The Analytic that Flesh Makes Possible: A review of Fred Moten Stolen Life

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...