at the core of the concerns that drive the tragic interactions he presents. The discursive nature of Othello s being, the conversion of the materiality of black being to ontological time, that in finding itself inside of Desdemona, necessarily becomes an element of the combination of individual temporalities that make up collective time: Othello now situates himself within the genealogy and temporality of Venice where before he had been explicitly alienated. The abdication or erasure of Othello s primordial being is demonstrated in that he also seems to have abandoned Islam as a practice and its marking of time through the obligatory daily prayers. This form of liminal being, the poly-subjective, requires that the subject linger in a particular typology of non-being that erases the material existence of the subject and replaces it with discourse. This is a dangerous and unstable state outside of the wholesale alteration of the social order s methodology for inclusion or exclusion of certain individual time signatures that would then stabilize this alternative

326 317 system. This question of misogyny is explicitly addressed in the linkage to concrete reality I am reaching toward with respect to the Haitian revolutionary presence of the figure of L Ouverture. There will be more about this later but it is important here to relate this critical concern that surrounds the question of sex between black men and white women. C.L.R. James historical account points us to this tension in his text that echoes that of Shakespeare s Othello. Even Jean François, royalist, dismissed Laveux overtures with incisive scorn. Until I see, M. Laveaux and other French gentlemen of his quality giving their daughters in marriage to Negroes, only then will I believe in all your pretend equality. 323 L Ouverture, like Othello, is never able to escape the sense-certainty of his appearance that belies his authority. What these whites (with their memories of the past) thought at being looked over, examined and granted posts with such assurance by a former slave is not known. But there is no record of any disrespect or open hostility. They may have hated in private, but it would have been difficult to get any response White women told Laveaux the attention and assistance that they had received from this astonishing man, called the old, ex-slave, with his despised black skin, their father. 324 It is perhaps this complex relationship between the material existence of Othello and the ontological existence of the Abject and Exalted that trouble the structure that is the paradigmatic form of the western state. Recall that the existence of the Exalted and the Abject are framed here as a voluntary and involuntary separation of individual temporality from the collective or Elemental. This ontological alterations of the normative condition of collective time that is the separation of the Exalted individual s time from the collective, is read by the Elemental subject as a material subtraction from collective time that forms the necessity of establishing the material existence of an Abject figure that, as a second order consideration, exists as ontologically, similarly reviled. The fact is that ontological abjection and exaltation,

327 318 in their immateriality, are not necessarily embodied and can exist as purely discursive phenomenon separate from the corporeal locus of their existence. Othello, in his desire to possess the corporeal existence of Desdemona causes the material exposition of the ontological condition of this combination of extreme subjects. This cannot hold itself together without revolutionary destruction of the terms of ontological and material existence. Fanon addresses these same concerns. The most obvious place to explore these echoes of Othello and the concern respecting the social threat of black/white intimacy are Chapters Two and Three of Black Skin, White Masks, that address sequentially the woman of color and the white man followed by the man of color and the white woman. However, in reification of the central argument regarding the transformation of the being of Othello into discourse Chapter One, The Black Man and Language provides critical thinking on this matter. Fanon opens the chapter by asserting that the study of language [is] essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man s dimension of being-forothers, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. 325 The nuance I wish to examine here is the essential question of whether the translation of ontological being into discourse that is in turn possessed by the radical Other erases the material being of the black man. Fanon asserts that: The problem we shall tackle in this chapter is as follows: the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being. We are fully aware that this is one of man s attitudes faced with Being. A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language. 326 The Sovereign Negro, the particularity of the phenomenological experience of this homo liminalis generally and that of Othello in particular extend in important ways this

328 319 foundational thinking on the part of Fanon which takes into account the base case established by he and Du Bois that we will label as two-ness, which, in the language of this project, renders the subject both Elemental and Abject. This is supported by the passage above where Fanon notes that language allows the Antillean to draw closer to becoming a true human being. This baseline figure remains an outsider from the paradigmatic structure of society and employs language as a pathway to a sense of belonging. For the Sovereign Negro the question of indirect possession of the world implied by this language arguably does not apply. This is a direct result of employing the notion of the collective construction of civil time and the relationship that exaltation on the part of a subject as a willful separation from the world implicates with respect to the exceptional nature of a figure with this status vis-à-vis control of time (sovereignty). The sovereign is a part of the world and her utterances, in the most extreme cases carry with them the force of law. Othello, in his role as a general, which carries with it the duty and right to order his men to their deaths, is categorically excluded from being an outsider that requires language as a point of access. However, the binary and contradictory subjectivity of abjection requires just this sort of trick of language described in Fanon but as a consequence of the ontological weight of his Exalted self, Othello must convert his material existence into discourse and erase his physical and sublime presence from the scene. In accomplishing this, and marshaling the language of Fanon on this point, he does not possess the language, he in fact becomes the language and is, in doing so erased and possessed by Desdemona. This eliminates what Fanon marks as the two dimensions of the black man in that one dimension is with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. 327 Othello has in practice eliminated the first dimension in at least two important ways. First there are no other blacks in the play. One can imagine the complexity of the narrative if Shakespeare had rendered Michael Cassio, his lieutenant, as a

329 320 Moor. Second, if we allow for the Turks to represent, at least in religious affiliation, Fanon s fellow Blacks, Othello is dedicated to doing nothing but killing them on behalf of the Venetians. In so doing he does material violence to Fanon s first dimension and then in his discursive possession by Desdemona he has eliminated the second. This dimensionlessness, however, is not to be confused with the existence of the homo liminalis. This is a static position of abjection. It is the desire to alter it that requires the subject turn toward and perhaps enter the zone of non-being and address the threshold of the separation between Abject and Elemental with humanity as the telos of the effort. Here Fanon turns toward miscegenation. He opens the chapter L homme de coleur et la Blanche with a complex alteration in the language employed with respect to non-being in the introduction. This passage is important enough to render in both French and English. De la partie la plue noire de mon âme, á travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d être tout á coup blanc. 328 Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures xx, surges up the desire to be suddenly white. 329 Fanon remains committed to analogizing this state of being to a depth from which the subject can climb, calling it une rampe, which I translated as ramp but here can be rendered as gradient to mirror his use of hachure. There is no reason to take the point of departure in both instances as distinct from one another however it is the goal of the effort that requires careful attention. In the introduction, the descent into the zone of non-being xx Hachures /ˈhæʃʊəәrz/ are an older mode of representing relief. They show orientation of slope, and by their thickness and overall density they provide a general sense of steepness. Being non-numeric, they are less useful to a scientific survey than contours, but can successfully communicate quite specific shapes of terrain. They are a form of shading, although different from the one used in shaded maps. (Wikipedia)

330 321 portends a space of recreation that is indeterminate as to its destination only that from it a new emergence can arise. In the specific case under review here that mirrors that of Othello, the subject has entered the zone of non-being in order to reify the false equivalency we marked earlier between whiteness and humanity. This project is what I have described as the transitional variety of liminal being that inevitably threatens the established order in that it seeks to elide its logic rather than fundamentally alter it. Fanon s foil for his narrative of this phenomenon, Jean Veneuse, has as his goal the solution that drives the trip into this particular varietal of the zone of non-being. I want to be recognized not as Black, but as White. But and this is the form of recognition that Hegel never described who better than the white woman to bring that about? By loving me, she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love opens the illustrious path that leads to total fulfillment I espouse white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. 330 Othello, for his part, has found himself invested in this same project for the alteration of his subject position. As I have mentioned before, it is consistent with the methodological choice to employ time as the metric of analysis here to ascertain how Othello s project is meant to work with respect to his inclusion in the constructed civic temporality and in so doing troubles its integrity. This is accessed through the heteronormative imperative of patrilineal relations that necessarily exclude the Abject in particular ways. This is an echo of Patterson s natal alienation that has proven so essential here but needs to be considered in both its positive and negative permutations to understand how it works here. Othello, as the radical Other is excluded from participation in the coherent development and maintenance of the collectivity by being excluded from legitimate sexual

331 322 relations with citizens who are read as white and therefore human: Elemental. The notion that Othello is engaged in sexual congress with Venetian women is the first order consideration of each of the antagonist in the play: Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio. IAGO Swounds, sir, you re robbed; for shame, put on your gown! Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. Arise, I say! 331 Many of the essential elements of the argument of this project are represented in this passage and the trouble that sexual congress between the Moor and Desdemona present for the normative understanding of collective temporality here is apparent. Iago emphasizes the notion of a never ending now that is legible as Nietzsche s concern with eternal recurrence of the same and Deleuze s Difference and Repetition. This transgression of the barrier that blocks the inclusion of Abject temporality into the collective has been violated and results in a looping of time around the event of the breach. The shattering of the barrier is intercourse between Othello and Desdemona; which the father is meant to understand is going on as they speak and will result in an eternal collapse of the integrity of his genealogy in that the devil will make a grandsire of you. What for Brabantio shatters reality for Othello will create the inclusion of his temporality into the collective rendering him Elemental, human and therefore white in the language of Fanon. Othello is convinced that his status as general and an Exalted member of the state will allow for this metamorphosis of his Abject subjectivity through this assault on the prohibition of miscegenation. With respect to the notion that when it is revealed that he has married Desdemona, the duke will divorce or perhaps punish him, the Moor is clear regarding his lack of concern for this possibility and why:

332 323 OTHELLO Let him do his spite: My services which I have done the Signory Shall out-tongue his complaints. 332 Structurally, what Othello is attempting to do is to play both sides against the middle, to address his real goal of Elemental existence within the structure of the established social order by using his Exalted status as a counter-balance to his Abject subjectivity that nets to the Elemental subject triad: human, citizen, white. Stated differently, his service to the state is not invested in altering the conditions of its existence; it is palliative of his abjection and in that limited goal is doomed to fail. Returning to Fanon and the travails of Jean Veneuse we find at the end of the narrative, Fanon proposes the only solution to the dilemma faced by the black subject: In no way must color be felt as a stain. From the moment the black man accepts the split imposed by the Europeans, there is no longer any respite; and from that moment on, isn t it understandable that he will try to elevate himself to the white man s level? To elevate himself into the range of colors to which he has attributed a kind of hierarchy? xxi We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies restructuring the world. 333 In the absence of a project of restructuring of the world, Othello finds himself in the position marked at the outset of the thinking employed here. The poly-subjective nature of his being erases his existence as a particular subject. In facing the loss of his ontological self (fractured, mis-recognized, or otherwise) to Desdemona he is in search of a return of his essence that requires the separation between subjects (Othello and Desdemona) that has been lost. Sartre offers a manner in which to grapple with this second form of loss of being in his text Being and Nothingness. He posits: xxi Claude Nordey, L homme de coleur, Coll. Présences, Plon., 1939.

333 324 No external nothingness in-itself separates my consciousness from the Other s consciousness; it is the very fact of being me that I exclude the Other. The Other is the one who excludes me by being himself, the one whom I exclude by being myself. Consciousnesses are directly supported by one another in a reciprocal imbrication of their being. 334 It is the loss of the separation between Othello and Desdemona that in essence destroys the Moor and it is only in reestablishing of the self by passing through the critical space of internal nothingness that allows for the Fanonian account of rehabilitation of the subject. This requires transitional subjectivity, a different typology of homo liminals. Additionally, this requires a transition through the zone of none being (zone of hachures) that has as its telos the singular existence of the subject as Exalted in order to restructure the terms of Elemental being. Othello, in his attempt to free his essence and reunite it to his corporeal being, has as his target Desdemona. He realizes prior to the event of her murder but forgets as the opportunity presents itself, that he only has one corporeal life to sacrifice for this attempt: OTHELLO: O, that the slave had forty thousand lives- One is too poor, too weak for my revenge! 335 It is imperative to engage how the suicide of Othello, or perhaps more carefully, the employment of death by the subject to alter its being, fits into the arguments presented in this project. We will see death later as it relates to the recapture of agency on the part of the enslaved woman through the interruption of the genealogy/temporality of abjection through enslavement through infanticide and abortion. Here we are confronted with the polysubjective essence of Othello s being that has proven unsupportable within the vessel of his corporeal existence. Much like the confusion of the ontological separation of the Exalted from the Elemental as a material condition, Othello attacks the physicality of the absorption of his essence by Desdemona as the manner in which to address the poly-valent existence of

334 325 his ontological being that needs resolution. In this we must view the metamorphosis of Othello here in two registers as well. One being his transition from Exalted to Elemental being and the second the shift from Elemental being to Abjection. Again, this is most clearly demonstrated in Othello s death speech. The shift from Exalted to Elemental is marked by Othello s initial statement: I have done the state some service, and they know t. No more of that. (Line ) This alteration in the subjectivity of the Moor, is, like the final one, implicated in its relationship to death. In this instance, in that the service that Othello has rendered the state is to cause the death of its enemies, through his possession and employment of the state s monopoly on the legitimate employment of violence, by terminating that relationship he has abdicated his Exalted temporality. What I mean here is that the possibility of terminating the life of another is to have control of the time of the other, the highest expression of absolute sovereignty. The final or second shift that ends the corporeal existence of the Moor is represented by the analogy of the death he had inflicted on the part of the state to his own suicide: And smote him-thus. Stabbing himself as he had stabbed the offending Turk in service to the state. What I mean here is that the common human interaction between Othello and Desdemona; marriage, has, like the transgression of the Turk, traduced the state. Only death can restore this order and in killing himself, not for killing Desdemona (recall that he wishes to be remembered for loving her too well ) but for the relationship that caused him to be [p]erplexed in the extreme, marks the transition from the arrogation of Elemental participation in collective life to absolute abjection. Othello, as we know, does not make the transition to the social death of abjection but instead terminates the complex confusion of temporalities with the absolute solution: corporeal death.

335 326 7: Separation through Misrecognition: The narrative traced above brackets, in substantive fashion, the existence of the homo liminalis. This is a result, in many ways of the problem that I underscored at the outset of this effort in that the existence of points of departure and arrival are comparatively simple to establish: it is the fleeting essence of transition and the need to locate a tool for the measurement of the instantaneous value of that which is necessarily unstable that complicates matters. Between the Exalted existence of Othello and his demise as an Abject subject there exist, what I would label as, two points of being where he lingers in Fanon s zone of non-being. They consist of the space between Exalted and Elemental and the space between Elemental and Abject a journey that he does not complete in that it is interrupted by his suicide. What these instances portend is the separation of the self from the self that is required to create the spatiality for alternative modes of existence. In accessing this transitional form of being, it is clear that a recurring theme emerges for the observers of this form of metamorphosis of the subject: that of the adoption of the false persona. For Shakespeare, this takes the form of Brabantio accusing the Moor of witchcraft (Act I, Scene 3 line 65), what I read as Fanon s masks that are designed to obscure the true identity of the subject. Hannah Arendt provides a useful analysis of this proposition in her text On Revolution. Along with addressing that theoretical position, Shakespeare s Othello provide the bridge to Melville s canonical narrative of misrecognition, Benito Cereno both for purposes of this project but arguably for the author as well. Melville s marginalia to Othello xxii contain a pencil mark emphasizing lines that were referenced in the previous seciton: xxii

336 327 By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I ll have some proof 336 I read this as lending inspiration to Melville s construction of the elaborate ruse of Benito Cereno and the construction of the character Atufal specifically. There are several elements of Melville s novella that concern me here that relate backward to Othello and forward to Fanon and ultimately Ellison s Invisible Man. They particularly weigh on the question of the false persona and its relationship to discourses of misrecognition on the part of all subjects concerned. In the literary examples before us, it is the inescapable question of blackness and its materiality that render unstable the poly-subjective figure that we are tracing that is Abject and Exalted. I find this most prominent in the character of Atufal in Benito Cereno as synonymous with Othello. It is the construction of the illusory nature of command that is the central line around which these other concerns hover: who is ever really in control of the (en)slave(d) ship during the hidden insurrection as a way to ask the same question of the authority of Othello over his army and himself that is accessible through the false imprisonment of Atufal. Melville s text is useful here in that it requires that we take careful stock of the structure of sovereignty that he finds expressed aboard ships. The ability to maintain the logic of a sovereign order at a distance from the center of its power is an essential element of situating the slave ship as the mediating place between the metropole and the plantation. The ship, in this way, serves as a place of transition not dissimilar to the space I have worked to locate as Fanon s zone of non-being as well as locus of the subject s existence as homo liminalis. In this respect, the slave ship becomes a material representation of the zone of non-

337 328 being legible in this paradigm as the place of transition from Elemental to Abject subjectivity obviously in that this transportation is essential for the creation of the enslaved body but in the case of Benito Cereno we are able to linger with Melville as the enslaved pass through this space in order to attempt to reverse the process. In the very opening moments of the novella, Melville leaves unquestioned the role of the state in this drama. The slave ship, or any ship for that matter, like the plantation must be thought as a space of coercion par excellence and as exemplar of the totalizing nature of state sovereignty. The scene of the novella is set by Melville s opening narration: In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor in the harbour of St. Maria towards the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. 337 The narrative offers the reader all of the information required to understand the point of departure for this journey by situating Delano in time and space. What is of interest here is the long reach of the newly recognized sovereignty of the United States far from his eastern seaboard home; (in many ways the cradle of the American rebellion as well as a nonslaveholding state) to the Pacific Ocean and the sovereign waters of Chili (sic) where Delano, so long as he is aboard his vessel, Bachelor s Delight, is in command. Tellingly, upon first sighting the suspicious vessel his confusion is deepened by the failure of the ship to identify itself with as the territory of a sovereign state. To Captain Delano s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colours; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be laying, was the custom among peaceful seaman of all nations. 338 Melville, the experienced seaman, has placed several important points here that require attention in order to examine this question of sovereignty on the high seas and particularly in the territorial waters of another sovereign nation. The baseline question is

338 329 whose territory the vessel represents? Delano, in the description provided by our narrator, locates his Bachelor s Delight as a Massachusetts vessel; the newcomer, however, showed no colours. The vessel appears to be stateless, and, we will discover, it is so in actuality, at least while in the possession of the formerly enslaved. In contrast Delano described himself as being from Duxbury, Massachusetts, and the ship under his command is therefore related to that location. When this piece was written (1855) the question of a subject identifying with a state as opposed to the nation, particularly with respect to slavery, have broad consequences as to the place of the institution in the nation. That slavery was the central issue at stake in the Civil War can be demonstrated by consulting the thinking of John C. Calhoun, the most articulate architect of the southern praxis of secession in the face of assaults on slavery. Calhoun s limitless defense of slavery rests on the principle that sovereignty, as he understands it, cannot be structured or maintained without the slave. This is important in two ways when considering Benito Cereno. If we assume that Calhoun is right about the slave and sovereignty binary, then a ship without slaves would fail to have the superstructure of power that allows for the possibility of command. The second consideration is that to the extent that there is a functioning hierarchy aboard the ship, the project is then to identify the slave; that Abject figure that renders the paradigm possible. Along with this, the lack of clarity with respect to the relationship of this vessel to a sovereign state is the material manifestation of its existence as a space of liminal existence where subjects become unstable in their traverse from one subject position to the next. With respect to the relationship of Melville s novella to race, the recent text by Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, is useful. The specific incident that interested Melville was the case of the Spanish ship Tryal that had been

339 330 hijacked by enslaved men and women in Melville takes important liberties with the story, but the two that most concern this argument are the timing of the narrative and the naming of the ship itself. When Herman Melville was deciding what to call the slave ship in Benito Cereno, one option was to keep the vessel s actual name, the Tryal. It was resonant enough. Abraham Lincoln hadn t yet, when Melville started writing the story in early 1855, used the biblical phrase fiery trial to refer to the slavery crisis. But it was a common metaphor in the oration Melville grew up on, often used to refer to the American Revolution. Instead, Melville settled on calling the ship the San Dominick, identifying it with Haiti s old French colonial name, Santo Domingo. 340 Naming the slave ship after the former slave colony that hosted the only successful slave rebellion in the New World requires close attention. This move on the part of Melville underscores the argument that sovereignty of a ship, as such and under normative conditions, must be considered as the same as the landed sovereignty of any state. In the case here with respect to the discursive linkage to the slave rebellion in San Domingue, we are able to analogize the zone of non-being as a space of instability and transition that goes for the slave ship and the former French colony alike. Following this linkage, the argument then allows for recognizing that the captured ship itself, like the captured island, has an unstable relationship with the normative structures of societal order and in so doing, all subjects within the political space of the ship or the former colony are likewise destabilized. What needs to be closely considered is the vector of the transition, which seems to determine whether the movement is stabilizing or destabilizing of the constituted structure. This becomes most clear, unfortunately, through exploring a complex series of interactions. In so doing we are able to witness the manner in which subjects can become homo liminalis within a coherent social order; a transition that will tend to stabilize or destabilize the structure or transition between disparate systems. This is witnessed in thinking in this way around the

340 331 conceptualization of the slave ship as the space of transition between separate systems of sovereign existence. In this instance the ship transitions between the systems of indigenous African society with its own structures of sovereign existence to that of western European/white supremacist existence. This obviously renders the actor subjected to this form of liminal existence as having the political space of the subject qua the subject altered through the passage from one distinct social order to the next. The presence of these transitional subjects can serve to stabilize, destabilize or even have little measurable effect across time with respect to the systems in question; both the point of origin and arrival are relevant here. Additionally, internal to a constituted system, the transition of an actor from one subject position to the next can also tend to have similar possible results for the individual or the system. To return briefly to Othello, consider that his transition into the coherent Venetian system as a general and defender of the state served to stabilize both he and the system. However, his intra-systemic alteration that attends his relationship to Desdemona threatened both the society as a whole and ultimately consumed both he and his wife. Melville s employment of the slave ship in this manner first requires that we interrogate the logic of sovereignty that operates internal to the vessel. Here he emphasizes the radical nature of the power of the captain, which exceeds that of the leader of many states and is perhaps only rivaled by that of the master and his slaves. Both maritime law and custom granted captains of whalers, slavers, merchantmen, sealers, and naval vessels absolute authority over their men. A Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession, thought one eighteenth century mariner. Captains could whip at will; the quarterdeck where floggings took place was often referred to as the slaughter house. 341

341 332 The relevance of the master/slave relationship to that of captain and crew is obvious but also bears on the question of whether sovereignty may be undermined on the sea by subjects who are unique for their lack of agency and will. Stated differently: if we admit the ship as a sovereign space, the status of which is derived from the sovereignty of the state, then the captain must be considered as a representative of the very sovereignty of the state, to usurp whose authority is to attack the state as a legitimate enterprise. This is fine for the threat to a nation s shipping by pirates as well as hostile naval vessels and is most assuredly the case for mutineers and slave revolts. Mutiny, by definition, implies the effort to grab power is illegitimate in that it is an attempt to undermine recognized and codified authority. By calling a slave rebellion a mutiny, the observer has already been coopted into the logic of slavery as a legitimate practice that is accepted as such by all relevant actors, most especially the enslaved. This logically establishes the desire of the enslaved for freedom as a form of criminality and perhaps indeed even treason. The impossibility of a legitimate slave revolt is based upon the assumption that the enslaved subject s desired freedom is illegitimate. It is reasonable for the African to be enslaved and unreasonable for the African to attempt to emancipate himself. What this means is that the enslavement of the black body is a normative condition of the proper functioning of the state and not dependent simply upon the more powerful imposing their will upon the weak. If the latter were the case, then freedom would be considered a spoil of war and render an enslaved person s wresting it from his enslaver as acceptable. In this system it is not. What Melville has accomplished with the naming of the ship is to present this action as analogous to that of the slave rebellion in Haiti and by doing so requires that one consider the French Revolution and the radical alteration of the relation of the individual to the state as well as slavery and its relationship to sovereignty.

342 333 The challenge here is to consider the implication of reading the slave ship stylized as the revolutionary island of San Domingue with respect the essential question of sovereignty. How do the name of the mysterious ship, the dislocation of the time of the action, and the figure of Atufal progress the effort here to understand the figure in transition? Benito Cereno is obviously about slavery in a way that I am reading its implicit or veiled presence in its progenitor, Othello, but it is likewise more subtly about a totalizing world system of domination of African bodies that operates in important ways in the context against which Melville is writing the novella. Specifically, the context I am referencing is the question of sovereignty and its presupposed absence from the black body. It is not just in Brazil, the American South or the West Indies where the black is necessarily assumed to be enslaved and any free black would need a great deal of recognition of that status by the master class/race to render it effective. It is the implied, at least for the period of the disguised rebellion, that sovereignty and legitimacy are at the forefront of the story and serve Melville s purpose to frame the Atlantic and the Pacific as sites where the notion of a ship labeling itself as African and free is an impossibility. It would have been impossible for the formerly enslaved on board the San Dominick to hoist their own colors and greet Delano as the legitimate beneficiaries of a relation to sovereignty that is based on the African continent. That requires a trans-systemic existence that troubles the dominant world system. Melville asserts the impossibility of this for both the ship itself and the Haitian ship of state. The deception on board the San Dominick was necessary because the world had become a prison for the black body. Much of the scholarship surrounding this novella centers on this question of deception, while implicitly treating it as a necessity for the freedom of the Africans It is this understanding that I believe Melville s text profitably interrogates. Scholars have taken

343 334 Melville to be one of the most careful and trenchant critics of the American political and economic scene. Michael Rogin - the political theorist whose work on Melville is the most important exception to the field s general neglect of him - has dubbed Melville America s Marx because of Melville s systematic critique of the structures of domination in nineteenth-century America. 342 I certainly believe this is true, but I believe the critique is not limited to America: Benito Cereno offers a critique of the international system of interlocking modes of domination that render the impossibility of African sovereignty an understood fact. By focusing his attention on a New Englander encountering slavery far away from its practice in the United States, Melville demonstrates that respecting the right to enslave black bodies is an essential feature of the relationship between states. The San Dominick, under the command of the Africans, does not have the potentiality of lasting freedom if we can even propose that groping around the largest ocean in the world without the navigational skill or technical expertise to sail the ship is a type of freedom. Even a New Englander, whom we can posit to be a non-slaveholding individual, recognizes the role the institution plays in the coherent operation of the world system. In spite of these normative conditions of the world, Melville casts the world in indeterminate grey at the outset of the story; everything grey The sky a grey mantle Flights of troubled grey fowl with flights of troubled grey vapours 343 The indeterminate greys become black; other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters 344 and finally, when Delano is able to make out the details, the blacks and greys retreat and he is able to ascertain the true character of the vessel a Spanish merchantman of the first class: carrying Negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another. 345

344 335 There is an important point here that Melville presents, initially through the eyes of Delano and later in the text of the deposition from Cereno. Upon arriving on board the slave ship, Delano is surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbered the former more than could be expected, Negro transportation-ship as the stranger in port was. 346 Delano is aware that this is an odd situation, seeing the enslaved so outnumbering the whites, as well as the fact that they have the free run of the ship. Cereno explains this during his initial moments with Delano: Yes, their owner was quite right in assuring me that no fetters would be needed with his blacks; so that while, as is wont in this transportation, those Negroes have always remained upon deck - not thrust below, as in the Guineamenthey have, also, from the beginning, been freely permitted to range within the given bounds of their pleasure. 347 The lack of necessity to bind the Negroes is also part of the record elicited from the testimony from Cereno in the closing moments of the text: That all the Negroes slept upon deck, as is customary in this navigation, and none wore fetters, because the owner, his friend Aranda, told him that they were all tractable 348. The contrast with the Guineaman - the notorious vessels plying the well-known transit route of the Middle Passage that was then and continues to be now the subject of so much consideration of the horrors attending the journey - is striking. Melville points out this critical difference between the physical elements of coercive force in this situation and that of the Middle Passage. It is wont in this transportation that the Negroes slept upon deck, as is customary during this type of transportation of enslaved bodies for whom all hope is lost. Under the necessarily new and dire circumstances of the Middle Passage where the question of return is remote, the slavers still exhibited an abundance of caution in insuring that the enslaved remained both disoriented and shackled. The sailor James Field Stanfield is quoted

345 336 extensively in Marcus Rediker s The Slave Ship and provides a first hand account of life for the average seaman aboard a slaver plying the Middle Passage. Stanfield chronicled another horror of the Middle Passage, the opening, in the morning, of the grates and the emergence of the enslaved from sixteen hours of darkness below decks. Stanfield imagined the aperture as a noisome cave, even a monster s mouth; from below decks the rank maw, belched up in morbid stream,/the hot mist thickens in a side-long beam. In fetter d pairs the drooping crowd emerged. He described two men in particular who were close united by the fest ring chain. They had to be lifted up from below. One had died overnight; one was still living. Once unshackled, the dead man would be to the sea consign d ; the corpse the briny monsters seize with savage force. Sharks, Stanfield understood, were part of the terror. 349 This difference in the physical restraint of the enslaved bodies is an important element of the argument Melville is presenting regarding the totalizing nature of the regime of servitude that existed in his world. The question that this raises is why the conventional wisdom on the part of slavers insisted on almost total restraint during the Atlantic journey but allowed for the enslaved to remain on deck once the bodies were held in the interior of the system of New World Slavery? The Middle Passage is just that, a passage or transition to a world where the coercive nature of society is so complete that the enslaved can be restrained without the use of physical bonds or, more carefully, restrained differently. Thinking the Middle Passage as exemplar of one form of space that allows for the existence of the homo liminalis, we are able to ascertain the type of transition that is occurring (transsystemic) by the level of restraint employed to successfully complete it. I am reading Melville s decision to fictionalize a slave rebellion in the Pacific rather than the more obvious examples in the Atlantic, as a choice that allows the reader to observe the reach of the slave state in the New World and further it renders legible a dual transition: the internal logic of Abject to Elemental being is apparent but in doing so the implication for the overarching

346 337 dominant world system is laid bare. Atlantic world slavery exists in the Pacific; the expansion of European sovereignty appears to know no limit to its reach at least in terms if its ambition. This ambition opens to further skepticism the allegedly relaxed regime of physical restraint experienced by the enslaved. This question of coercion can productively be approached by revisiting the question of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of state authority and whether an attack on said authority is understood to be criminal (mutiny) or justifiable (freedom fighting). Addressing this can be achieved in comparative fashion by examining slave rebellion in the Atlantic versus the Pacific. Michael Paul Rogin s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville offers one possible theory behind the stakes of Melville s choice. The San Dominick slaves destroyed their captain by mimicking their obedience to him. Melville did not fictionalize the Amistad or Creole uprisings, where slaves threw off illegitimate authority and then appealed to the American government for help. He used instead the records of a slave revolt on the Spanish ship, The Tryal. On that ship the slaves overthrew their masters only to reenact their own enslavement. 350 Rogin is making several points that seem in need of further clarification. In his formulation Rogin seems to be situating the rebellions in the Atlantic as representing an attack on illegitimate authority and thereby, by implication, marking the events in the Pacific of interest to Melville as somehow a usurpation of legitimate authority. I think his use of legitimacy as the term of analysis is unfortunate, but I do agree that he has identified an important perspective that is not related to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the enslaved condition but to the need for the slaver s to use physical control to impose his will on the enslaved body. The legal question in the Amistad case centered on the question of legitimate ownership of the individuals and is obviously implicitly sympathetic to the question of the legitimacy of slavery itself. In this sense Rogin is correct to contrast legitimacy as it relates to

347 338 the settled matter of ownership in the case of the Tryal/San Dominick and as it is contested in the Amistad. But it is productive to consider the legal question of possession of the body in conjunction with the focus here on physical restraint or its lack. I propose that Melville s interest in this aspect of slave transportation is meant to mark the shift in coercive praxis as it evolves into a component of the hermetically sealed structure of slavery beyond the instability in the transition from Africa to the New World. In the interior of the Slave System restraint is omnipresent. Recall the discussion of coercion earlier in this text that centered on the essay by Michael A. Weinstein. Melville has located the space of coercion par excellence in order to focus the reader s attention on the helplessness that accompanies the desire for emancipation; either self or externally granted. Employing Weinstein s language, it is the absolute control of space that attracts Melville in two ways: first, to point out its existence through the enslavers unstated knowledge that their victims had nowhere to run, and second that the enslaved of the San Dominick, like those held on the plantations of Haiti, would imagine the possibility of breaking their bonds. This facilitates a broader reading of the text that allows it to mark regimes of coercion and subjugation as essential elements of the modern state as Melville encounters it, slavery being only the most extreme of a series of interlocking types of social control based firmly in the elaboration of the social contract from Rousseau forward. Stepping from the deck of the San Dominick to the quarterdeck of the Pequod, Melville, in the narration of Ismael, is clear on this point. Who ain t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about-however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way-either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other s shoulder-blades, and be content. 351

348 339 Benito Cereno echoes this thinking in so far as it asserts the absolute power of the commander of a ship at sea, though the question is open as to who is ever really in command of the San Dominick after the revolt of the enslaved and particularly during the ruse to fool Delano. Even in his diminished state, Delano is constantly in suspicion because in Cereno, this undemonstrative invalid was lodged a dictatorship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal. 352 The sea commander, as I have described here, has absolute sovereignty exercised through a variety of modes of coercive violence; the universal thump of Moby -Dick is present in the novella as well. By accepting that Melville is consistently interested in sovereignty and the place of slavery in it, it is possible to use this unforgettable passage from Moby-Dick to deepen our understanding of the question of physical coercion in other works. Most compelling is Melville s use of the conjunction or, which gives the coercer a choice between physical and metaphysical violence to realize his goals. The implication for Benito Cereno is that the physical coercion by the enslaver of the Middle Passage can be replaced with metaphysical coercion in the Pacific. Metaphysical coercion, in its most robust practice, is based upon the specter of the final or else, of the possibility of physical correction or even death. When practiced efficiently, it may not require a physical manifestation of the universal thump ; this is what I think that Melville means to put before the reader in twice asserting in Benito Cereno that the enslaved in this form of transit are commonly allowed to go about without being fettered or confined in the hold; this is an illustration of the metaphysical universal thump. The complement to this would be the hold of the slaver transiting the Middle Passage where the big muscle work of the physical thump is de rigeur. As a practical matter, based upon the description of the enslaved on board the San Dominick (with the exception of the infants who were born in the New World), all would have experienced the Middle Passage; they would

349 340 then have faced, (based upon the actual events surrounding the case of the Tryal) another dangerous and grueling trek across the mountains of South America to then be loaded onto vessels for the transportation of slaves in the Pacific. This moves us to the second of the questions here. In asserting that physical and metaphysical coercion may exist apart, Melville insists that the physical coercion exists in real or imagined relation to the metaphysically coercive. The question of shipboard discipline and its excesses is a common theme in Melville s oeuvre. Flogging, it appears, matters in the story [White Jacket] less as naval reform than as politically significant personal obsession. It was politically provocative, in the middle of the debate over slavery, to identify shipboard with slave masters, and condemn the use of the whip The whip, emblem of chattel slavery, symbolized shipboard authority to Melville. The sea-lords were, like plantation owners in popular discourse, lords of the lash. The Declaration of Independence, insists Redburn, promised equal treatment for blacks ashore and white sailors at sea. Yet he is commanded like a slave, and set to work like an ass! vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama. 353 The last of the questions investigated here, the specific praxis of metaphysical and physical coercion in the context of Benito Cereno, returns us to the question of illegitimate enslavement that was raised by the quote from Rogin. Perhaps this question of ownership along with the actual institution itself can be distinguished from the trade. The contemporary moment maintained a separation between the trade in slaves and slavery itself. The US Constitution called for the possibility of undermining the slave trade while leaving slavery intact, and the British actually outlawed the trade and went about intercepting what had become an illegitimate practice while also leaving unmolested the institution of slavery for many decades. This seems paradoxical. The surest way to be rid of the slave trade is to be rid of slavery but that was not politically possible at the time and more importantly

350 341 underscores a logic that deems the two phenomenon as different. This implicates the logic that slavery, as such, is a legitimate operation but the introduction of newly captured bodies into the system had been deemed illegitimate in some fashion not unrelated to the deprivations of the Passage. The implication here is that there was no way, at least in the mind of the expert traffickers of bodies from Africa to the New World to sufficiently reduce the level of coercion to ameliorate concerns about the inhumanity of the Middle Passage. This tends to lend credence to Weinstein s account of the necessity of extreme forms of physical violence as the legitimation of less apparent modes of coercion. In this thinking, without the Middle Passage the black body stolen from the African continent could not be trusted to accept its plight; after that ordeal, the conventional wisdom maintained that this was no longer the case and the bodies could be transported without being secured beneath the deck. The Middle Passage as the core practice of the slave trade is deemed illegitimate in the minds of abolitionists, the British government that outlawed it, and the framers of the Constitution provided for its erosion. At the same time slavery is deemed different and legitimate. Melville s text allows us to question deeply the logic of another form of transportation of enslaved bodies that is less harsh and at the same time legitimate in ways that are imagined to be acknowledged by slaver and slave alike as logical. Benito Cereno, by engaging the paradoxical relationship of the legitimate and illegitimate transportation of bodies, focuses on what is lacking in the discourse at the time -on the institution of slavery not just the trade. This is not to say that there were not deep concerns about the abolition of slavery, but it is a matter of historical record that the abolition of the trade foreruns the abolition of the peculiar institution itself, which, at least, in this country, required a Civil War to eradicate. John C. Calhoun, even in his irrepressible defense of slavery expressed concerns with respect to the trade.

351 342 Calhoun himself strongly condemned the international slave trade early in his career. In 1816 he described as a disgrace that the trade was tolerated until 1808 and was ashamed of his owns state s role in it. 354 It is possible that Melville is asserting that the physical violence of the enslaved condition requires a physical act of violence to interrupt it. With this possibility, the behavior of the enslaved striving for self-emancipation that takes the form of violence against the enslaver fits into this discourse. In the deposition by Cereno we learn the enslaved physically attacked the slavers which resulted in the transference of some power aboard the San Dominick. Above all, it is the initial rebellion that culminates in the murder(?) of the master of the enslaved, Don Alexandro Aranda and the use of his physical remains to replace the figurehead of Christopher Columbus with his skeleton and the admonition Follow your leader! 355 The series of events that surround the production of this figurehead delineate both the physical and metaphysical elements of Melville s formulation. An element of mystery is essential to make metaphysical coercion function. Strong s essay entitled Follow Your Leader, asserts that [i]f the book [Benito Cereno] is about slavery, it is about slavery as a consequence of the fact of domination, and it is thus about the meaning of how one follows one who is in power. 356 This relates to the totemic display of the former master as the figurehead of the ship, stripped, literally, to the bone. A figurehead is just that, a physical representative of some larger (metaphorical) understanding. Prior to the insurrection aboard the San Dominick, the leader of the journey was the totemic Christopher Columbus, which highlights all that was implicated by the discovery of the New World. By replacing the explorer with the skeleton of the owner of the enslaved aboard the ship, the insurrectionists have established a new ethos for the vessel that does not presuppose the supremacy of the European. If the leader whom a member of the crew chooses to follow is Babo, there will be the possibility of

352 343 life; that seems to pick up what Strong is proposing in her essay. A better question for the purpose of this effort, and the one that seems most to concern Melville, is the possible result of continuing to follow the leadership (in metaphysical terms) of Don Aranda. Another of Melville s treatments of the rebellious subject, Bartleby the Scrivener, shows how preferring not to follow authority is a preference that has consequences. Aboard the San Dominick, and under some elements of the authority of Babo et al that result would be a death and desecration of the human form that is shrouded in mystery and assumes the level of the metaphysical. Cereno becomes obsessed with the fate of the remains of Don Alexandro Aranda as we learn from his deposition: that during the three days which followed, the deponent, uncertain what fate had befallen the remains of Don Alexandro, frequently asked the Negro Babo where they were, and if still on board, whether they were to be preserved for internment ashore, entreating him so to order it; that the Negro Babo answered nothing till the fourth day, when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the Negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship s proper figure-head, the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the Negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white s; that, upon his covering his face, the Negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body follow your leader, 357 This illustrates the real, physical killing of the body, followed by a metaphysical threat that Babo makes explicit, ( in spirit, as now in body ) as a regime of dual coercion. Based upon Cereno s narration of this critical event, we have to wonder how the skin, muscle, and fat are so thoroughly removed from this body to leave it a whitewashed skeleton that appears to have been left to this reduction by the sun and carrion fowl in a desert. Melville seems to be dangling the possibility of cannibalism before the reader and Cereno. Second, we cannot be sure that this is even Don Alexandro. All identifying

353 344 elements of his person have been removed, and Babo s question regarding the whiteness of the bones of the cadaver whether in that he should think it a white s is evasive. The corpse would, after all, have been a much more effective talisman if it were identifiable as Don Alexandro. The macabre figurehead is to serve as constant reminder of the usurped power of the vessel that is now held in the hands of Babo and his fellow captives. This power, however, is not real in that the blacks do not possess the technical knowledge to operate the vessel. Further they have no sovereign state to which they belong and which is understood to be eligible for the protection of custom and the exercise of punitive power. The new figurehead is shrouded, veiling this façade of sovereign power, a power that I read as demonstrating its ability to strip the body to an ontological vacuity that is implicated in the possibility of new modes of being. Delano notes this strange aspect of the vessel s appearance. Whether the ship had a figurehead, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about the part, either to protect it while undergoing a refurbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. 358 This is in stark contrast to the stern piece of the San Dominick that is faded, but legible, and speaks to the drama that is unfolding on board the ship. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castille and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr mask in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked. 359 We can assign the dark satyr figure to Babo and the writhing figure to Don Benito; however, these characters, like the figurehead, are masked. What is behind the mask? Once that is revealed, are the power relations between the figures altered? Will the unmasking reveals the true figure or just a series of ever more difficult to recognize, for what they are,

354 345 masks? Masking is a frequently investigated phenomenon, but the accounts of Deleuze and Fanon offer ways in which to frame the events in question here. Difference & Repetition proposes that there is nothing but another mask behind the each successive unveiling. The ego is a mask for other masks, a disguise under other disguises. Indistinguishable from its own clowns, it walks with a limp on one green and one red leg. 360 This is in contrast to the theorizing of Frantz Fanon that requires that there be something real behind the charade and pressures attendant life under the gaze of white supremacy. Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. 361 The question of whether anything lies beneath a mask is not necessarily an either or proposition. Both can be true depending upon the figure in question, I posit that the relationship to sovereign power becomes the determining factor as to whether there is substance behind the mask. The thinking of Deleuze presents the central dilemma both for the Negros aboard the San Dominick and those that trouble the thinking of Fanon. The Negro has no identity formed by a state. The Negro is stateless and assumed in many ways to thus be outside the protection afforded the body by a functioning state or national enterprise. If the Negro is the masked figure, using the language of Deleuze, there is nothing there of sufficient ontological stuff to form a subject that is worthy of recognition. Fanon in his theorizing around the recovery of identity for the Negro through the removal of masks is seeking an ontological basis that is a foundation for a new type of subject free of the negative encumbrance of race. The Negro s body is without this possibility (just like the captured San Dominick is without a national identity (flag) and has its figurehead shrouded

355 346 and is only outwardly represented by the stern piece with its pantomime of this reversal) of relations through the adoption of false persona. Strong s essay opens with this thinking surrounding the real and symbolic relationship of the ship to the state. In the case of Benito Cereno, we have two ships, linked by a longboat throughout the book in some kind of contact with each other. The one is captained by a New Englander; the other, while appearing to be Spanish, is in fact run by slaves. Joined together as if they might be thought to form the two main sections of America, the two are, as we shall see, less different than they might at first appear. 362 The assertion of the San Dominick as, in fact, under the command of the formerly enslaved and appearing to be Spanish might seem straightforward, but I believe the text is sympathetic to a reading that, on the contrary, insists that the vessel is always under the command of the Spaniard and can never really be possessed by the (en)slave(d) Africans. The ship, in the text, doesn t appear to be Spanish; it in fact appears to be stateless - and that I argue is the central argument that Melville presents in this regard. It is not possible for the vessel to be legitimately stateless, vessels without states are pirates or themselves smugglers; it must belong to some state to be recognized. Don Benito in his deposition, if we are to take it as reliable, asserts that this is also the understanding of Babo. Upon discovering the strength of the American vessel, Cereno claims that Babo proposes that very night he (the deponent) would be captain of two ships instead of one 363 Melville, by parenthetically ensuring that the he in question is Don Benito and not Babo, leaves no possible doubt for the reader regarding the fact that Babo is never really in command. It is not possible for there to be a vessel under the command of an African because the totalizing coercive system of the New World does not accommodate the Sovereign Negro. Babo, just after the mutiny, refers to his geographic confusion and lack of sovereign relationship when he inquires into their proximity to Africa.

356 347 the Negro Babo asked him whether there were in those seas any Negro countries where they might be carried and he answered them, No, that the Negro Babo afterwards told him to carry them to Senegal, or to the neighboring islands of St. Nicholas; and he answered that this was impossible, on account of the great distance, the necessity involved of rounding Cape Horn, the bad conditions of the vessel, the want of provisions, sails, and water; 364 The Negro Babo, as opposed to the Spaniard Don Benito and the New Englander/American Delano is enmeshed in a web of technological, spatial, and temporal cognitive confusion in addition to the fact that the Negro, as a creation of white supremacy, is alienated from all identity with a sovereign space or perception. Blackness, as such, becomes the colours that tell the viewer all he need understand regarding the sovereignty, or lack thereof, of the subject in question: that both the individual Babo and the San Dominick, are shown to be unable to be under the command of the blacks. In fact, blackness that covers the white body leads Delano to the same conclusion that we must come to: blackness, as such is a mask and in its covering signals a lack. While thinking which of them to select for his purpose, he chanced to observe a sailor seated on the deck engaging in tarring the strap of a large block The mean employment of the man was in contrast with something superior in his figure. His hand, black with continually thrusting in into the tar-pot held for him by a Negro, seemed not naturally allied to his face, a face which would have been a fine one but for its haggardness If, indeed, there be any wickedness on board this ship, thought Captain Delano, be sure that man there has fouled his hand in it, even, as now he fouls it in the pitch. 365 Melville, here and throughout this text is working through his complex relationship with color. The white sailor, in the mind of Delano, arouses suspicions when his hand is rendered black by being covered in tar. This something that blackness/negroness

357 348 represents to Delano makes it impossible for him to believe that the blacks on board the vessel could be the source of the danger that confronts the Bachelor s Delight. But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with Negroes? 366 This thinking on the part of Delano requires careful attention. He feels that something isn t quite right with the whites on board the ship principally when he notes that the Negroes are out of line. However even when the blacks do not observe normal discipline of the enslaved, he assumes only that the whites have allowed this type of transgression. In effect Delano is asserting that, even when violating convention, the blacks lack agency in the act. Like capricious children it is to be expected that they will act out unless disciplined; he concludes that it appears that the whites here permitted their acting out rather than that the Negroes have disobeyed or rebelled in any significant way. Delano concludes that white s indulgence of bad behavior is a consequence of the deprivation of the ill-fated journey. While left alone with them, he was not long in observing some things tending to heighten his first impressions; but surprise was lost in pity, both for the Spaniards and blacks, alike evidently reduced from scarcity of water and provisions; while long continued suffering seemed to have brought out the less good-natured qualities of the Negroes, besides, at the same time, impairing the Spaniard s authority over them. But, under the circumstances, precisely this condition of things was to have been anticipated. In armies, navies, cities, or families - in nature herself nothing more relaxes good order than misery. 367 Delano s assertion of the lack of black agency marks his narrative as unreliable, and we must assume that this may be the case with the deposition we read in the closing moments of the text as well. Melville is deceiving us by making it appear that the tale is

358 349 being told through the eyes of the naïve Delano. It is not, and the narrator for the majority of the text is distinct from the reporting in the deposition. Melville is telling a story of someone telling a story of a story that they were told by an unreliable informant. Who, we have to ask, is the storyteller? In the opening moments of the text, the narrator offers the following important description of Delano: [his] surprise might have deepened into suspicion had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinarily and repeated excitement, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. 368 This passage asserts that Delano cannot be expected to understand what is going on even when it is apparent. This narrator clearly has knowledge of the habitual workings of Delano s mind that render his confusion to be expected and perhaps not appropriately characterized as an event at all; this is who he is and one is left to wonder how he is able to safely navigate a ship through dangerous waters with the difficulties he has relating his observations to reality. Or perhaps there is another reading. Perhaps the narrator is relating Delano s story after a revelatory moment which causes him to come to self-awareness; an understanding that allows him, in retrospect, to accurately relate the life he has spent in a fog of delusion unable to see the forest for the trees or in this case, the slave revolt for the slaves. The fact that the blacks are undisciplined causes Delano to become far more concerned with possible threats from the whites, rather than mistrusting the actions of the Negroes as potentially dangerous. Delano s reading is one that draws his attention to the relationship of the actors to a sovereign power, or specifically to the question of its existence or absence. It

359 350 is simply not possible for a black to be a Spaniard or anything other than a Negro within the perception of Delano the native informant. This renders two assumptions apparent implicit to his observation: 1) that if discipline is lacking, it is because of the hardship attending the doomed voyage and; 2) that it is continued suffering that emphasizes the less good-natured qualities of the Negroes. This is critical because it shows that in the mind of Delano the condition of slavery does not qualify as a source of continued suffering. If slavery were such a condition, then one could expect that there would be a steady state of undisciplined behavior. Since there is not, Delano s search for the cause of the discord aboard the San Dominick rests on a series of implausible instances of navigational problems complicated by impossible-to-imagine doldrums claimed by Cereno when the cause of the condition that he observes is in fact slavery and slavery alone. This thinking may hold the key to the paradoxical relationship explored above between supporters of slavery who are outraged by the Middle Passage. Slavery, unlike the Passage, is not characterized by continued suffering in the minds of these characters. The water and food-stuffs as well as the wind that moves the San Dominick into port will never palliate the suffering of slavery. Whether the depravations of slavery are recognized by the master class or not, the fact of a continuous state of coercion/suffering assures that the questioning of authority by the enslaved will continue apace. Delano does not know this but certainly Melville does. Further, what Melville seems to be saying in his early glance into the inner-workings of the psychology of Delano is that, like his inability to imagine the possibility of a slave revolt he, like society, is also incapable of grappling with the fact of the conditions created by slavery. We cannot be certain whether Delano, although a New Englander, is not a supporter of slavery who just happens not to be involved in the trade or, at the moment, to own any human beings. After finding himself enthralled by the quality of Babo s servitude, he offers

360 351 to purchase him for his own use. Tell me, Don Benito, he added, with a smile - I should like to have your man here myself - what will you take for him? Would fifty doubloons be an object? 369 What we have come to expect of the New Englander Delano is thrown into question. Melville, again, through this insightful narration, exposes directly how Delano s befuddled mind works specifically when confronted with people of color. When at ease with respect to exterior things, Captain Delano s nature was not only benign, but familiarly and humorously so. At home, he had often taken a rare satisfaction in sitting in his door, watching some free man of colour at his work or play. If on a voyage he chanced to have a black sailor, invariably he was on chatty, and half gamesome terms with him. In fact, like most men of good, blither heart, Captain Delano took to Negroes, not philanthropically, but generally, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs. 370 This statement is consistent with the portrait of Delano s mind from page one of this text. More telling is that Delano simply cannot tell the difference between a free black person and an enslaved one. To him they are both sources of benign curiosity and his own strange brand of collegiality. He somehow is striving to find a place of comfort aboard a slave ship, surrounded by the enslaved, where his old weakness for Negroes can flourish. This revelation cuts two ways, and it is blackness that serves as the blade. Delano, in his lumping all Negroes as the same, is exhibiting the same state of mind that renders all Negroes equally eligible for slavery. For the amiable bigot Delano there is nothing about a Negro who is enslaved that seems distinct from his experience with some free man of colour who is merely going about his work or play whom he may be regard or chat up at his leisure. The sinister side of this mode of thinking is that for the enslaver there is nothing different that he or she would expect from a free man of colour that is not of a piece with the care that must be taken around the enslaved. Under these conditions of marginalized perception it is clear that even threats from Negroes would be illegible to Delano. Melville,

361 352 in my reading, places the Hatchet Polishers in the text specifically to illustrate the depths of Delano s delusion and these figures also serve as an entry point to insure that the internal metric of this project, time, is keep intact. There are several elements of the characters the Hatchet Polishers that require attention. First, and perhaps most obviously, Delano is incapable of recognizing the overt threat they are meant to constantly represent. A threat that is discernible to all the other whites on board the San Dominick, but Delano fails to register the danger because of his unquestioned assumption of inherent docility on the part of the Negro. the six hatchet-polishers neither spoke to others, nor breathed a whisper among themselves, but sat intent upon their task, except at intervals, when, with the peculiar love in Negroes of uniting industry with pastime, two-and-two they sideways clashed their hatchets together, like cymbals, with a barbarous din. All six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated Africans. 371 Melville places the Hatchet Polishers as a gesture toward an aspiration of sovereignty and its maintenance by force, which remains un-recognized by Delano. In terms of the altered architecture of the San Dominick, Melville, by placing the hatchet polishers in the sacred space of the quarter deck of the ship, is demonstrating the spatial alteration of this space of creation of subaltern subjects. In addition to labeling the polishers in the passage above as different in appearance from the rest of the blacks onboard, the narrator shifts to situate them in a specific place beyond the general marker of Africa or just Negro, but Ashantee. Delano wonders at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet polishers and why such an interruption should be allowed. 372 Don Benito assures him that they are doing his bidding, continually polishing blades that never seem to get restored. And, of course, it never occurs to Delano that the Ashantee seem to make the most noise right when he is on the brink of some discovery.

362 353 Here, passing from one suspicious thing to another, his mind revolved the point of the strange questions put to him concerning his ship. By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in continuous comment on the white stranger s thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded. 373 Several mysteries hover above this passage. Is the din from the polishers continuous or only in those instances when Delano seems to be verging on revelations, or is it more likely that through some quirk of the misfiring of his faculties, he is only cognizant of the clashing when he is about to reach an understanding? It is not that the noise disrupts his understanding; it is the opposite: it is his inability to hear the noise that is his misunderstanding. Here, I propose that Melville is situating blackness not as a lack but as itself a fullness, a din that is not able to be heard by whites. It is here that I depart with readings of blackness in this text as a silence. I propose it is just the opposite and its most obvious presentation is in the continuous noise that we may take as a kind of time keeping, an establishment of a self-determined time signature that is the sine qua non of coherent sovereignty. Silence appears in the form of Atufal and that will be taken up in tracing the presence of the Sovereign Negro in this text as a progression from the figure of Othello. Christopher Freeburg s text, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America is a careful reading of blackness that, as he posits, is tethered to this notion of silence. Realizing silence in this way is to confront the manifestation of an ultimate totality, pictured as endless gray, a blankness neither infinitely living or dead, but the all itself that inspires dread in whoever faces it. This inspired dread; the result of the confrontation with the void emerges in whites encounters with signs of blackness. The enslaved Africans are not the void itself, but their blackness signifies what it is

363 354 like to be forced to face it - the place where mastery unravels as one experiences the contradictory fields of knowable social conventions and the unknowable all Silence dramatizes the stakes of the blackness the slaves signify. 374 My disagreement with this reading of blackness as silence turns on Melville s careful deconstruction of whiteness in Moby-Dick, which in my reading is the type of silence and absence that Freeburg finds here in blackness. Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much as color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; 375 Whiteness for Melville is an absence of color and sound that nonetheless provides a canvas for both color and sound to be produced upon. Blackness, on the other hand, is the super-abundance of color and sound but also is a question of the perspective of the observer and the observed. Whiteness is contiguous with recognizable modes of sovereignty and its recognition. Black is a type of noise like that produced by the Ashantee Hatchet Polishers, and the inability to hear it is the erasure of cognition of that impossible to ignore din is the essence of blackness and is necessarily deemed as unrelated to sovereignty except in its lack. I believe that Freeburg is correct to point us to temporality as the framework against which this is most productively considered. Freeburg proposes that when the truth of the deception aboard the San Dominick is revealed, time for Delano is disturbed in what he proposes represents the absence of time or temporal distinctions 376. The narrator of Benito Cereno at that moment proposes that: All this, with what preceded, and what followed, occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one. 377 From the perspective of the coercer, it is clear, at least in the account provided by Kant that the meta-physical nature of Negro inferiority gives license to institute what are perceived as dehumanizing regimes of coercion and exploitation based upon a notion of ontological inferiority. Ronald Judy proposes that:

364 355 To be black is to be Negro. Given that such a concept is not empirical, these judgments cannot be deduced on sensible grounds; rather, they are completely transcendental, i.e., metaphysical. That is to say, the phenomenal appearance of blackness does not achieve the significance of stupidity until it is subsumed under a concept, and for Kant that concept is The Negro, which is the a priori principle of stupidity. 378 These notions of Negro stupidity are apparent in the misperceptions by Delano of the situation on board the San Dominick. Kant proposes that auto-affection gives the subject its temporality; the self touching is related in many ways to the beating of the individual s heart and is the same type of awareness of that throbbing as pressing your hand against your chest to feel your heartbeat. This becomes a daily first activity, the first moments of awareness upon waking in the morning are to check with the self and ask; are you ok and hope to receive a positive response. 379 To return to the San Dominick, the Hatchet Polishers are referred to as first Africans and later Ashantee, marking, in my reading, the perception by Delano that these subjects are different; recall upon his first encounter with them he notes that [a]ll six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated Africans. 380 The revolutionary and disruptive establishment of this time signature on board the San Dominick renders Delano s misperceptions almost complete in that, on board this ship, in this space, in this particular time, there are no Negroes. The critical problem for the Africans on board the ship is that modernity has structured a hegemonic system of time that renders the black body always already subject to its coercive force and the destruction of the essential awareness and coherence of the inner and outer selves. The San Dominick and the liberated blacks aboard it will ultimately be held to account for their revolution. Because Delano has that hegemonic perception of time, he can bear witness to the fracturing of it only when he, aboard the long

365 356 boat, is returned to the common mode of temporality, and Don Cereno s leap from one time to the another makes it impossible to ignore. Through all of this action on board the San Dominick it is the figure of Atufal, the chained African, the one figure on board the vessel who is physically still in chains, that is the most free in that he is the physical embodiment of the alternative time signature that has been established by the blacks. It is he, not Babo, that I nominate as the Negro/shadow that haunts Don Benito to his death. As a practical matter, outside of reading his presence as an embodiment of the time signature and perhaps more importantly, sovereignty itself, it is unclear what Atufal is doing in the novella at all. I say this for several reasons. First, from a perspective of the deception put on by the blacks, there is no necessity to emphasize the fact of bondage. They are always understood to be under a regime of coercion that, in its depth and breadth, does not require the physical restraint of the body. Second, the presence of the bound African only tends to raise suspicion in the mind of Delano. This is made clear each time that he appears, like clockwork, with the striking of two-bells on board the ship that appears to be disassociated, as discussed here in some detail, from the notion of normative time outside of this ship. The appearance of Atufal in chains is described in the deposition as the device of presenting Atufal, his (Babo s) right-hand man, as chained though in a moment the chains could be dropped. 381 This is one of the ruses that troubles Delano the most. It represents one of the four curious points 382 that occupy the thinking of Delano in order to keep his mind out of mischief. 383 He is specifically concerned with the tyranny in Don Benito s treatment of Atufal, the black; as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by the ring in his nose. 384 Atufal is repeatedly recognized, including his owners, as somehow different. Within the deposition, the quotidian roster of the enslaved proposes that he is a powerful Negro named Atufal, who, being supposed to have been a chief in Africa, his

366 357 owners set great store by him 385 Just as the presence of Atufal troubles Delano, we as readers have to take note of him as the key to Melville s discourse on time and its relationship to sovereignty. It is Atufal not Babo, that is the Negro that haunts Don Benito and represents the Negro who casts the offending shadow. Melville foreshadows this in the description of Atufal s first appearance. At the first glimpse of his approach, Don Benito had started, a resentful shadow swept over his face; and, as with the sudden memory of bootless rage, his white lips glued together. 386 Later, Delano regards him in similar fashion: Atufal, the pretended rebel, but punctual shadow 387 Marking this the iconic reference that serves as the epigraph to Ellison s novel and referenced by Carl Schmitt can be resituated. Interestingly, it is Babo who is adopted into the political radical black imaginary as the revolutionary figure while Atufal appears to have been forgotten; the implication being that it is Babo whose name could stand in for the Negro that has cast the shadow upon Don Benito. It is my proposal that the text is sympathetic to resituating the silent figure of Atufal as the revolutionary ideal. C.L.R. James, a careful reader of Melville whose interest in the author extends beyond strict literary critique to the political valence of the work, had this to say about Benito Cereno in, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In: As usual with him, his protest is uncompromising, absolute. The Negroes fight to a finish, Babo is the most heroic character in Melville s fiction. He is a man of unbending will, a natural leader, an organizer of large schemes but a master of detail, ruthless against his enemies, but without personal weakness, as was proved by his behavior after he was captured. Melville purposefully makes him physically small, a man of internal power with a brain that is a hive of subtlety. 388

367 358 Here, in the form of Babo, James locates the revolutionary ideal that can be productively read against his canonical history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. In both of the James texts, the author is interested in bringing to the reader s attention the revolutionary par excellence. In spite of the title of Black Jacobins, L Ouverture is specifically criticized for ultimately coming to be the opposite of Babo by seeming predisposed to compromise, which proved to be his primary personal weakness and source of his tragic downfall in the reading of James. L Ouverture, or more carefully, James representation of him, considers him an acommodationist because of his adamant desire for recognition within the French national or imperial consciousness and therefore from the community of nation states as well. This notion finds itself reified in the lore surrounding L Ouverture in contra-distinction to that enjoyed by Dessalines and has become canonical through its presence in the text of C.L.R. James Black Jacobins. The defeat of Toussaint in the War of Independence and his imprisonment and death in Europe are universally looked upon as tragedy Toussaint strove to maintain the French connection as necessary to Haiti in its long and difficult climb to civilisation. Convinced that slavery could never be restored in San Domingo, he was equally convinced that a population of slaves recently landed from Africa could not attain to civilization by going it alone. 389 In the historicizing of the events in Haiti, it is Dessalines, the uncompromising successor to L Ouverture, who orders the killing of all whites and prepares the Declaration of Independence that isolates the newly formed state from outside interference by whites and represents the revolutionary ideal he has found himself canonized in Haitian Voodoo as a Loa; canonized, so to speak, in a way that L Ouverture is not. It is this spirit that readers like James have found in the figure of Babo. He serves as the anti-l Ouverture; in spite of his ultimate demise it is Babo s commitment to the spirit of the revolutionary ideal that

368 359 renders his death romantic according to James, in contradistinction to the tragedy of L Ouverture. Tragedy is particularly important here in light of James narrative and David Scott s examination of it. In Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution is understood as a conflict between the tragic and the romantic; This is a realization that Scott proposes is shared by James and is demonstrated by the author s 1963 revision of Black Jacobins. It is clear here that it is Babo, the most heroic figure in Melville s fiction who drives the events on the San Dominick to be understood by James categorically differently from those on the island after which he names the ship, Santo Domingo. Another way to approach this question of the romantic and the revolutionary ideal is to examine the character of Atufal in two ways. The first is the curious erasure of Atufal from the revolutionary imaginary and the second is to situate his appearance around the concept of masking that serves as a central trope for Melville in this text. The argument is that the erasure of Atufal is a by-product of the form of masking employed by Melville in the text. The masking on board the ship that is symbolized by the stern disguises the fact that the blacks are actually in charge of the vessel and accomplish this by assuming the persona of slave. Each player in this drama has a specific role to play in order to present the layered appearance of real life to Delano. Leon Forrest, in the inaugural Allison Davis lecture at Northwestern University, addresses the complexity of this masquerade in his remarks. The masquerade of peaceful, devoted darkies, not plotting slaves nothing to do with the inner-self. In both cases the public mind would not think the monk nor slave would have much of an inner life short of meditations upon Master, and incapable of self-mastery. Actually the triad of African leadership (Babo, Atufal and the mulatto Francesco) masked before the eyes of Delano as obedient, or noble savage, or mulatto aristocrat was united in the thing below the mask: the desire for freedom and fierce revenge. 390

369 360 By examining the figure of Atufal, both his persona and through that process the thing below the mask, we find that there is a subject that is important to Melville whose desire for freedom and revenge is distinct and the product of his presence as a barely recognizable figure of black sovereignty that does not elude the awareness of the characters within the novel but in its construction does the work of delusion on the reader and critic alike. Recall the consternation that Atufal s regal appearance caused Delano. In spite of draping him in chains and rendering him the only African aboard the vessel to be restrained in this manner, Melville has constructed a parody that seems to negate itself and expose the true character of one occupant of the San Dominick. Forrest reads Atufal as one in a long series of pantomimes of Christianity that Melville employs in the text. Melville is doing parodies of the Christ story throughout. One interesting parallel-as-burlesque springs from the mocking interrogation scene when Jesus is brought before Pilate (shortly before his crucifixion) on charges of blasphemy and not giving sufficient tribute to the state. In the mock interrogation scene in the novella, Atufal is summoned before Don Benito with Babo as witness and Delano as spectator for the ostensible purpose of humbling the African Christ and Atufal refused to back down concerning their pride and who they were We learn that this royal man, Atufal, was once a king in his own land; his kingdom (like that of Christ) is surely not of this New World. 391 Atufal, if we can imagine the existence of a real self, cannot hide it beneath the layers of masks that are employed to deceive Delano; if that represents the measure of success then the ruse is an abject failure. Delano continues to view Atufal as royal and further takes umbrage at the notion of Don Benito subjugating him: the tyranny in Don Benito s treatment of Atufal, the black; as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by the ring

370 361 in his nose Babo s plan to hide the charismatic appearance of Atufal in plain sight, does not achieve the desired effect. It is Atufal s silent protest that provides a point of reference between the time established by the axe-polishers and that of the system the enslaved are attempting to escape. From this perspective, Atufal represents a transitional figure stuck between the African world that recognizes his sovereignty and white supremacy that acknowledges his agency only as an anachronism. It is perhaps the unstable aspect of this subject that has contributed to his erasure and shifted the focus to Babo. Thinkers like James and [for] the black power protests of the 1960s, African American writers and activists started to celebrate Babo as an underground hero and to read Benito Cereno as subversive 393 Benito Cereno is subversive but it is the complex masking of Atufal that provides the foundation of a political project that must take into account what Forrest describes in his address as the angularity of freewill. 394 The multi-layered persona adopted by Atufal better represent the revolutionary ideal established by James in his deconstruction of the faults of L Ouverture that are corrected, in his reading, by Babo. The trope of Jacobinism is overt in the James text and hovers in Benito Cereno when we return to the rich possibility of reading the San Dominick as metonymic to the French and Haitian Revolutions. It is here that Hannah Arendt s On Revolution provides a framework around which we might understand this question by relating it to the French Revolution and the central concern of the Terror, hypocrisy. Arendt, in Chapter Two of the text, is preoccupied with the Terror. Arendt s formulation is quoted here at length. The profound meaningfulness inherent in the many political metaphors derived from the theatre is perhaps best illustrated by the history of the Latin word persona. In its original meaning it signified the mask ancient actors used to wear in a play. The mask as such obviously had two functions: it had to hide or rather to replace, the actor s own face and countenance, but in a way that would make it possible for the voice to sound through. At any rate, it was in this twofold

371 362 understanding of a mask through which a voice sounds that the word persona became a metaphor and was carried from the language of theatre into legal terminology. The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona, a legal personality, as he would say; it was as though the laws had affixed to him the part he was expected to play on the public scene, with the provision, however that his own voice would be able to sound through Without his persona, there would be an individual without rights and duties, perhaps a natural man that is, a human being or homo in the original meaning of the word, indicating someone outside the range of the law and body politic of the citizen as for instance a slave-but certainly a politically irrelevant being. When the French Revolution unmasked the intrigue of the Court and proceeded to tear off the mask of its own children, it aimed, of course, at the mask of hypocrisy In contrast, the persona in its original theatrical sense, was the mask affixed to the actor s face by the exigencies of the play; hence it meant metaphorically the person, which the law of the land can affix to individuals The point of this distinction and the appositeness of the metaphor lie in that the unmasking of the person, the deprivation of legal personality, would leave behind the natural human being, while the unmasking of the hypocrite would leave nothing, behind the mask, because the hypocrite is the actor himself in so far as he wears no mask. He pretends to be the assumed role, and when he enters the game of society it is without any playacting whatever. 395 This framework can be employed to understand the masquerade that Atufal is presenting to Delano. Taking up Arendt we find that Atufal, as an ontological being is not a normal African but royal in some sense which adds the persona of sovereignty to his person. In the parlance of this project, Atufal has separated himself from Elemental existence in the coherent system from which he exits as an Exalted actor. The next layer of masking appears when he is captured and forced into chattel slavery. If we imagine that his first mask, sovereign, is not removed but covered by this persona, we can mark the deception as an incomplete or ineffectual process of veiling his royal persona since it is still discernible by every character in the story. Upon capturing the San Dominick one can propose that the mask of enslavement has been removed only to be replaced upon the

372 363 encounter with the Bachelor s Delight by the first layer of subterfuge, the pantomime of slavery, Forrest s masquerade of peaceful, devoted darkies, not plotting slaves 396. Atufal, however, has a more complex role to play. The assumption must be, on the part of the plotting Babo, that the presence of a Sovereign Negro wandering the decks of the San Dominick would expose the entire hoax. In order to mask this aura of free will, Atufal is literally shrouded in chains. An iron collar was about his neck, from which depended a chain, thrice wound round his body; the terminating links padlocked together at a broad band of iron, his girdle. 397 Here, Atufal has adopted the persona of the bad nigger who, even at this point deep inside of the architecture of the slave society cannot be trusted to respect the invisible coercion of white supremacy. In addition to this, Melville s Atufal dons an additional persona, that of the silently protesting Negro who has not yet been broken by the reality of his condition. This is some mulish mutineer, thought Captain Delano, surveying, not without a mixture of admiration, the colossal form of the Negro. See, he waits your question, master, said the servant. Thus reminded, Don Benito nervously averting his glance, as if shunning, by anticipation, some rebellious response, in a disconcerted voice thus spoke: Atufal, will you ask my pardon now? The black was silent. Again, master, murmured the servant, with bitter upbraiding eyeing his countryman. Again, master; he will bend to master yet. Answer, said Don Benito, still averting his glance, say but the one word pardon, and your chains shall be off.

373 364 Upon this, this black, slowly raising both arms, let them lifelessly fall, his links clanking, his head bowed; as much as to say, No, I am content. 398 We are told that this revolutionary silence has persisted for some sixty days, 399 where every two hours he stands before 400 Don Benito. Delano is expected to digest the concept that 12 times a day for 60 days, Atufal has, 720 times, refused to utter the simple word of pardon that would free him from his chains and this penance. It is this that establishes Atufal as the incorruptible (in the sense the term is employed by and about Robespierre) revolutionary for whom, in spite of the multiple layers of subterfuge and masking, the integrity of his Exalted persona remains. Upon my conscience, then, exclaimed Captain Delano, impulsively; he has a royal spirit in him, this fellow. He may have some right to it, bitterly returned Don Benito, he says he was a king in his own land. Yes, said the servant, entering a word, those slits in Atufal s ears once held wedges of gold; but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man s slave was Babo, who now is the white s. 401 Atufal, it seems, was ontologically incapable of donning the mask of minstrelsy that Babo, the slave both in this world and the other, so effectively portrays. Forrest analogizes the entire pantomime to an extended meditation on the part of Melville on Milton s Paradise Lost. For let Babo stand for Lucifer, the perversely brilliant fallen Angel whose bodily presence here introduced the original sin of slavery and the experience of blackness in the Western laboratory and imagination; and Cereno stand as Western Man, who must undergo this agonizing experience, but through imitation, as a masked-actor-monk doing the Stations of the Cross in black face; and Delano stand as a representative of Michael, who comes to right it all, but who must fall from the paradise of his gullibility. 402

374 365 This compelling reading of the text is hampered by its excision of Atufal. This silence, recreating the revolutionary silence of the Sovereign Negro in the text requires attention. According to the text, the only utterance we have from Atufal is that he says he was a king in his own land 403 and beyond this he will neither speak nor act. This might be read as rebellion enough. We are even led to believe, from Don Benito s deposition that: [T]hat the Negro Babo was the plotter from first to last; he ordered every murder, and was the helm and keel of the revolt; that Atufal was his lieutenant in all; but Atufal, with his own hand, committed no murder; nor did the Negro Babo; 404 From this perspective, Atufal can be understood to represent the totemic head of the revolution; not dissimilar to the figurehead on the ship, that in silent representation dangles the possibility of sovereign will and freedom before the eyes of those embarked on the vessel. In this he differs from Babo in that there is nothing for him to order or require; he represents an alternative system of order and temporality itself, and it is against this point of reference that the revolution proceeds: Babo orders death based on Atufal s sovereign imprimatur, and neither are required to take up arms themselves - a simulacrum of the French Revolution s Comité de salut public. This leaves us to understand Atufal as the revolutionary ideal, echoing Rousseau s notion of sovereignty. My argument then, is that sovereignty, being nothing other than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated; and that the sovereign, which is simply a collective being, cannot be represented by anyone but itself - power may be delegated but the will cannot be. 405 Atufal s silence, in counterpoint to the constant chatter of Babo or the din of the hatchet polishers, is therefore the embodiment of sovereignty itself and perhaps therefore, is appropriately erased from James conceptualization of the heroic revolutionary in that he is an idea that represents the goal and as such cannot be moved and requires no elaboration of

375 366 that position. Atufal, in his material presence embodies the mistake of cognition that I proposed in the previous chapter of understanding the ontological condition of Exalted temporality as causing a lack or subtraction from collective being. From this place we can pose Othello and Atufal beside one another and examine them and their revolutionary potentiality. In placing Othello and Atufal in conversation with one another it facilitates an examination of what I propose represents an evolutionary trajectory in the portrayal of the black revolutionary imagination in general and in particular its relationship to death. In thinking of death here it is important to recall the way that I am employing it as a way to understand the subject in both meta and ultra-meta-physical terms in that we can witness the corporeal (meta) termination of the subject or its ultra-meta (ontological) death through a series of pressures brought to bear on the relationship of individual temporality to that of the collective. The argument here is that Othello addresses the problematic of his fractured subjectivity by pursuing the death of the corporeal being that has absorbed his essence. Atufal and the rebellious subjects aboard the San Dominick pursue the death of the material condition of their subjugation; the killing of the enslavers and the capture of the space that facilitates the creation of the enslaved subject in order to reverse its logic. Substantively, both of these efforts fail. The final literary exemplar I wish to employ in thinking this evolution or perhaps genealogy is Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man, which offers a third way to examine both the praxis of masking the true character of the subject and typologies of death. Ellison renders this transition in some ways obvious in that he employs the closing lines of Benito Cereno as the first of two epigraphs to Invisible Man. It is notable that he quotes incompletely the lines from Benito Cereno.

376 367 You are saved, cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you? Leaving out the answer proffered by Cereno, The Negro. This establishes at the outset of Ellison s project the extension he is providing to the genealogy we are tracing from Shakespeare s Othello to Melville s Atufal and now Ellison s Invisible Man. He has chosen to render the revolutionary figure as just that; invisible: rather than the hyper, singular visibility of the Moor of Venice or that of the chained and paraded figure of Atufal on board the captured slave ship. It is my reading of the texts of both Melville and Ellison that the Negro in question is not the crude pantomime of the ever helpful darkie that is Babo but the silent menace of Atufal. Invisibility, as employed by Ellison can be situated as a strategy for occluding the foundational confusion of material and ontological essence that creates the Abject and produces the ocular mark of subaltern being that plagues Othello, Atufal, and Fanon. What becomes necessary is to think invisibility as an interruption of the dominant paradigms for, in the first instance, marking the consciousness of the subaltern and in so doing producing a road map for the unraveling of this condition. The most basic question is whether the figure that has become invisible has broken the logic of Du Bois tripartite construction of subaltern consciousness that depends upon second-sight as its sine qua non? Further, does the inability of the Elemental subject to witness the material condition of abjection ameliorate the fact of the (to repurpose Sartre) consciousness in the first degree of the reflected nature of that condition? Or, just because the subaltern figure can t be seen anymore has he or she solved the problematic or does the project of invisibility require constant reification of the causal context in order to be coherent from the perspective of the subject that employs the strategy? In order to navigate these issues the exegetical strategy will first examine the set of circumstances that fracture the protagonist of Ellison s story s

377 368 relationship with a more traditional mode of recognition by the Other. This leads the central character to relocate himself spatially and in so doing attempt to hide his subject position. The perspective for this analysis is shifted to those who recognize him for what he is in spite of his attempts to hide in plain sight. The first passage that draws my attention is from the text s Chapter 13 You right, but everything what looks good ain t necessarily good, he said. But these is. This quote is extracted from a turning point in the novel 406 where the narrator is experiencing a moment of self-discovery. The short statement from the protagonist s interlocutor, a street vendor selling yams, serves as a point of entry into the central problem that confronts the theorizing of Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs and I read as manifest in the thinking of Melville; how can one be sure that the thing that you are observing is the thing itself and not hidden beneath veils of subterfuge that disguise reality? The possibilities that exist out of this line from Ellison seem to be as follows: 1. Not everything that looks good is good; 2. Some things that look good are bad; 3. Some things that look good are good; 4. Some things that look bad are bad; 5. Some things that look bad are good; 6. Not everything that looks bad is bad: 7. Everything that looks good is bad; 8. Everything that looks bad is good: 9. Everything that looks good is good; and finally 10. Everything that looks bad is bad What interests me here is both the internal and external dynamic as it relates to second-sight that masking and invisibility put into play. The second passage of Ellison that is of use has been examined in this project before with respect to its relevance to Du Bois second-sight and the power of the seventh son invested in the Bluesman Wheatstraw. In both of these instances, the protagonist is

378 369 recognized for what he is by those who are the same as he. The questions that will preoccupy this portion of the project will be to unpack the elements of masquerading employed by the subject desirous of invisibility, second, how it is that his mask is penetrated and finally how does this recognition of the true-self effect the subject bent on disguise? Central to this examination is the proposal that Ellison is conducting a long mediation on Du Bois theory of the subject and in so doing the Invisible Man (the figure), is what the author seems to propose as the logical trajectory of the paradigm. What I mean to propose is important here is that Ellison as a thinker, in my reading, has recognized and absorbed the two elements of Du Boisian thought that loom large for this project: first the veil and the Veil as distinct entities and second, what I have called Tripartite Subaltern Consciousness. Ellison, I argue, is offering a trenchant critique of Du Bois framework, which, has as the secondary target of its attack, the project of self-consciousness as proposed by Booker T. Washington. Washington is not collateral damage here just not the primary objective. The fault line that I propose Ellison is working looks like this: Stated plainly, if we accept the omnipresence of second-sight as the primary lens of Africana self-consciousness then we must trouble any project of reconstruction of the subaltern black from this point of departure. If we are to understand the sense that attends second-sight, doubleconsciousness, as a subject being aware of herself always through the eyes of the hegemonic other, then it seems that we must wonder how one can construct a positive image of self from this position. The argument presented here with respect to the nature of double consciousness is that it in fact can only proceed in a manner that tends to negate the positive subjective of subaltern actors and is the reason for the Du Boisian construction and employment of the Veil. In other words, if I, as the marginalized and maligned subject see myself as such from my social condition and secondarily realize that the hegemonic other

379 370 views me as such, what purchase might I find for positive identity formation? The answer that I have posited earlier here is that without a process of radical interruption of secondsight, there is none. Understanding this, Ellison works through the options that present themselves and roughly dove-tail with what we have marked from Shakespeare and Melville before attempting the third option, the erasure of the subject from view or invisibility. As a practical matter, the starting point of this examination exists external to Du bois thinking in his troubling of the solution to the problem of abjection proposed by Booker T. Washington. The conflict in viewpoint between Washington and Du Bois is wellcovered ground but the tension is summarized by Du Bois in Souls in his chapter that addresses Washington directly. [Washington] claimed that black people give up at least for the present, three things- First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth, -and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and conciliation of the South. 407 Du Bois could not disagree more and poses his project in stark contrast to this formulation. A central component of his project is the now classic trope of the veil that serves as the location of the canonical concepts of double consciousness, two-ness and second sight. These, however, are not positions from which to realize self-consciousness. Du Bois knows this and makes it clear in the text. -this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. 408 Du Bois locates this possibility behind the Veil, which, as I have argued is a separate concept from the veil. It is useful here to take Chapter XIII of Du Bois and Chapter Two of Ellison as an appropriate starting point for this thinking. Chapter Two of the Ellison releases, if only in

380 371 its opening moments, the reader from the chaos of the Battle Royale. At the conclusion of Chapter One, the narrator, when confronted with the hoax the white men have played on him grants us an insight into the status of his understanding/consciousness of his situation. (It was a dream I was to remember and dream again for many years after. But at the time I had no insight into its meaning. First I had to attend college) 409 Like John from Chapter XIII of the Du Bois, our narrator is embroiled in situations that marginalize his identity but he has no real understanding of the implications and most importantly, imagines that college will serve as the key to its resolution. Ellison quickly disabuses the reader of this notion. As the narrator retrospectively recalls the idyllic setting of the college from his hole, we learn that the road that runs through the campus goes from the seat of higher education to its terminus at the insane asylum. 410 Ellison is proposing here that, far from leading to a space of freedom and self-realization, as we have seen in the Du Bois, this process of education leads to insanity. It is imperative here to identify the dramatis personae and central tropes of the Ellison with respect to their mirror image in the Du Bois. From that position we can work our way through this improvisation and examine its implications. I label this an improvisation in that that the central theme of the story; a coming of age through engagement with higher education by a disenfranchised black youth, is the melody around which the two authors create very different solos with profoundly divergent messages. The white in the Du Bois, the Judge, the father of white John, is in the Ellison presented as the character of Mr. Norton, the multimillionaire Northern founder of the college. More complex is the parallel to John s sister; she is echoed as first, the founder s now deceased daughter. Additionally, as the primary female character in the Du Bois, she seems to appear in the Ellison as a composite; the aforementioned daughter of the founder and the molested daughter of Trueblood. Trueblood, the embarrassing Negro, represents

381 372 the uncultured, stereotypic black, which, in Du Bois is represented by the entire segregated life of African-Americans in the town of Altahama. The tropes that we will compare and contrast are further evidence of Ellison s perhaps cruel and at best cynical reading of Souls. The college is not even allowed to remain untouched. Ellison gives us Booker T. Washington s Tuskegee Institute in form with Ellison s desire for classical education in content making the two diametrically opposed visionaries ideas coterminous with one another, implying that there is no difference. The veil or color line finds itself present as the white line dividing the road from the college to the insane asylum, which is Ellison s way of pointing us to his view of the deleterious effect of education in this manner. The statue commemorating the black founder of the college is an image that we are all familiar. Ellison pulls it into his narrative and allows no confusion as to his disdain for the project of Booker T. Washington as a co-equal partner in his deconstruction of Du Bois. There in my mind s eye I see the bronze statue of the college founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting the veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of the knelling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. 411 That which puzzles Ellison s narrator is the centerpiece of that which concerns him about the Du Boisian formulation. Without this concern, his story would likely follow the same logical trajectory of Of the Coming of John ; in the absence of this philosophical agreement with the Du Boisian turn he feels justified to upend the construction by questioning the fundamental prescription proposed in Souls: Education. Based upon the centrality of this concern for this project, it is probably most important that we take a look at the last statement first: [are we] witnessing a revelation or a

382 373 more efficient blinding[?] Based upon the way Ellison poses the question and presents his narrative I am willing to make the following argument to the question posed at the outset of this section; whether Ellison has in fact perceived the riddle of the Veil/veil that Du Bois gives in Souls and if so, what is his position on its sufficiency? I believe that he has grasped the subtlety and the evidence lies in the passage above and his employment of the iconic image of the Founder (Booker T. Washington) lifting the veil from the eyes of the crouched slave. First, we are again dealing with a frontal attack on Du Bois s Souls by Ellison dragging the maligned Figure of Washington from Du Bois s Chapter III Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others into the project. The veil that Booker T. proposes/appears to be lifting from the eyes of the slave is not the veil/color-line; he in fact was fully invested in its maintenance. Booker T., Du Bois and Ellison are all talking about the Veil that covers a form of enlightenment that means different things for our interlocutors. Booker T. was most interested in the more practical forms of education, Du Bois with increasing the capacity of the most talented and Ellison buys none of it. He places his sweeping disagreement with the concept in the mouth of Mr. Norton, the white founder. If you become a good farmer, a chef, a preacher, doctor, singer, mechanic-whatever you become, and even if you fail, you are my fate. 412 That, I would argue, pretty much covers the space that we might have read into the obvious pantomime of Washington s Tuskegee and pantomime it is because Ellison conflates Du Bois vision of a classical education with Washington s more realistic project of training for practical career. Further, by tying the achievement or failure of the black figure to the fate of the white benefactor there is no room for the existence of black agency on its own terms under these conditions. The reference to fate illustrates the type of education with which Ellison has animated his college.

383 374 A pleasant fate, he repeated, and I hope yours will be as pleasant. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir I said, pleased that he wished something pleasant for me. But at the same time I was puzzled. How could anyone s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant-not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays. 413 Ellison uses the narrator s confusion about fate to remind the reader of the insurgent nature of his project of self-conscious agency. When he writes, no one I knew, the only character we have been introduced to prior to this moment that discussed fate is the narrator s grandfather from Chapter 1. Grandfather had been a quiet old man who never made any trouble, yet on his deathbed he had called himself a traitor and a spy, and he had spoken of his meekness as a dangerous activity. It had become a constant puzzle which lay unanswered in the back of my mind. And whenever things went well for me I remembered my grandfather and felt guilty and uncomfortable. It was as though I was carrying out his advice in spite of myself. And to make it worse, everyone loved me for it. I was praised by the most lily-white men of the town. I was considered an example of desirable conductjust as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted 414 This is the bridge, the conceptualization of fate that Ellison uses to drive the story forward to the central conflict of Chapter 2, the encounter with Trueblood and his wife, daughter and offspring. xxiii xxiii Here Ellison adds Greek Tragedy to the text; the allusion to the plays assigned by Woodridge, and stands it on its head. The author s target here is Sophocles and his

384 375 Mr. Norton s desire for his daughter is palpable. She was too pure for life, he said sadly, too pure and too good and too beautiful. We were sailing together, touring the world, just she and I, when she became ill in Italy. 415 His desire for his daughter, that the text leaves opaque as to its fulfillment, results in her tragic death, which in his own words formed the millionaire s motivation to build the college. Jim Trueblood, a sharecropper who had brought disgrace upon the black community, is embodiment of Ellison s signifyin[g] on Greek tragedy. His depravity shocks Mr. Norton, who suffered mightily for his, while Trueblood thrives. He ignored me, staring into Trueblood s face as though reading a message there which I could not perceive. You did and are unharmed! he shouted, his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation. Trueblood looked helplessly at me. I looked away. I understood no more than he. You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed! No suh! I feels all right. You do? You feel no inner turmoil, no need to cast out the offending eye? Suh? Answer me! I m all right, suh, Trueblood said uneasily. My eyes is all right too. And when I feels po ly in my gut I takes a little soda and it goes away. 416 Ellison is relentless in his mockery of the standards and lessons of Western classical culture. Just as the narrator has suspected, having received nothing but phony gold coins and a bogus recommendation for his investment in white values, Trueblood s depravity finds a positive response from whites.... Fore they heard bout what happened to us out here I couldn t git no help from nobody. Now lotta folks is curious Oedipus Rex. Rather than the classical formation of the Oedipus complex, Ellison plants the desire in the psyche of the fathers, the Founder and Trueblood, for their daughters.

385 376 and goes outta they way to help Why, I guess there ain t a colored man in the country who ever got to take so much of the white folkses time as I did. So finally they tell me not to worry, that they was going to send word up to that school that I was to stay right where I am. Them big nigguhs didn t bother me, neither. It just goes to show you that no matter how biggity a nigguh git, the white folks can always cut him down Things is pretty good now, the farmer said. Every time I think of how cold it was and what a hard time we was having I gits the shakes. 417 And things for Trueblood were about to get better. Then I saw him removing a red Moroccan-leather wallet from his coat pocket Trueblood s mouth fell agape, his eyes widened and filled with moisture as he took the bill between trembling fingers. It was a hundred-dollar bill. 418 Ellison allows no progress from either of the two canonical positions of black empowerment; Washington or Du Bois. He mocks Du Bois s concept of the talented tenth and rewards mightily the polar opposite of the virtuous life advocated by Washington. This leaves him with the option of disguising the self, adopting the masks of Fanon as the method for resolution of his being. If we allow that Trueblood represents just that, the truth of a type of black being, if not in the details of his existence in his willingness to be himself without knowing himself as a product of Du Bois tripartite construction of the self and having no desire to be anything else. It would appear that this firmly situates a character like Trueblood outside of the notion of transitional or poly- subjectivities. He is only who he is, the resolved negation of the homo liminalis. It is the encounter with these static figures; beings who recognize the true identity of the protagonist that concerns us here. The masking chosen by the protagonist, in the first instance, is predicated on the adoption of false identity; identities that fail to fool other Abject figures who possess second sight and in that failure, invisibility becomes the mode of revolutionary self-re-creation.

386 377 Fanon provides a framework for this thinking by revisiting the first of these passages, You right, but everything what looks good ain t necessarily good, he said. But these is. For the Black Body of Fanon and Ellison, the possibilities of recognition and misrecognition become more complicated than the ten possibilities bounded by appearance matching or failing to match the normative notion of the good or bad of the thing. For the Black Body there is a complicated dance of recognition within the subject that reverberates through the process of coming to self-consciousness prior to submitting itself for observation by the other. The Black subject first is aware of herself as a negative being in that awareness of the fact of blackness and its place in the Western tradition sets the deck ahead of the game. This awareness of the universal marginalization of the black precludes valuation of the individual qua the individual. This is the crux of the matter with respect to the range of possibilities presented above. Individual valuation against a normative notion of what is presupposed to be good or bad allows for the potentiality of a positive outcome to this game of (mis)recognition: some things that look bad are good rather than the totalizing notion that all things that look bad are bad. Fanon like Ellison requires the possibility of individual valuation against the norm of societies negative judgment of all similarly situated to exist as substitute for a structural change that would alter this hegemonic worldview. The longing extends to a desire for a radical self-evaluation of normative negativity even on the part of the hegemon: All things that look good are bad, or to be fair, some things that look good are bad. The concern for these theorists, in this tradition, is to deal with the internal risk of self-fulfilling negativity as a result of an existential commitment to the fact of presupposed subalternity in the hope that fixing the inside might prepare this figure, who, up until this

387 378 point, has gazed only at herself, through the eyes of the other, to be able to confront the scrutiny of the other with the possibility of a positive outcome. Stated differently, how does the black body, as the site of notions of abject otherness, position itself for the establishment of real self-consciousness? This question finds itself grounded in the discourse framed in Ato Sekyi-Otu s Fanon s Dialectic of Experience. It was in this spirit that Francis Jeanson wrote that for the harried and cowering creatures portrayed by Fanon to undertake to free themselves, they must already, in some sense, be free, free regardless This is true. But prompted by this nagging suspicion that objectivist determinism and claims for the paramountcy of subjective freedom are rival siblings, I shall look in Fanon s texts for a somewhat different version of the conundrum of the upsurge of agency and narrativity in a universe from which they are allegedly exiled. The existentialist Jeanson asks: How can the consciousness of freedom be snatched from the experience of supine servitude? I would like to ask: How can meaning ever emerge from absolute contingency and the radical deed of an anchorless will? 419 If we accept this thinking it is useful to inquire into Invisibility as a tool for the creation of a subject that stands ready for Jeanson s consciousness of freedom or Sekyi- Otu s meaning. Most particularly, I wish to trouble our understanding of recognition in the thought of Fanon through Ellison. The point here is that before questions of recognition by the other, I wish to meditate on what the subject, as described by Fanon, recognizes about herself and how the device of invisibility forms the subject in the aftermath of the disappearance from the gaze of the Other. A great deal of effort was spent in Division Two of this text to offer a way in which the internalized view of the Abject subject functions in and around the existence of the gaze of the Elemental subject. The point here is to offer an account of the series of effects that attend the discovery by the Abject subject that invisibility from the material gaze of the Other

388 379 is the solution to the lack of true self-consciousness that we have established as an aberrant relationship with auto-affection. The thinking proceeds logically from the ocular imperative of the thinking that is presented by Du Bois and Fanon and is expressed in the literature that we have examined here. If we accept that Du Bois and Fanon are correct in that the aberration of the Negro is linked to the visual experience marked by Burke and repurposed in Black Skin, White Masks, the challenge to our thinking here is to wonder at the result of removing the Negro from view; the thought experiment conducted by Ellison. The question becomes complex when one wonders as to whether the dependent nature of subaltern consciousness is ontologically altered by fracturing the logic of secondsight, double consciousness and two-ness. Returning to the text and the two passages that interest us, it is clear that the project of upwardly mobile alteration of subject position renders the actor in question dramatically out-of-place(time) and frustratingly visible to those he is trying to separate himself from. No one is really fooled. This is contiguous first with the project of respectability through marriage we witnessed with Othello, the sublation of the sovereign essence of the enslaved in Benito Cereno and here again in the Ellison. It is clear from the outset of the text, which is likewise situated out-of-time, that the frustrations that attend failed projects of masking. The Invisible Man chooses to locate himself in a permanent zone of non-being, the cave where he retreats and begins to locate his truth of self. By adopting the theoretical stance of this project and reading the Prologue of the text again, having awareness of the two failures to mask his identity that I have referenced, the opening lines provide an opening to entering the zone of existence that the protagonist resides within. The first sentence is fraught with meta-physical import. I am an invisible man. 420 I am, I read as referencing an affirmation of being in the Cartesian sense, an references the particular and in so doing renders the figure universal in the Hegelian sense,

389 380 Invisible Man, locating the subject squarely in Fanon s zone of non-being by removing the ocular nature of the actor, creating, what I would call, a transitional type of homo liminalis. Ellison provides his own gloss on the phenomenology of the Abject subject as he demonstrates his consciousness of his existence for the observing Other as a distortion of his true self: second-sight and double consciousness. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often wearing on the nerves. Then too, you re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. 421 The quotations here could go on forever, or at least until the end of Ellison s magnum opus but this passage is of particular importance for what I am trying to accomplish here. First, the passage can be productively read by first situating the perspective of the characters against the paradigm that I have established. The observed, Invisible Man is clearly the Abject subject while the observer is the Elemental subject who Ellison, in grand fashion illustrates conducting the confusion of the ontology of the figure in question for materiality and creating the terms of abjection. This is, in the language of Ellison; A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. What I have attempted to accomplish here is to offer an account of the construction of the inner eye of the Elemental actor, which interacts with the ontological

390 381 being of the Other through the material mechanism of the eye. The question here is to linger briefly on the interesting logic of cause and effect here. Basically, the complication is simply marked by wondering if a subject draws the attention of the Elemental observer and is then deemed through a series of observational processes to be Abject or if there is a way in which the subject is already understood to be Abject and it is morbid curiosity that garners the gaze of the Elemental figure? This is a permutation of the question raised by Melville with his meditation on the whiteness of the whale and this question cannot productively remain open for a number of reasons that have particular resonance for the progress and efficacy of this project. It is most productively resolved by proposing the sequentiality of ontological and material conditions which allows for the possibility of a priori establishment of a subject position (an ontological process) that appears to be informed by the a posteriori cognition of an actor (a material process). Therefore it is not beyond the reach of this paradigm to explicate the phenomenon of the shock of accidentally seeing the Negro woman we encounter in Burke and beyond. Ellison s text is sympathetic to this solution to the complication. The author turns the Burke on its head by having the Negro accidently force the encounter that causes the moment of recognition: One night I accidently bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. 422 I submit this as the first of a series of steps the protagonist makes into liminal being, here addressing the barrier between the Abject and Elemental; death, but retreating from resolution of the logic. And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth-when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to

391 382 the street Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for the wakeful living? But I didn t linger. 423 Ellison provides an illustration of two subjects, Elemental and Abject, approaching the barrier between static subject positions while briefly, both becoming homo liminalis retreating from death as the vehicle for transformation. Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living?, Ellison asks of the possibility for metamorphosis of the Elemental subject whose death outside of the context of alteration of the terms of the structural paradigm itself, could not provide for wakeful living of either subject. For the part of the Invisible Man, the killing of white man would have immediately provided for the reconstitution of material and ontological being in the context of the radical recapturing of a space of belonging to the collective temporality by merging his individual time signature with that of the Elemental actor. This effort would have failed for the same reason that death within the terms of the existing structural dynamic for both Othello and Atufal proved, only briefly to offer a possibility of redemptive metamorphosis of the subject before succumbing to the logic of the state. As a final solution to his problem, finding that death and violence would only prove to reify, in the end the abjection of the subject, Ellison elects to situate the protagonist in a permanent state in the transitional form of homo liminalis in a space that accommodates that manner of unstable existence; in fact stable in its instability. The point now is that I found a home-or a hole in the ground, as you will. Now don t jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a hole it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine is a warm hole. And remember, a bear retires to his hole for the winter and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick breaking from its shell. I say all of this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. 424

392 383 The figure in question, through a series of failures has chosen the persona of Jackthe-Bear, who I nominate as the homo liminalis that exists in a static state of non-being between the Abject and Elemental in a space that is outside of the structure of normative society but tethered to it through the theft of power to provide light for the state of liminal existence. Ellison has allowed his character, by experiencing the failure of Du Boisian/Washintonian solution to black subject recognition, Fanonian masking, and Shakespearean/Melvillean transformation through death to arrive at this space of invisibility to the other and hyper-visibility on the part of the self. This allows the subject to fracture the relation of shadows that is implicated in the closing moments of Benito Cereno and the opening moments of Invisible Man and is the manifestation of Lacan s employment of the shadow and cognition of the umbra and penumbra to be rendered invisible themselves to the omnipresence of light that eliminates shadows. And I love light. Perhaps you ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it is with me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility. 425 Lingering in this space, for Ellison s character, is much about altered temporality and in so doing allows for the experience of individual time as the space between individual and civil notions of time. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you re

393 384 ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That s what you hear vaguely in Louis music. 426 This is, in many ways an alternative to the radical temporality discussed in Division 2 that proposed that the John Coltrane Quartet, at its most evolved elided the existence of meter itself. This is interesting in at least two registers in that it is without question that Coltrane is in the family line that leads, in many ways back to Armstrong. The second aspect of this is Ellison s disdain for evolutions in improvisational music from what we know as Be-Bop forward and, we know from his own correspondence that the author was particularly hostile to Coltrane s art. Interestingly, Richard Brody s New Yorker article Why Did Ralph Ellison Despise Modern Jazz proposes that it is strictly a generational problem for Ellison and his tastes: Ellison s skepticism regarding modern jazz may be, in large measure, a mark of generational conflict. The musicians he revered, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rushing, Mahalia Jackson, and Charlie Christian, were born between 1899 and Charlie Parker, whom Ellison admired despite his wariness about the historical significance of his musical style, was born in 1920; Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whom he actively rejected, were born in 1926; Mingus, in 1922; Taylor, in Ellison was born in 1913; the musicians he loved had their styles set by the time of the writer s own maturity. 427 This may indeed be true but it is also clear, and remarked upon by Brody that Ellison placed profound stock in the efficacy of jazz as a vehicle for the project of freedom for African-Americans. From the same article, Brody writes: He calls jazz musicians practitioners of an outlaw art that was the source of their artistic freedom they could create free of the concerns of status and respectability. He cites the underlying premise of jazz as

394 385 an attempt to express with musical instruments the sound and the style of the Negro American voice as raised in prayer, protest, shout, and song. It was an attempt to humanize the world in terms of sound, an effort made with musical means to impose the Negro American sense of time upon the larger society and upon the world of nature. 428 The art, as such, for Ellison as a vehicle can be read as substantively the same as the vehicle he elects for the resurrection of his character in the Invisible Man: the static position of a subterranean cave from which he can observe and mark alternative time rather than the locus of unstable instability we find aboard the San Dominick, the revolutionary plantation in Saint Domingue or within the time shattering improvisation of the late Coltrane. Ellison s solution is a position of stable instability that produces a certain relationship with both internal/individual time signature and that of the civil collective. Temporality remains the central line of the thinking here on Ellison and for this project generally and in that vein and returning to the text it is productive to interrogate the notion of hibernation, resurrection and the phenomenology of time that Ellison presents. The passage I find most provocative for its resonance with the central notion of the abstract existence of the ontological body, the Lifeless Human of the First Division, is: And remember, a bear retires to his hole for the winter and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick breaking from its shell. I say all of this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. This, in terms of the understanding I am groping for of Fanon s zone of non-being and its relation to the homo liminalis as the necessary state through which the subject must pass in order to experience metamorphosis, is present in Ellison s analogy to the hibernation of a

395 386 bear, rebirth after a period of apparent death, and the presence of the Adamic naming practice to give a sense of order to this previously unnamed state. Like the Adam of the discussion here surrounding Michelangelo s representation of Genesis, the invisible man is animated within the space he occupies that provides him with a point of departure that elides the existence of a past. This figure, Jack-the-Bear, is vested only with futurity. There is no past and in this space of alternative (ecstatic?) time there is only a loose relationship to the present as we understand it from Augustine forward. Witness the progress Ellison makes in solving the mathematical problem that confounds the representation of the present. Recall in the discussion of the manner in which this project was employing the term liminal; it is meant to be considered in its mathematical fullness that is designed to measure an instantaneous value. This is confounded by the fact that there are ever-smaller increments that a segment of time can be divided, which means that the notion of the instant qua itself elides our measurement. This is not the case for Jack-the-Bear who, from this zone of non-being has passed beyond death: I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation and occupies an ontological present that is outside the experience of human time in that the present in its absolute present-ness is both past, present, and future in that it is absolutely indivisible: Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. Focus on the or of this definition of the temporal node that Ellison describes that I consider the irreducible present. Jack-the-Bear can stay there forever in the absolute present or from there leap into the next permanent present that is all futurity in that it is categorically unrelated to our vulgar understanding of the future. This space of irreducible permanence allows Jack-the-Bear to recombine the unity of time and space lost, as I have argued in the western intellectual tradition, at the Fall, and to [step] inside his opponent s sense of time.

396 387 This is important from a sense of the problem of measuring the irreducible present in that there is no discernible displacement of the subject to measure so in naming the time or the place we have returned to the unified position where one equals the other. The shattering of Augustine s take on the flowing of time by Ellison is startling in its elegant presentation. So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. 429 Recall here Augustine s analogy to time through the recitation of a Psalm that required the recall of the piece into a future in order for it to flow into the present and retreat again into its proper place in the past. Ellison s Jack-the-Bear has dispensed with this necessity and each moment is its individual own-ness without a discernible past or future. In this descent, Ellison drags us (un)willingly to the liminal space I have marked out throughout this project: the plantation where we can witness the presence of Abject time made a vehicle of radical recreation of the subject through the womb of the enslaved woman. Returning to the passage quoted above, Ellison writes: And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother s as she stood before a group of slaveowners who bid for her naked body 430 It is in the abuse of the womb of this woman that we can locate this project in the space of abjection that is the plantation, Ellison is definitive here in what is brought to his perception by this rupture with Abject temporality. It is the relationship of the body of the female enslaved and the bearing of children for the master that is made apparent.

397 388 I dearly loved my master, son, she said. You should have hated him, I said. He gave me several son s, she said, and because I loved my sons I learned to love their father though I hated him too. I laughs too, but I moans too. He promised to set us free but he never could bring hisself to do it. Still I loved him 431 This, as I have stated brings us to the historical space of Abject being that I wish to explore; Monticello and the revolutionary presence of Sally Hemings.

398 389 FOURTH DIVISION RESOLUTION: Genealogy of (im)morals What she want to go and do that for? Toni Morrison Beloved 1: Introduction: The material presented here has lingered in the realm of the abstract but has gestured toward events and individuals that exemplify the claims advanced in this project. There is a way in which the most obvious case to review in marshaling the historical record in addressing the efficacy of the theoretical framework would be to look deeply into the French and Haitian Revolutions. There are theoretical and historical reasons why those, in my reading, co-dependent events would be productive. From a theoretical perspective, a great deal of attention has been paid in this text to the thinking of Rousseau as establishing the philosophical framework from which I derive the paradigmatic structure and relate that to temporality. Along with Rousseau, much has been made of the thinking of Hegel as well as Fanon. In the methodological tradition established within the confines of this project it should be obvious that these are not employed as isolated or discreet elements. Each is dependent and exists in close relationship with the other. Accepting that, it is therefore necessary to interrogate carefully linkages between these thinkers. For my part, I nominate the Franco/Haitian Revolution as the transitional space and the revolutionary thought and practice of Maximilien de Robespierre as the essential link between the thinkers mentioned above. There is much that can be written about this linkage but suffice it to say that the critical term that I wish to employ that encompasses the instances of literary masking of true identity as a vehicle for discovery of a place within a constituted social order for a

399 390 putatively excluded subject, is the hypocrite. I mean to be careful here in that I do not necessarily mean to position the notion of hypocrisy as a negative signifier though it can be. The reason for employing that term is that it forms the vehicle for possibility of revolutionary alteration of the individual and its fact of existence must be hidden by the radical and uncovered by the establishment. It is forms of terror on the part of the Abject, Elemental, and Exalted subject that I propose are either focused on the self that form masks of subterfuge or against the other to alter the context and terms of the being of the subject relative to the social order. All of that being said, the resonance that I have marked in the previous section of Toussaint L Ouverture and Othello stands and is not a notion that I wish to leave but wish to mark as, in its relation to the world altering events of the age of revolution, representative of the big muscle movements of the framework I have proposed here. The goal of this section is to interrogate the logic, not of the plantation but of a plantation and in so doing begin to study closely the hermeneutics of the digital dexterity of the small muscle movement of individual acts of terror against the dominant systematic that preoccupies us here. Doing so allows us to slip into the wheels and cogs of the clock of civil temporality as represented by plantation logics and examine how disrupting the smallest mechanism can frustrate the synchronicity of temporalities of domination. It is the mechanism of genealogy that I wish to pay careful close attention to here and in so doing frame the plantation as establishing a type of lineage of the subject that must be interrupted by the revolutionary or reified by the hegemon. Specifically, the analysis here will focus on the dependence of the plantation on specific type of genealogical relationship between the established subject positions and how the alteration of this logic tends to jeopardize the architecture of the system. In order to accomplish this analysis I must first

400 391 explore the mechanism of transferring the idealized paradigm described here into a functioning system of political relations, geographical spaces and functioning institutions. 2: Imagined Real Spaces: Central to the macro thinking of this project is the relationship between the subject and the state in that the state provides the framework within which the individual actor is able to locate the nature of the abstract body that is then formed into a particular political actor. In the process of this creation, the political force of the state is brought to bear on Elemental or ontological subjects that are in turn made into political actors that are potentially normative citizens of the collective or excluded from the collectivity as the Exalted or Abject. In the case that we are examining here; the political space of the plantation, it is imperative that we take stock of the mechanism of constituted and constituting power that establishes it as a space of subject formation. In short, where does the plantation come from and what is it meant to do? In one sense, the plantation is the extension of a series of interlocking relations that, in the context of the Atlantic World form the locus of the production of several commodities that are of interest here: obviously they include the crops that make up the final leg of the triangular trade but what interests us here is the leg of the triangle that runs from the slave castle to the new world and creates the commodity of the body of the enslaved subject. I have discussed at some length the slave ship and its role in this process of creation through destruction and the unstable nature of that aspect of this process of subject creation. The plantation, as an extension of the sovereignty of the metropole and the terminus of the extraction of freedom from the body of the enslaved actor is also an unstable space but it is this stable instability that renders the plantation and its subjects as

401 392 both a space of Fanon s zone of non-being and formative and/or supportive of the homo liminalis. What I mean here is to propose that the concept of the ontological and material being of the subject, in support of the project of creation of the Abject actor is based upon separating the ontological stuff of freedom from the materiality of the body; this I argue is the necessary and sufficient condition of the abjection of the enslaved. This is clearly manifest by a brief examination of Madison s Federalist 54 that is the explanation of the segmentation of the enslaved African in America into part human part property; the 3/5 Compromise. But we must deny the fact that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both those qualities; being considered by our laws; in some respect, as persons, and in other respects, as property. In being compelled to labor not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master, and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty, and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank and classed with the irrational animals, which under the legal domination of property. The Fœderal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and property. 432 The argument I am proffering here is that the separation of the body into property and human that Madison theorizes is actually a second order affect of the causal separation of individual temporality from its potentiality as acceptable into the collective of civil time. This is the condition of un-freedom and the mechanism that provides for this banishment is the unique province of the state. What I mean here is that freedom or its lack, in the context of existence within a social order is a condition that is granted by the state. It is this initial act of separation that allows for the division of the material body into components of property and human; without that first step the notion proposed by Madison is not possible. The

402 393 freedom of the body marked for abjection is therefore extracted and held by the state; this is the ontological aspect of this logic. The body, and the labor it produces is then held by other individuals that rely upon the state s possession of the freedom of the individual to legitimize the condition of slavery. This is obvious from many of the juridical processes that surround the maintenance or dismantling of slavery (i.e. le Code Noir, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13 th Amendment). As a practical matter, so long as the paradigm as constituted exists, it is the juridical action of the state that ameliorates the condition of abjection. In the absence of total revolution, the proper addressee for the return of freedom to the body as opposed to its possession by the state is the state. As I have proposed earlier in this document, it is the then the conversion of this ontological condition of abjection into a material object that renders blackness as a marker of this lack of freedom and itself becomes coterminous with the notion of Abject subjectivity. The argument is that the plantation serves the state in two important ways: materially as a mechanism for the production of commercial goods and ontologically in the maintenance of a space that allows for the continued unnatural separation of freedom from the body. This obviously indicates that the plantation, a definable geographic space, like the body, is divided into material and ontological components and part of the challenge of defining it as a space of subject creation is to be able to discern the differences between these two functionalities. The definitive nature of the plantation as a physical space hides the inherent and formative instability of its ideal functionality. It is the stable and continuous state of instability that allows the plantation to serve as the mechanism for the material and ontological mortification of the subject. This necessitates that we deem it satisfactory to posit that this type of instability, in its stability, is functionally different than the employment of the transitional state of being as a mechanism for alteration of subject position. What I

403 394 have long argued in this text is that the possibility of metamorphosis is predicated on accessing spaces and modes of being that pass through the ontological body (bare human) in route to other states of being. What we are marking here in the aberrant space of plantation logics is the lingering of these subjects in a transitional space that forbids the resolution of the actor as a wholly ontological and material being and instead imposes a series of separations on the body. Separating the actor from: Inclusion, as a temporal being, from the normative collective; Freedom; Its relation to a state that protects it from these violent separations; and From a natural relationship with death What needs resolution in the first place is the understanding promoted here regarding the complex relationship between the idea and the thing itself. This logic is particularly complex in that I am proposing that the plantation, in many ways, serves as the exemplar of the production of a secular project of state that is a simulacrum of the power to create spaces and individuals that is manifest in the mythology we explored in Genesis. The argument is that the logic of sovereignty as it relates to locating its legitimacy in its association with divine providence. Jefferson and his plantation Monticello are particularly well suited to this examination for several reasons. Jefferson, as a thinker, leaves us a robust record with which we can examine his relationship to this essential line of reasoning that I am pursuing in delineating the linkage between a secular project of political sovereignty and divine imprimatur. Jefferson s Declaration of Independence is obviously the place to start in an exegesis of the relationship he establishes between the divine and the secular. Without delving deeply into the relationship between Jefferson s thinking and the foundational texts of social contract theory it is important to at least recall the opening lines of the document as a way to frame the

404 395 terms of the discussion surrounding this transference of divine authority to the secular realm. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The short takeaway from this complex document is the explicit notion that ontologically, man is endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights and it is the role of government, another grant of the Creator, to secure these rights. With this understanding, logically, the structures of governance are therefore, in their proper functioning at least divinely inspired if not established to provide the framework for the security of natural rights. This construction is interesting to explore with respect to the

405 396 proposal here that translates this thinking into temporality and allows for the distinctive subjects that I have traced. Here, Jefferson proposes that the governance, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed can be understood as an alternative way of explaining the relationship between collective/civil temporality and its relationship to Exalted time in that, as we have seen in the Second Division, Exalted Time exists as a separation from Elemental time and as such cannot exist alone. This separation and its understanding by the collective of beings distinct from, but in a positive fashion, its communal organization can be understood to be a manifestation of the consent that Jefferson marks. With this theoretical device, Jefferson succeeds in secularizing several aspects of divine providence: the imperative of government itself and its reasoned existence as a way of securing the divinely established rights of each individual. The complexity here, and what establishes the aberrant space of the plantation that is designed to do exactly the opposite of secure the broad based provision of rights to the collective is the notion that the Exalted figure or institution, in addition to being vested with the imprimatur of divine logic, captures the power to adjudicate subjects as part of society in their continued exclusion. This is a two-step process. The first of which we have understood from the Second Division as being the product of Elemental being viewing the loss of the Exalted from the collective as creating a material condition of deficit that is compensated by the establishment of Abject being. The second imperative here is that in the interest of maintenance of order, the Exalted establishes customs and practices (many of them juridical) that render this tripartite system legitimate. The plantation, as such, becomes a space of abjection within the paradigmatic structure of organized collectivities that provide for the existence of natural rights for Elemental subjects. Clearly, as a theorist of modern forms of republican governance and rights based existence on the part of political actors, the second way in which Jefferson becomes essential

406 397 here is in the fact of his careful construction and maintenance of a plantation, that, to my understanding was only loosely related to the material role of the space to be commercially viable but is all too productive in the ontological production of enslaved subjects. Jefferson, as the lord of his manner, has a distinct relationship with the notion of sovereignty in the western tradition in that it is only in the aberrant space of the plantation, like the Camp that preoccupies the thought of much of modern thinking on the notion of spaces of exception, that he has absolute control of the life and death of the Abject subjects of his and the state s creation. The form of absolute control of the space as a franchising of the state s monopoly on legitimate violence is clearly legible within the legal frameworks of The Code Noir recorded at the Sovereign Council of Saint Domingue, 6 May 1687 is of particular utility. Article XL: The slave who has been punished with death based upon denunciation by his master, and who is not party to the crime for which he was condemned, shall be assessed prior to his execution by two principal citizens of the island named by a judge. The assessment price shall be paid by the master, and in order to satisfy this requirement, the Intendant shall impose said sum on the head of each Negro. The amount levied in the estimation shall be paid for each of the said Negroes and levied by the [Tax] Farmer of the Royal Western lands to avoid costs There are two aspects of this Article that are of interest to this effort. What are the crimes for which a slave might find himself facing capital punishment and what are the implications of this death or rather, destruction of property that is indemnified against monetary loss? According to The Code noir, a slave faces death under the following circumstances: Article XXXIII: The slave who has struck his master in the face or has drawn blood, or has similarly struck the wife of the master, his mistress, or their children, shall be punished by death Article XXXVIII: The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the day his master reported him

407 398 to the police, shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded by a fleur de lys on one shoulder. If he commits the same infraction for another month he shall have his hamstring cut and be branded with a fleur de lys on the other shoulder. The third time he shall be put to death. Death for the slave was punishment for the attempt to recapture agency, Article XLII demonstrates the limits of the violence visited on the slaves. The masters may also, when they believe that their slaves deserve, chain them and have them beaten with rods or straps. They shall be forbidden however from torturing them or mutilating any limb at the risk of having the slaves confiscated and having extraordinary charges brought against them. The prohibition on torture or mutilation exists only so long as the slave maintains her status of property outside of that, the body is worthless to the society and must be destroyed. It should be emphasized here that this death, like that of a king, only destroying the corporeal body, the sovereignty of the slave (in its lack) is eternal within the perception of a given worldview just as that of the king. Again we turn to The Code Noir for the juridical structure of this essential component of the notion of sovereign continuity as we figure it here. Article XII: Children born from marriages between slaves shall be slaves, and if the husband and wife have different masters, they shall belong to the master of the female slave, not to the master of her husband. Article XIII: We desire that if a male slave has married a free woman, their children shall be free as is their mother, regardless of their father s condition of slavery. And if the father is free and the mother a slave, the children shall also be slaves This should be carefully considered. This formulation, Partus sequitur ventrum, that which is brought forth follows the womb is the essential concept that guarantees the perpetuity of the enslaved condition; the slave is dead long, live the slave. Just as the condition of royalty depends upon the passing of the royal genes, slavery is a product of this

408 399 same logic. However it is the construction that disallows the consecration, in some sense, of the enslaved womb. This is in direct contradistinction to the narrative that defines the presence of divinity on Earth, the Immaculate Conception. The Godhead facilitated humanity through the womb of the human vessel of Mary but that human form was invested with the characteristics of the divine that posed interesting paradox for thinkers grappling with these ideas in the formation of secular juridical practices. the seemingly paradoxical formula describing the relationship between Prince and Justice may have easily evoked other associations in the minds of Fredrick s contemporaries; they were accustomed to hear not only praise of the Holy Virgin as mother and daughter of her Son (Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio), but also the praise of Christ himself as father and son of his virginal mother. I am your Father, I am your Son sang Wace, who merely echoed a motif repeated in many variations by a whole chorus of poets. 433 It is appropriate here to pause and review where we are with respect to the question that drives this portion of this project. It seems that we have determined that the (en)slave(d) has two bodies: the corporeal and the transcendent status of the enslaved condition; wholly marginalized sovereignty. The formulations around which Agamben structures his analysis: Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life. 434 We have demonstrated that the enslaved body, particularly under The Code Noir, was indeed quite capable of being killed but as far as to death in service of the state, there is no possibility for this figure to operate in this manner and maintain the status of slave. Based upon what we have before us the enslaved figure, particularly in the Atlantic World does indeed appear to be a manifestation of, in many ways, the logic of the homo sacer. Briefly, with respect to the essential element of death, the sacer, for Agamben, is unnaturally killed in the Camp. Here, on the plantation, the figure is kept unnaturally alive.

409 400 Jefferson and his complex relationship with his slave and mistress, Sally Hemings allows us to witness the stress placed upon plantation logics by the maintenance of personal relations that undermine the functioning of the system most specifically as they relate to the imperative of the genealogical relationship or temporality of abjection. Not lost on this is the inversion of the Othello/Desdemona binary. Additionally, Hemings and Jefferson, as actual witnesses to the revolutionary events of France provide another way in which to examine the far-reaching effects of the Age of Revolution. It is in that vein that I turn to the historical events surrounding the relationship of Sally Hemings to the structures of western societal order as I have laid them out here. 3: Sally, the Black Jacobin of Monticello: As the title if this chapter suggests, I intend to situate the enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, as exemplar of a particular type of revolutionary disruption of hegemonic temporality while at the same time marking the provocative inversion of the players and conflict in Shakespeare s Othello, the Moor of Venice. We are all familiar with the popular representation of the relationship of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson that, in its most benign version, proposes that the slave holding Jefferson was conducting a mutually beneficial affair with his mulatto slave. Annette Gordon-Reed s important text, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family 435 does much of the work necessary to unsettle this understanding of the relationship that allows for the move I wish to make regarding the nature of these events for the integrity of plantation logics. Gordon-Reed writes: Sally Hemings is often treated as a figure of no historical significance-a mere object of malicious personal gossip. That shouldn t surprise. Aside from forays into history from the bottom up - a perspective that has been given increased emphasis over the past forty years-historical writing tends to favor the lives of individuals who spoke, acted, and had a

410 401 direct hand in the shaping whatever particular moment they lived in. Hemings does not fit the bill on any of these accounts. She neither spoke publicly about her life nor engaged in any public acts that have been recorded. Othersjournalists, Jefferson s enemies-determined how she entered the spotlight; and they put her there with no real interest in her as a person. 436 This is clearly, the case, and as I have stated, Prof. Gordon-Reed s text does nothing if not disabuse the reader of the notion that Sally Hemings exist as one object among many: books, wine, architectures, universities, etc, that attracted the attention of arguably the most important thinker on the concept of revolution and governance in the modern age. The interest here is to interrogate the most thought provoking of Heming s acts: the decision to leave life as a free woman in France to return to slave holding Virginia as the property of Thomas Jefferson at the dawning of the French Revolution on September 26, There are several plausible explanations for this decision on the part of Hemings not the least of which must have been the instability and uncertainty of life in France as the system of governance fell apart and Jefferson prepared to leave. My interest is principally in the agreement that predicated this return with Jefferson: When it was clear that return to America was imminent. Sally Hemings was pregnant, and her pregnancy created a problem that she and Jefferson had to address and sort out. Madison Hemings described what happened: But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte xxiv by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one xxiv An unwed pregnancy.

411 402 years. In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. 438 What I am proposing is that it is the possibility of terminating the particular nature of enslaved temporality: natal alienation as a product of the notion of partus sequitur ventrum, that must be explored. Quite simply, in traditional notions of western slavery, the status of the individual was dependent upon that of the father, which mirrored the tracing of Exalted genealogy and its relationship to patrilineal notions of royalty. New world chattel slavery, conversely, assured the permanence of the enslaved condition or in the lexicon of this effort, Abject Temporality by tying the status of the child to the womb of the mother. The permanence of this alteration of the causal condition of bondage is obvious when it is carefully considered. Just as the weird sisters assured Macbeth that no one of woman born could harm him. All mortal consequences have pronounced me thus: Fear not, Macbeth. No man that s born of woman Shall e'er have power upon thee. (Macbeth Act 5, scene 3) Net of the gendered nature of this claim that implicates Macbeth s assurance that he has nothing to fear from women no matter how they happen to appear in the world, it was, as it is in our minds now, a fairly safe conclusion that every mortal was born of a woman. In aid of rendering the condition of slavery eternal, partus sequitur ventrum (that which is brought follows the womb) this causal condition of enslavement is shattered by the agreement reached by Hemings and Jefferson. What I am proposing here is that we view the enslaved condition, as a product of the genealogical relationship as itself a type of temporality which, as I mentioned above, is as thick a concept as the notion of royalty that facilitates the counting, for instance, of the Louis I-XVI. Like the conversion of the Exalted subject Louis XVI into the Elemental being Louis Capet in order to facilitate his absolute abjection through death, Sally Hemings has, in

412 403 her on way, disrupted the paradigmatic logic and temporality of the plantation. Death still looms here inevitably but more about that in its proper course. Here I am concerned with the point of conversion of the progenitor of large scale revolutionary logics with the individual ambition of a single, enslaved woman and what it all portends for the central line of thinking of this project. To review the implications consider, again that Thomas Jefferson is perceived as a revolutionary figure par excellence, in the eyes of many, even those at the head of the radical deconstruction of French society. There is of course little argument regarding Jefferson as a translator of social contract theory to a practical political experiment in the New World. In spite of his call for liberty, Jefferson is obviously a slave owner who entered into long-term sexual congress with the half sister of his deceased wife. In so doing, he produces a genealogy that, in combining the temporality of the Exalted with that of the Abject, necessarily interrupts the material conditions of the hegemony of the plantation even without the destruction of the eternal logic of enslaved genealogy that Hemings exacts from Jefferson. The first of these to consider is the role of the mulatto as a transitional figure whose presence on the plantation immediately undermines the structural integrity of the separation of subjects. Much has been made of the presence of the person of mixed race in the fracturing of French colonial slavery as well as metropolitan French social order. Sally Hemings, herself the product of race mixing between Jefferson s father-in-law and one of his enslaved presented an esthetic image that provided the foundation for a veiling and erasure of the mark of blackness. It is a point of fact that three of [Heming s] four children left both slavery and the black community to live as white people. 439 It is clear that plantation logic accommodated the presence of enslaved bodies as sexual object for the master class. The trope is common and verifiable enough in that the presence of mixed race children on

413 404 the plantation is positive proof of sex between master and slave. As a side note, we have very little information in the way of proof tradition to establish like relations between male enslaved bodies and male and female members of the master class. It is naïve to imagine that all of the above did not occur in the nonexistent moral structure of the plantation with respect to violence of any kind generally and sexual violence specifically. That being said, the focus here is to think about the life that Sally Hemings would find promised her as the concubine of the master of Monticello. The first most powerful understanding to come to regarding the life of Sally Hemings as the object of Jefferson s sexual attention is to remove the notion of consent from the conversation. Gordon-Reed s text leaves little to commend the notion that there was a consensual sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings as master and slave. There are at least two possible routes to the conclusion that what happened between Hemings and Jefferson during their beginnings in Paris was presumptively rape. One idea rests on an understanding about enslaved women and the other one, which works in tandem with it, on an understanding about white male slave owners. As to enslaved women, we may that none-because of the obvious state of war that exists between masters and slaves- would ever have wanted to have sex with any white man. The idea of the presumptive unwillingness on the part of all enslaved women may be added to the idea that there could never have been consent between Hemings and Jefferson to sexual relations because of the unequal power distribution between them. Whether Jefferson used violence or employed his well-known charming manner with women to win Hemings over, his power was such that one could never be sure of her true desires. Therefore, Sally Hemings when she was at the Hotel de Langeac did not-because she could notconsent to sex with Thomas Jefferson. 440 From this position we have the first point of negotiation between Jefferson and Hemings in that the option to stay in France as a free women enabled her to recapture the

414 405 possibility of consenting to Jefferson as a sexual partner, at least in my mind so far as she remained in France and had the possibility of absolute freedom. It then seems clear that we must be careful to note that, in spite of conscious agency on the part of Hemings to return to Virginia, the fact that she immediately looses the possibility of freedom under the terms of her own volition render the notion of consent, again null and void. I propose that, except for the brief period of time represented by the possibility of freedom in France and the positive assertion of a return to slavery in the United States, Hemings was always coerced and not capable of consenting to any relationship with anyone that was not under the aegis of Jefferson as her master. This raises the provocative and seemingly impossible to imagine paradox of the subject who elects to be enslaved. This raises the stakes immeasurably for the question of the revolutionary nature of Hemings negotiating freedom for the bodies of her progeny in exchange for bondage for her own. In addition to this thinking, I will consider the body that choses corporeal death as a means to escape the condition of abjection by taking up Toni Morrison s essential text, Beloved. The case of Hemings is profoundly interesting from a perspective of the methodological framework that centers itself on the transitional subject as well as what it is that that subject experiences or comes to perceive about itself that 1) causes the impetus toward transition, 2) what the subject comes to know about its transitional self during the course of this instability and 3) what of this accumulated knowledge causes the subject to complete or retreat from the logical terminus of the transition. In the case of Sally Hemings, I mean to focus on the brief period of consent I have marked above that is arguably the temporal space of the existence of Hemings as transitional homo liminalis; specifically as the subject that exists between the possibility of a free existence in France and bondage in Virginia which paradigmatically would situate her being between

415 406 Abject and Elemental. As a practical matter, the cause for the desire on the part of Hemings for transition to Elemental subjectivity is twofold: the most obvious factor is that abjection is not a desired state of being the second is explicit in the argument advance here in that Elemental being is the normative, ontological state of human subjects and therefore it is natural to desire that status. What is unnatural and a construct of societal imperatives is existence as Citizen, a status that provides its own set of juridical and societal barriers against transition back to Abject subjectivity and forward to Exalted being. That being said, in the case of Hemings, the moment we are marking first needs to be thought with respect to Du Bois Tripartite Construction of Subaltern Consciousness. It is a fairly straightforward matter to consider the state of Sally Hemings the enslaved property of Thomas Jefferson at the moment before the critical choice presents itself. The argument would follow that the enslaved Hemings with no practical choices before her is encumbered with the three movements of Du Boisian consciousness: she is in possession of second-sight which leads to the sense of double-consciousness which renders her a dually constructed being in the sense that she is American (and much can be said about what that meant in the late 1700s but we can, for purposes of this thinking smear that question) and Negro. As I have argued in this project, this necessarily interrupts the affection Hemings must feel for herself in that we have traced the complication in ego development attendant the confusion of second for first order consciousness. Arguably the introduction of choice to the consciousness of the actor encumbered with auto-dis-affection shatters the integrity of Du Bois understanding. Secondarily, pace Gordon-Reed, in disallowing the notion that in that state of abjection Hemings was capable of granting consent to Jefferson, we can eliminate the possibility that she might, even in the confusion of second for first order consciousness, encounter Jefferson s brand of

416 407 affection, however it exists from his position of hegemonic and asymmetric power, as means to create an internal affection predicated on this external stimuli. This would be a prototypical example of false consciousness. In this, Du Bois notion of second-sight and the relationship I have sought to establish between it and the Veil is important. The existence of Hemings as the unique case that she provides facilitates much more to be said about this. Perhaps another way to approach this question is to marshal a quotation by Harriet Tubman; I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if they knew they were slaves. This proves out the import of Du Bois providing a trap door out of the totalizing logic of the enslaved condition that allows the subject to feel, ideally, discomfited by the confusion of reflective for unreflective consciousness. Returning to Hemmings, it is clear that there is a moment here that must be interrogated closely against the theoretical account of subaltern consciousness provided by Du Bois and others and the historical record of the Hemings. That Hemings knows that she is an enslaved human is clear. That Hemings begins to imagine a possibility of existence outside of the condition of enslavement is also manifestly clear. What is unclear is whether Hemings believed that she qua herself was ontologically capable of self-consciousness outside of the material condition of slavery. Hemings certainly believed that her children would thrive as free subjects but was unprepared to take the leap from Abject to Elemental status herself even when it was placed before her as a viable option. There is perhaps another way of approaching this question and the key lies in the gender inversion of the Othello story as it relates to the question of genealogy and the proposition I raised in the third Division that the Moor s desire was to enter the temporality of Venice by mingling his time with hers through birth. Recall the specter of this possibility

417 408 raised by Iago to Brabantio in Act I. Here, the Abject actor, Sally Hemings, becomes the vehicle for the fracturing of the lineage of abjection and as such, like the revolutionary slave ship or French colony, her womb is a space of profound instability. Recall the structure surrounding the possession of the womb of the enslaved with the curse of bestowing on their progeny the indelible mark of enslavement: partus sequitur ventrum. If Hemings desires children and at the same time desires sparing them and their progeny eternal abjection, she has to breach the logic of the partus and, by partaking of the gene pool of Jefferson s whiteness, facilitate the masking of that part of her that is marked with the curse of Ham. Returning to thinking this along with Du Bois, we are able to provide an account of the particular nature of the consciousness of Hemings that understands all to well the veil as the color line that serves as a barrier to true self-consciousness. What we are then required to inquire into is the nature of the place of reconstruction, the Veil, or in the parlance of Fanon, the zone of non-being from which she can reconstruct her being. The zone of nonbeing for Hemings qua her children is in fact her womb and in her revolutionary fracturing of the logic of partus sequitur ventrum, she effectively achieves the erasure of the ontology of abjection and provides a new, Elemental and abstract historicity to her progeny. Again Macbeth: through her agreement with Jefferson, her children effectively become not of enslaved woman born fracturing this logic and introducing a new vector of possibility for these children after Jefferson extracts the last measure of his pathological relationship with domination, twenty-plus years of bondage, as further payment. The down payment for this possibility for her children costs Hemings in material terms her own free existence while assuring the ontological and material restoration of Elemental subjectivity to her children. This, in my reading, renders Hemings a profoundly disruptive figure with respect to the

418 409 logics of domination: past, present, and future, as they function in the space of radical subject mortification: the plantation. This thinking is meant to account for questions 1 and 2 from above regarding the phenomenological experience of Hemings. Question 3 is perhaps a more difficult query for which to provide an answer. Methodologically, I have employed the historical record to offer an account of Heming s consciousness and motivation. To answer question 3 in a way that would satisfy concerns regarding whether her gambit worked based upon the historical record we have of the lot of her children would, in my mind, miss the point. The success of Heming s project is discernible by the creation of the space of recreation by the agreement by Jefferson to grant her children their freedom in return for her continued bondage. In this way, Hemings, in the parlance of this project, has indeed approached the threshold between Abject and Elemental being: social death, and transgressed it thorough recapturing control of time through control of her womb. I read this as a successful revolutionary act on the part of this woman. Perhaps the most provocative question of all revolves around the decision to have children with Jefferson and its discursive relationship to the genealogical understanding of freedom that inhabits Heming s maneuvering. Here, the focus remains on the relationship of Heming s womb to the structures of slavery and her revolutionary destruction of Patterson s Social Death through the granting of a certain type of life as opposed to the employment of corporeal death to free children from a life of enslavement. Here it is appropriate to Morrison s Beloved. 4: La Momma Morta: One has to wonder at the desire on the part of Jefferson to complicate his relationship both to Hemings and the institution of slavery by producing children with his

419 410 property. Abortion or even infanticide represent proven methods on the part of the enslaved to employ death as a means to free their progeny from the status of abjection in slavery. As Gordon-Reed notes, [w]e cannot know what Hemings thought about abortion for herself 441 but it is imperative to consider the theories that attend the willful termination of pregnancy as a method of revolutionary fracturing the logic and practice of slave societies. Thinking around typologies of death in this circumstance maps along the line I considered in the previous division with respect to the choice of method of restructuring the self pursued by Othello (death of the self), Atufal (death of the Other ) and the Invisible Man (ontological death through invisibility). The argument here is that Hemings pursues an ontological form of death similar to that of Ellison s Invisible Man. This is in opposition to the other possibilities presented to Hemings assuming that she did not choose a revolutionary shift in the entire paradigm by remaining in revolutionary and putatively free France. Hemings could probably have taken the known path of a return to the Americas under the metaphysical and physical domination of Jefferson but chosen to remain childless. In considering this we can warrant that Hemings was a privileged person within the context of the enslaved condition. I use this term carefully and reluctantly understanding that adopting Gordon-Reed s understanding of the impossibility of consent on the part of an enslaved subject produces a contradictory relationship in proposing there is privilege within regimes of absolute domination. That being said, life at Monticello as the focus of Jefferson s sexual attention traded one type of physical and mental subjugation for another. This is a common yet uncomfortable set of circumstances; the selection of the least awful choice amongst a series of awful choices, but it remains an uncomfortable line of thinking in that narrative and imagination seem to require at least the possibility of a positive if not

420 411 happy outcome. In the extreme environment of the plantation we have to accept that the notion of good or more specifically privilege is an exercise in relativism. Therefore, it is arguable that she could have practiced a certain type of life at Monticello and gone about altering the terms of Abject temporality by refusing to birth children. This was, to our knowledge, not the decision made by Hemings so in order to think through it as an option that she refused we have to explore through another vehicle. There are historical cases of infanticide as a method of resistance on the part of the enslaved and Toni Morrison employed one such case, that of Margaret Garner, depicted here by Thomas Satterwhite Noble s 1867 painting of her infanticide in the face of re-enslavement. Figure 35 Before turning to Morrison s canonical text, it is useful to explore the historical case of Garner as illustrative of the employment of alteration of spatiality or, in the language proposed in this text, taking control of personal space to alter the terms of subjectivity. Imagine that we chart the subject Margaret Garner on the paradigm I proposed in the introduction of this text and depict here again.

421 412 We would understand Garner as an enslaved subject to exist in the most negative space available on this graph: having control of neither her temporality (womb) nor her space (existing in a slave state). Garner shifts the relationship of spatiality to her subjectivity by escaping into a free state. In so doing, she takes positive control of space and in bringing her children along with her and self-emancipating she has also captured control of space sufficiently to alter the locus of the foci of her existence to that of Elemental status. With the arrival of slave catchers bent on returning her to the south, she loses control of her space again and in the final desperate act of revolutionary metamorphosis of the subject, rather than killing herself and recapturing control of temporality in the manner of Othello, she elects to control her womb and genealogy by killing her child.

422 413 The court case that follows substantively renders the abstract argument that I have made regarding the primacy of space, relationship to time and the asymptotes of law and chance legible through the legal wrangling that ensued. Was Garner to be tried for murder which would render her, at least legally human and potentially criminally responsible for her actions; a condition not possible for subjects who lack all agency and further renders the children human rather than objects of the property? Or, like the slave catchers argued, tried for theft of property in stealing herself and the child from the possession of her owner? As we find in the text Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South by Steven Weisenburger, the state of Ohio allows the slave catchers to return her to Kentucky where her master eludes her extradition back to Ohio by continuously relocating her; ultimately to Arkansas and outside the reach of Ohio s courts. 442 I argue that this case illustrates that space; as it relates to the state and the status it grants the subject is of primary import. Morrison, for her part, elects to establish temporality as the primary concern of the subject in her novel Beloved. In approaching this complex relationship, it is imperative to explore the lurid alteration of the relationship of mother, father, and child in the crucible that is the plantation. Recall the sub-title of Gordon-Reed s hermeneutics of the life of Sally Hemings: An American Family, that is echoed in Weisenburger s text s title: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. This places the focus of inquiry on the normative notion of what we mean by family and requires that we mark the plantation as a particular site of the fracturing of the principles that govern the operation of, arguably, this essential building block of certain types of societal order. The seismic fissures travel in two directions from a place like Monticello as exemplar of the phantasmagoria of the plantation and familial relations. In the first instance we have to wonder at the devastation to the consciousness of the subject victimized by these structures and in the second at the effects on the victimizer.

423 414 Natality on the plantation becomes complicated by the relationship of the Black wetnurse to the social order. As a result of the always-already abjection of the black body, its use as a tool finds it alienated in a series of devastating attacks on the psyche: The enslaved wet-nurse is reviled by the birth mother of the child, the white child who grows to realize that it nursed at the breast of the profane, the black child who becomes jealous for its lack of nourishment from its own mother or even the jealousy attendant with its replacement by another sibling or surrogate nursing child. Finally, the black female must then structure systematic resistance to affection for the children she nurses, the slave master who forces it and the woman of the plantation who hates her for it. Following the title of this section and the utilization of Giordano s aria, the mother is death already that kisses the child to give it life and kills itself over and over through the process. Both the historical figure of Sally Hemings and the literary character of Sethe (modeled on the figure Margaret Gardner) are invested in time fracturing projects that fundamentally sever the relationship of the child to the womb of the mother. In thinking more carefully about the presentation of this revolutionary act by Morrison s Sethe we are able to witness the alienation of the child from the womb that bore it in the absence of new structures of subject making that render pristine, or at least Elemental the womb of the birth mother. Here we have to address the primordial and in this reading divine, god-like father, that in the case of Hemings is embodied in Jefferson. Following this line of thinking, we are allowed to take seriously the role that Jefferson plays as a creator of the very state in which Hemings is able to resolve her subjectivity. In this, it is not a stretch to render material the mythological notion of the creative power of the Framers or Founding Fathers. Jefferson as the father of the children of Hemings assumes a much larger context when we take seriously the material

424 415 force of his ideas. What I am proposing here is that Hemings serves as the knowing subject in this logic and her intention is to alienate her progeny from the logic of partus sequitur ventrum through resurrection after social death rather than to attempt life on her own terms without the protection of the secular divine in Jefferson. Consider in this context the options. Hemings could certainly have accepted freedom in France but would have fundamentally altered her self-referential subjectivity through radical displacement of space. In Hemings mind, I argue, she could not be who she understood herself to be outside of the spatial context that created her. In other words, the spatial dissonance of Othello s Venice, Sethe s Ohio, or the Invisible Man s hole would not do for Hemings. Understanding this, the process for the purification of the womb or distancing of the face of the carnal relations that produced the children has to be elided. Here I wish to situate Hemings as a synonymous figure to the twice-consecrated genealogy of Mary as the vessel for the living God who must die to be reborn. I say twice-consecrated because I had been unconscious of the alienation of the birth of Mary from the imperative of human intercourse. This important mythology was brought to my attention in Peter Sloterdijk s text Bubbles: Spheres I where he takes up the Giotto s painting of the parents of Mary; Joachim and Anne. Mary s parents Joachim and Anne were still childless after twenty years of marriage despite being God-fearing people. One day Joachim decided to travel to Jerusalem for Hanukkah in order to make a sacrifice before the altar of Yahwe and ask for the child they so desired. There he was recognized by the priest, who expelled him from the temple in a fit of rage because he was cursed by the law, which made no provision for a sterile man, who made no increase to the people of God, to stand among men who begot sons. One day, an angel of the Lord appears to him and announces that his wife Anne will bear a child, which they are to call Marythe later mother of the Messiah 443

425 416 This situates the genealogy of Mary as already distinct from that of mortals and if her conception is not virginal, it is certainly, arguably, unfertilized in the conventional sense of the biological imperative of birth. The second stage of what I have labeled twiceconsecrated is the well known immaculate conception of Christ that renders the child at least two generations removed from traditional modes of conception. Arguably, the historical record is sympathetic to a reading of the psyche of Hemings that presents the need for the type of ontological erasure that attends Fanon s zone of nonbeing: recall it as an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, a bare ramp from which a new emergence can arise. In substance, it was until very recently that the mixed race children of Monticello had appeared out of nowhere and it is only the irrefutable nature of DNA science that has disallowed the continued disavowal of the true parentage of Heming s children. This was arguably her goal. To allow for the children to disappear into the world without a discernible genealogy and to be accepted as only what they appear to be, normatively human, Elemental, and in many instances white. This metamorphosis required a multi-layered process of alienation, disavowal, social death and finally social resurrection. Hemings, recall, as homo liminalis, bracketed by the fleeting yet fraught moment of agency that presents itself in revolutionary France, commits social suicide but in so doing allows her material self to exist in the context in which it is legible to her internal understanding of self-being. The corporeal life of black Sally requires the ontological death of free Sally. She has effectively alienated, through a process of will, her freedom from her body. Second, she has to willfully alienate her children from their matriarchal relationship. As a practical matter, it would never do for the progeny of Hemings and Jefferson to be identified as such; the two political cartoons from presidential election involving Jefferson

426 417 speaks to the problem for the slave-holding politician. The first depicts the rumor of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings: Figure 39 And this one gesturing at the hypocritical relationship of power between masters and slaves on plantations: Figure 40

427 418 We have marked the processes of alienation, social death and alienation, what remains is the complexity of social resurrection: the rebirth of the body after its mortification and death as a newly arisen, perhaps unrecognizable subject. 5: The Raising of the Body: Hemings, like the literary figures we have examined in Shakespeare, Melville, Ellison, and Morrison, have sacrificed their bodies to projects of, in the first three instances, selfmetamorphosis. It is the historical figure of Hemings and the literary figure of Sethe that focus on the body of the child as the vehicle for subjective transformation. Before turning to the plantation again, the theoretical framework against which I intend to read this notion of social resurrection as the resurrection of Christ and I am particularly interested in encounters with the newly arisen Messiah that occupies the attention of Jean-Luc Nancy in his text, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Here, Nancy takes up the moment when the risen Christ admonishes Mary Magdalene against touching his body once she realizes who he is. In considering this text my interest is on Nancy s take on what is meant by resurrection as a means of providing context to the ontological condition of life after social death that I am describing here. He writes: The resurrection is not a return to life. It is the glory at the heart of death: a dark glory, whose illumination merges with the darkness of the tomb. Rather than the continuum of life passing through death, it is a matter of discontinuity of another life in or of death. If during the Lazarus episode Jesus says I am the resurrection, what he means is that the resurrection is not a process of regeneration (like that of the mythologies of Osiris or Dionysius, for example), but that it consists or, rather, that it takes place in one s relation with he who says, I am the resurrection. The rest of the verse declares: He that believeth in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live. To place one s trust in him and to be thus within faith is not to believe that a corpse could be

428 419 regenerated: it is to hold oneself [se tenir] firmly on the assurance of a stance [une tenue] before death. 444 This thinking on the part of Nancy provides an interesting way to consider the notion I have presented that situates the revolutionary stance of Hemings as a counter-point to many of the strategies for mutual recognition pursued by literary figures and most particularly as an alternative to the employment of corporeal death as a vehicle for alteration of subject position. Nancy s formulation is provocative for considering social death as the condition from which the subject is resurrected. As a matter of first impressions, I am most interested in thinking in and around the trope of the tomb employed here by Nancy in considering the plantation as itself just that. I have proposed before that the plantation is an extension of the slave ship as the locus of the transition from what must be social life to social death. It additionally must be true that the plantation, in addition to serving as a factory for the production of the socially dead subject also serves as the repository for the material body of the enslaved. This is clear when we consider the effects on the condition of social death that attend relocation of the body outside of the tomb that is the plantation. This is manifestly clear in the case before us when we consider the fracturing of enslaved subjectivity that attends escape to the north or, in the case of Hemings, life in France. Accepting this formulation it then is necessary to push against the account by Nancy that removes the notion that resurrection is a granting of life or serves as a type of reanimation of the subject. It is the discontinuity that he marks that seems to fit the praxis of Hemings, Sethe and Garner. I read this discontinuity as an interruption in genealogy which is effectively an interruption of temporality which creates a space or opening for the re-insertion of excluded internal time signature into the altered collective. The continuum of enslaved genealogy through the womb of the mother must be interrupted in order to facilitate the resurrection

429 420 of the already socially dead unborn. In order to unpack this moment of discontinuity and its relation to the events described here by Nancy, it is the prohibition against touching that I mark as the momentary existence of a hyper event of liminality on the part of the resurrected Christ that I additionally trace onto the moment that concerns us of agency that exists for Hemings. Nancy reminds us that this is the only instance in the life of Christ when his body is not available for touching. What is properly exceptional about this scene as it is treated in the evangelical narrative is the following: Christ expressly rules out the touching of his arisen body [son corps ressuscité]. At no other moment had Jesus either prohibited a touch or refused to let someone touch him. Here, though, on Easter morning and at the time of his first appearance, he suppresses or prevents Mary Magdalene s gesture. What must not be touched is the arisen body Christ does not want to be held back, for he is leaving. He says it immediately: he has not yet returned to the Father, and he is going toward him. To touch him or to hold him back would be to adhere to immediate presence, and just as this would be to believe in touching (to believe in the presence of the present), it would be to miss the departing [la partance] according to which the touch and the presence come to us Just as it comes, so it goes: this is to say that it is not, in the sense of something being fixed within presence, immobile and identical to itself, available for a use or a concept. Resurrection is the uprising [surrection], the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and of the one disappearing in the body itself and as the body. 445 In the fleeting moment of agency, when the material possession of the body of Hemings is in question and in that questioning unavailable, untouchable, when it had before and would again be all to touchable by Jefferson; Hemings has been resurrected and in so doing frees her progeny while mortifying her body for its useful life by allowing the moment to pass. Hemings at this moment becomes the subject and the object of her own

430 421 redemption, rendering even more complicated the notion of Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio (Virgin Mother, Daughter of thy son) that preoccupies thinkers around the figure of Mary. Hemings, the revolutionary figure, has solved the conundrum that ensnared Othello in ineffectively dealing with the separation of ontological being from the corporeal existence of the body. Othello, recall in my reading, has lost his essence in that it is absorbed and possessed by Desdemona rendering him shattered in the bifurcation. Rather than fight against this condition; the solution of which lay in the fundamental alteration of social order, a transformation of context that held, at least in the thinking of Hemings, untold costs for her subjectivity; she elects to employ to her benefit the separation of the abject body into ontological and material subjects. Hemings employs the possibility of complete freedom as a bargaining chip for the genealogical and therefore ontological freedom of her essence through the material and ontological freedom of her progeny. In the moment of liminal existence, Hemings in her component parts, occupies all subject positions in the Christian narrative of virginal birth: paternity, maternity, and progeny. She in removing the restriction on the touching of her body has recaptured the absolute loss of sovereignty over her personage. She has a choice, and in control of that choice by electing to return material possession of her freedom to Jefferson she has stripped the possession of ontological freedom from the state and it becomes hers to give through her womb consecrated through her resurrection. In short, Hemings cannot be a slave if she is birthing free children. The plantation logic of Monticello has been rendered exceptional to the exceptionality of that abject space; in this, it is no wonder that Hemings remained in isolation on the mountain: this condition could not exist outside of that exceptional space. This ultimately requires that I return to consider the case taken up by Morrison that forms an alternative technology for the implosion of the logic of abjection by employing death as the vehicle to alter the

431 422 relationship of the body to space in the same way that Hemings altered the physical space of Monticello. What I mean to present here is that Hemings, in here employment of social death to insure the free life of her children presents an alternative to Gardner/Seth and the approach of altering the possibility of the physical spatiality of plantation logic to render the body unfree. Recall that with the arrival of the slave catchers in putatively free territory the condition of plantation abjection has been rendered plastic and unhindered by the barrier of free space. In the logic that is explored by Morrison, it is through the juxtaposition of social death with corporeal death that this can be reformed. This effort, in the argument of this text, returns the space to its ability to accommodate the black body as human and therefore free but only by resituating the threshold of death that serves as the barrier that defines the subject.

432 423 FIFTH DIVISION Conclusions: Points of Departure 1: Introduction: This effort is designed to produce an analytical tool that allows for the examination of the subaltern subject as it relates to the structure of hegemonic societal order as it is expressed in theory and practice in the modern world system. My goal at the outset was to accomplish the following: 1. To characterize the subject that I proposed is at the same time human (homo) and exists at a point of instability (liminalis) principally due to its profoundly transitory nature; 2. To examine the existence of this figure against what I called a continuum of sovereignty ranging from the Abject to the Exalted with the middle term being the Elemental: and 3. To conduct this examination from the perspective of the Abject or Subaltern figure and in so doing explicate: a. The creation of the Abject; b. The technologies and purposiveness of doing so; c. The imagination and technologies to alter subject positions and; d. The barriers that define and resist As the project progressed it became impossible to ignore that the challenge posed by Michel Foucault at the outset here, to recognize the identification of the transitional subject position as an entire field of possible research is most readily expressed by the difficulty in defining whether the homo liminalis is most readily characterized as a space, a subject defined by a space, a space defined by the presence of a subject, or a time that is subject to a similar range of possibilities or some combination of the above. As this project has progressed the question of the homo liminalis as a particular type of transitional subject that is locatable in that its movement can be so fleeting as to elide the sensitivity of the receptors tasked with its detection requires that some conclusion be offered into its apparition and appearance at and within a particular type of space and time. What I mean to express by considering the type of space and time that is required

433 424 for the appearance or more accurately legibility of homo liminalis is primarily a question of perspective and context. Put simply, and this will be taken up in this chapter as well in considering the notion of total revolution, the question seems to be whether the transformational motion of the subject that becomes the homo liminalis fractures the integrity of the architecture of the system under consideration to the point that there is no longer a position from which to discern the relative motion of the subject. What I mean here is that the revolutionary disruption of individual subjectivity that is observable as the homo liminalis, in the exemplary case, should tend to fracture the terms of subjectivity that created the conditions that required the transformation in the first place. If this interruption of order is totalizing then there is potentially no longer a position from which the subject in question and/or those intent upon observing the phenomenon can discern change in that it would then seem that everything, literally, has changed. This requires that we understand the existence of homo liminalis as a spatial/temporal phenomenon that may be limited as an observable subject beyond its instantaneous existence as the necessary condition for a futurity which puts additional types of pressure on the possibility of identifying it as a phenomenon within the context of absolute revolutionary alteration of the terms of being. This also tends to alert us to the possibility that there is no such thing as absolute fracture from a perspective of coherent observation, categorizing and expression of a phenomenon that successfully alters the terms of observation, categorization and expression at the same time. Meaning that if it is possible to observe a transformation it is not possible for that transformation to have altered the terms of its existence ontologically and perhaps also the terms of its possible points of arrival. In order to unpack this problematic it seems that it is first necessary to address a concern whose satisfactory explanation I have found to be elusive in the production of this

434 425 project and its relationship to the space and time of the homo liminalis in that it is unclear whether the homo liminalis exists in an already defined space of transformational being, created the space of transformational being as a product of its alteration, or is itself the space of transformational being; both form and content. This, in my thinking, needs to be thought along with the fraught examination of Fanon s employment the zone of non-being as a trope that has preoccupied this effort. This question of the spatiality of the existence of homo liminalis, in this thinking and in concert with the logic presented here of the unity of space and time that is the context and character of existence of the abstract, ontological human that I have posited as the necessary transitional condition and goal of liminal being, is the threshold issue in presenting a satisfactory account of the locus of homo liminalis. I have proposed that one of the universal attributes of the Abject subject is that the body is not only politicized in its existence in a particular political space but that the body itself becomes a political space with its own boundaries that can be violated, defended, expanded, reduced or destroyed. Here the question of the transition of this subject from, in one instance, the Abject to Elemental, must require the evacuation of the body of those elements of its subjectivity that establish its abjection. The externality and boundaries of the subject, evacuated of the terms of its Abject existence, then both enters and becomes the vacant space of the homo liminalis. Recalling the architecture of the existence of the Abject, Elemental and Exalted presented here, what Fanon s theorizing of the zone of non-being requires is that there exists a space that is contiguous and contingent to the thresholds that exist between all things that are not the same. The space of non-being, then, would seem to represent the threshold to the barrier between subjects and would have to exist on both sides of the line between them. But, following the central problematic of this section and the apparent requirement

435 426 of some form of conclusion, this requires that the transitional subject exist within the continued existence of terms in which it embarks upon its transition. As a practical matter, the transition depicted here only makes sense (from our observational perspective) so long as the larger context of the change remains intact. This form of metamorphosis exists in that the interstitial spaces between discernible typologies of subjectivity exist in a register that defies our analytic tool of separation between one type of being, i.e. caterpillar and the next, pupa ; and the alteration from one mode of being to the next is only legible because we understand that there are no radical separations from one type of subject to the other and the terms of our understanding remain coherent and linear. If the transition from a caterpillar to a pupa fractured the notion of the life cycles of a butterfly, as we understand it, we would no longer have observable and/or measurable metamorphosis. Additionally, our recognition of the metamorphosis as such allows us to witness that the pupa is not a different being but a changed being. Figure 41 Leaving aside the question of what the caterpillar thinks about its transition it is clear what the outside observer marks about it. However, with respect to the subject that