The Universal Machine (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822370550)

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: 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 Epistrophies: 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.

Author: Fred Moten
ISBN-10: 0822370557
ISBN-13: 9780822370550
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/06/2018
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/28/2018