The Universal Machine

Description

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. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 1. There Is No Racism Intended......Page 16 2. Refuge, Refuse, Refrain......Page 80 3. Chromatic Saturation......Page 155 Notes......Page 262 Works Cited......Page 286 A......Page 296 B......Page 297 D......Page 298 E......Page 299 H......Page 300 L......Page 301 N......Page 302 P......Page 303 S......Page 304 Z......Page 306