Fred Moten > Quotes

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
― Fred Moten

“Yeah, well, the ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain't my primary concern. I don't worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk. That's like that Fred Hampton shit: he'd be like, "white power to white people. Black power to black people." What I think he meant is, "look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn't something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
― Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

“A couple people seem to be reticent about the term ‘study,’ but is there a way to be in the undercommons that isn’t intellectual? Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities was already there. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, ‘oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.’ To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.”
― Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

“In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“we can speculate on the relay of our common activity, make a circle round our errant roots. Dancing is what we make of falling. Music is what we make of music's absence, the real presence making music underneath. I'm exhausted so my soul is rested.”
― Fred Moten, The Little Edges

“The theory and practice of revolution is bound to the way the individual emerges as a theoretical possibility and phenomenological actuality in and out of the revolutionary ensemble.”
― Fred Moten, Black and Blur

“The hard materiality of the unreal convinces us that we are surrounded, that we must take possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency, on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but an illusory right to what we do not have, which the settler takes for and as the commons. But in the moment of right/s the commons is already gone in the movement to and of the common that surrounds it and its enclosure.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. That continually rewound and remade claim upon our monstrosity—our miracle, our showing, which is neither near nor far, as Spillers shows—is black feminism, the animaterial ecology of black and thoughtful stolen life as it steals away.”
― Fred Moten, Black and Blur

“After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of terror, is wrong.”
― Fred Moten

“...[T]he United States is the land of formal democratic enclosure...”
― Fred Moten

“What we come together to try to do starts to look like what we do when we come together to enjoy ourselves, handing saying what we want for one another to one another in and out of words.”
― Fred Moten, The Service Porch

“When slavery is understood to have always been yoked to freedom all throughout the history of man; when (the so-called free) man’s yoking to the figure of the slave is also, of necessity, understood to be yoked to his struggle against the free man for his freedom (and the ambiguity of “his” is, here, intentional), then what we’re talking about is better, if still inadequately, understood as durational field rather than event.”
― Fred Moten, Black and Blur

“our resistant, relentlessly impossible object is subjectless predication, subjectless escape, escape from subjection, in and through the paralegal flaw that animates and exhausts the language of ontology. Constant escape is an ode to impurity, an obliteration of the last word.”
― Fred Moten, Black and Blur

“The false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are. We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around.”
― Fred Moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study

“the animative materiality—the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force—of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being”
― Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

“[H]aving something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line.”
― Fred Moten, The Service Porch