The Universal Machine

by Fred Moten

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Jazz and the Literary Imagination

In The Universal Machine —the concluding volume to his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being —Fred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, in which he explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinas's idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendt's antiblackness through Mayfield's virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxton's musical language, or showing how Fanon's form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout The Universal Machine —and the trilogy as a whole—Moten's theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Theory, Nonfiction, Race, African American, Cultural

312 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2018

About the author

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia). His current projects include two critical texts, consent not to be a single being (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Animechanical Flesh, which extend his study of black art and social life, and a new collection of poems, The Little Edges.

In 2009 Moten was Critic-in-Residence at In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object, The Performing Arts Festival at the House of World Cultures, Berlin and was also recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America; in 2011 he was a Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute; in 2012, he was Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College; and in 2013 he was a Guest Faculty Member in the Summer Writers Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute. He was also a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine from 2002 to 2004 and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York from 2001 to 2002.

Moten served as a member of the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly and has been a member of the Editorial Collectives of Social Text and Callaloo, and of the Editorial Board of South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also co-founder and co-publisher (with Joseph Donahue) of a small literary press called Three Count Pour.

Reviews

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed The Universal Machine within my review of the entire "Consent Not To Be A Single Being" trilogy for Symposium:

https://www.c-scp.org/2019/07/09/fred...

[aktiv müde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soooo klug das Chat GBT paar mal mir einzelne Absätze erklären musste 🙈

[Mills College Library]

305.896 M917u 2018