The Analytic that Flesh Makes Possible

Janet Neary (bio)

A review of Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018.

Stolen Life is the second book in Fred Moten’s recent series, consent not to be a single being, published within a year by Duke University Press. Like the other books in the series, Black and Blur and The Universal Machine, Stolen Life is a set of interrelated essays in which Moten uses blackness as an analytic to propose open-ended ways of being in the world that sharply cut and exceed the seeming wholes and totalities that form the commonplace understanding of the modern world. In this aleatoric collection that resists collection (xii), Moten presents his inimitable and endlessly generative mode of thought in encounters with a wide range of primary and scholarly texts. From the opening essay, “Knowledge of Freedom,” which draws on Winfried Menninghaus, Olaudah Equiano, David Kazanjian, Ronald Judy, and Bryan Wagner (among others) to produce a sustained analysis of the foundational disturbance of blackness in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, to the concluding essay, “Erotics of Fugitivity,” which thinks alongside Sora Han’s “Slavery as Contract” to present a fierce and beautiful re-thinking of consent as refusal in order to dismantle the terms of liberal statism, Moten illuminates what he has called the “improvisational immanence” of blackness to show how—as concept, radical aesthetic, political tradition, and mode of being—it precedes and disrupts the regulative discourses that enshrine notions of sovereignty.

Situating himself as student and teacher, Moten is both frank pragmatist addressing concrete realities of life in the academy and among subjects who imagine themselves to be sovereign and sonic theorist performing devotional acts of analysis. The dynamic essays collected in Stolen Life enact the black radical tradition, recursively unfolding a reclamation of the antenormative (what he terms the “insistent previousness” of blackness in In the Break), dispatching “normative individuation,” “judicial ownership,” and “legislative priesthood” in ways that entail a rethinking of every aspect of epistemology and of human relations. If the collection is a kind of intellectual ensemble that returns often to Moten’s primary interlocutors (Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nahum Chandler, Hortense Spillers, and Nathaniel Mackey), the essays are predominantly dialogic, each taking flight from a particular intellectual point of departure, drawing in and from many voices but moving by way of a devotional agonism in which one principal text becomes the grain against which Moten thinks. This method of critical close reading is the foundation of Moten’s powerful critique of the academy’s abetting of liberal individualism, even while he thinks out loud about how to be inside these structures without acceding to their terms. To describe Moten’s fugitive engagement with continental philosophy, one could do worse than to cite his comment that in Kant’s writings he finds an “unruly sociality, anarchic syntax, extrasensical poetics” (2).

Stolen Life extends and amplifies the work of In the Break, presenting us definitions of blackness as boundless, dynamic, and vital, as “non-performed performance[,]…the surrealization of space and time,” against the notion of blackness as “death-driven epiphenomenon…[either] bound by [or] originating in the white/nonwhite binary” (33). In Stolen Life, as in his other work, blackness is, rather than is not, and Moten recruits DuBois (via Chandler’s reading of his early work) to present “blackness as that which is before the binary that has been said to define our existence” (35). In so doing, Moten presents a temporal and logical challenge to the notion of “blackness as an effect of the color line, which is to say the white/nonwhite binary which orients it and by way of which it is plotted” (33). Moten argues that to imagine that blackness is reducible to this axis is to accede to the very terms of the negation, which, in “its most extreme development,” refuses “the idea of blackness as a form of life” (33-34).

One consequence of this intervention is the philosophical distinction between blackness and black people. Though Moten is clear that “black people have a privileged relation to blackness” and “that black cultures are (under)privileged fields for the transformational expression and enactment of blackness” (18), quoting Wagner he identifies his aims as

‘to name the blackness in the black tradition without recourse to those myths that have made it possible up to this time to represent the tradition as cultural property’; to ‘track…the emergence of the black tradition from the condition of statelessness’; and ‘to describe its contours by tracking the tradition’s engagement with the law.’ (27)

He differs from Wagner “regarding the origin of blackness and of law” (27). This difference represents the collection’s most novel intervention: Moten’s mobilization of blackness as legal critique. Rather than a reaction to state brutality, Moten understands blackness as “jurisgenerative,” which is to say, before the law, “ante-interpellative” and “anterelational” (27), a proposition that identifies a disruption at the heart of the law, a kind of ‘call coming from inside the house’ in which blackness itself is critical capacity: “The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment…. Stolen by it, it steals from it, steeling itself to it in preservative, self-defensive, disjunctively anachoreographic permeance” (41).

“Stolen life,” the philosophical through-line of the essays, is most clearly articulated in “Knowledge of Freedom,” the collection’s cornerstone. “Stolen life” names a fugitive dynamic wherein the very regulatory discourses that organize themselves by exclusions, limitations, and hierarchical assessments of human life are dependent upon race as the categorical instantiation of regulation, a recognition that illuminates a paradoxically intimate relationship between regulation and the disturbance(s) or wildness that it attempts to distinguish, extinguish, name, contain, or transcend. Moten’s meditation on Kant’s treatment of imagination recognizes the ambivalently generative potential of the disavowal at the heart of Kantian philosophy:

The regulative discourse on the aesthetic [taste] that animates Kant’s critical philosophy is inseparable from the question of race as a mode of conceptualizing and regulating human diversity, grounding and justifying inequality and exploitation, as well as marking the limits of human knowledge through the codification of quasi-transcendental philosophical method, which is Kant’s acknowledged aim in the critical philosophy. (2)

To recognize this more-than-proximity is also to engender what Moten elsewhere calls “the enthusiastic social vision” of blackness, to reclaim the “radical sociality of the imagination,” and to dwell in the materiality that is the ground of distinction and the substance of thought; as Moten puts it, “the ones who work the ground are the ground” (3).

Extending this recognition of how “race moves against its own regulatory derivative” (17), Moten adapts the foundational solipsistic American metaphors of the “errand into the wilderness” to describe constitutive, generative abjection:

Too often life is taken by, and accepts, the invasive, expansive aggression of the settler, venturing into the outside that he fears, in search of the very idea as it recedes from its own enabling condition, as its forms are reclaimed by the informality that precedes them. (xi)

“This,” he writes, is “how the unnameable comes to bear the imposition of a name” (3). The violence indexed by this maneuver, however, also marks the critical capacity and generative force of reclaiming the anoriginal “ground” of philosophy and of modern statehood: “What if,” Moten asks, “the ones who are so ugly that their utterances must be stupid are never far from Kant’s mature and critical thoughts? What if they, or something they are said and made to bear alone, are the fantastical generation of those thoughts?” (2). One of the most interesting aspects of Moten’s theory, here, is the relationship between the material and the temporal: “The irreducible materiality of the beautiful and the irreducible irregularity of the imagination define an enclosure that will have always been disruptively invaded, as it were, from the inside” (5). The dynamic captured here is the critical move that characterizes all of the essays in the collection: the recognition of anoriginal, undifferentiated materiality that is paradoxically foundational to the regulatory, a recognition that enacts critical capacity and enables collective insurgency.

In turning Kantian philosophy inside out, all the essays in Stolen Life perform immanence, directing our attention to the potential of reclaiming anoriginal, unnamed materiality from the false transcendence and violent naming that is the engine of sovereignty. Such a rethinking has at least three primary, related consequences: a critique of individuality, a recentering of black women, and an insistence on—and celebration of—the pathological.

Moten continually turns to unruly black narratives to challenge what Lindon Barrett has called the “subject-effect” (256). Calling on Ronald Judy, Wahneema Lubiano, Sylvia Wynter, and Barrett, Moten replaces the notion of a “‘universal’ Kantian subject” with an “improvisational” Kantian subject whose “generative incoherence” “opens a critique of being” (52). Repeating a version of the question that inaugurates In the Break, Moten asks, “What would it mean to think and to inhabit the object?” (84). The figures most powerfully situated to challenge normative individuality are black women. As figures that materially exist in the space between two fantasies—”the black (woman) as regulative instrument and the black (woman) as natural agent of deregulation”—Moten asserts black women’s privileged access to “a turmoil foundational to the modern aesthetic, political, and philosophical fields” (3). Here Moten seems to be working in the same groove as Harryette Mullen, who argues that, “in some instances the stark materiality of [black women’s] embodied existence gave [them] a clarity of vision about their position as slaves and as women” (246). Consequently, the arc of Stolen Life moves from the identification of black immanence within Kant, which establishes that it is “the outlaw that guarantees the law” (15), to the “anoriginal lawlessness” enacted by an enslaved black woman, Betty, who refuses the terms of liberal subjectivity by electing to return to slavery with her masters after the Massachusetts Supreme Court declares her to be free (the basis of Sora Han’s reading in “Slavery as Contract”). In Han’s words, Betty’s “decision is an a priori fugitivity to becoming a fugitive of the law of slave and free states” (qtd. in Moten, 247). In Moten’s, “The question of breaking the law is immediately disrupted by an incapacity for law, an inability both to intend the law and intend its transgression” (15). Moten celebrates Betty as a figure of abjection.

For Moten, to be in and with the generative disruption is to reclaim pathology against uplift. Rather than work to “negate the negation” (a reactive pose Moten unequivocally rejects), Moten’s thought recovers what is “before and against the grain of that negation” (xi). In other words, Moten suggests that rather than cleaving to the false comfort of recovery and uplift, endlessly demonstrating the error of the exclusion, one must claim and revel in abjection:

What if blackness is, in fact, abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious precisely insofar as it is the continual refusal of normative individuation, which is supposed to be the enactment of everything opposite to these qualities? (265-266)

The collection ends by dwelling on the historical and literary trace of a black woman inhabiting the tension between the two fantasies into which the modern liberal state and existential discourse would attempt to corral her. Moten calls out “certain critico-redemptive projects” (x), such as the scholarly impulse toward uplift. Following Saidiya Hartman, Moten rejects academic projects characterized by a “tendency toward the production of anti-anti-blackness that will have been activated by the way of the liberal subject’s capacity to imagine some combination of uplift and overturning” (265). He has yet harsher words for defenders of academic freedom, which he understands to be an expression of settler colonialism: “Academic freedom is a form of violence perpetrated by academic bosses who operate under the protection and in the interest of racial state capitalism” (221).

The two essays in the collection that wrangle most personally with life in the academy are also the most formally experimental and the most affecting. In “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out),” oblique autobiography breaks into the essay as Moten thinks through the ways his neuroatypical son was risked in traditional schools. Writing from the other side, as an agent within the academy, in “Anassignment Letters,” Moten adapts the assignment form into an epistolary essay that directly addresses his students, beginning, “I think I figured out what my job is: to support you in the development and refinement of your own intellectual practice” (227). In what follows, Moten deconstructs the assignment form as a tool of possessive individualism that forces hierarchy, closure, and arrival, offering in its stead “intellectuality [as] fugitivity, as a mode, and as a quality, of life” (227). Rejecting the assignment as such, Moten insists on cultivating intellectual practice as open-ended, processional, and fundamentally collective.

Despite the emphasis on the flesh (and the distinction he teases between Spillers and Fanon, the distinction between flesh and skin), to read Stolen Life is to move into language and live differently there. Moten’s agility with language is unparalleled (though to say so is to speak in categorical and hierarchal terms at odds with his writing; one of the book’s commitments is a rejection of the solo). Yet it is impossible to encounter the book without tangling with and marveling at Moten’s virtuosity with language, which is, in his hands, difficult, opaque, inexhaustible, material, and suggestive. Language is thought, rather than a medium for thought, and language itself often drives the essays’ analytic innovations. For example, in the preface he writes that “in that exhaustion of what it is to acquire, a choir is set to work” (ix), using homophones to stage the tension between the collective ensemble’s organization against an eviscerating, acquisitive, destructive racial capitalism. Later, the insurgency of oral culture disrupts the text of continental philosophy and becomes a way of getting at blackness’s immanence within Kant: “Black chant, is, among other things a transverse reenactment of black Kant, pronounced cant, of blackness in Kant insofar as it intones the foundational interplay of sense and non-sense” (32). In both of these examples it is unclear whether argument or sound (inseparable for Moten) have priority. The most sustained example of Moten’s sounding openings for philosophical paths is the essay “Black Op,” dedicated to Lindon Barrett, an interlocutor whose ideas are felt beyond this essay that bears his name. The title of this short essay enacts multiple-entendre by operating both sonically and graphically as shorthand, cut-off generation, unfinished multiplicity; one may imagine an asterisk at the end of “Black op*” such as one would use when entering a term into a search engine to capture all the potentialities of a beginning—or at least to refuse the limit of completion—proliferating/suggesting/searching “black optimism,” “black operation,” “black opposition,” “black optics,” and on. As he does with the assignment form, Moten uses the sonic materiality of language to counter the ways it has been used violently to name, identify, limit, and categorize.

Finally, it is important to note that what Moten deems the “improvisation of [the Kantian] subject” (52) has implications for literary study. It is in deconstructed literary texts that Moten finds the most compelling enactments of the black radical tradition, but also where we most urgently see the necessity of rejecting narrative. Considering the violent imposition of narrative form on enslaved peoples’ experiences of slavery as they are related in slave narratives, Moten identifies the problem as “how to tell the story of a rupture that has broken the ability to tell and how to have that telling be free and be in the interest of freedom” (42). Moten’s answer to this question is to recover the improvisational subject instantiated by a forever rematerializing, always anoriginal frontier. Recalling Sylvia Wynter and putting what I will call his Kantian formula into action, Moten is

interested in how the free story that forms the paradoxically anarchic ground of the black radical tradition will have rationalized that conception of ‘Man,’ improvising through its exclusionary force and toward theory and practice that reconstitutes both the methods and the objects of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. (42)

Throughout the collection, Moten demonstrates the ways blackness is paradoxically both foundational to and disruptive of the law, continental philosophy, aesthetics, imagination, and what we understand to be the contours and commitments of the archive. Employing a series of logical and linguistic declensions, Moten confronts grammatical and philosophical cul-de-sacs that he repeatedly finds his way out of, tracing “the open obscurity of a field of study and a line of flight” (x). His analysis is animated by and dwells in the materiality of language and flesh that precedes naming, subjects, and sovereignty, preparing the ground for his reclamation of the abject. It is fundamentally collective and non-dyadically relational, sketching a world that is appositional, simultaneous, irreducible. To end with his own words,

What I’ve written may seem confusing, but try to remember what we have been working through all along: this weird and arrhythmic doubleness of the term subject…. In order to get a plain sense of this you have to use your imagination. (233, 241)

Works Cited

• Barrett, Lindon. “Dead Men Printed.” Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays, edited by Janet Neary, Duke UP, 2018, pp. 237–269.
• Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved.” The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 244–264.