THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE, consent not to be a single being, Vol. 3

291pp., paperback, Durham, 2018

Three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, considered alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield.

"Fred Moten is one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in black studies. The Universal Machine offers us a social poetics of blackness in its rigorous and extended engagement with Kant, Levinas, Arendt, and Fanon. The book is a provocative and incisive meditation on the violence of the esteemed categories of western philosophy: man, universe, reason, and world. What becomes clear over the course of its pages is the critical role of blackness (black life, black study) in producing thought of the outside and the vision of another world, or, better yet, no world, just the love and caress of earth. The density of its argument and the labyrinthine beauty of its sentences define Moten's body of work and trouble the line between critical thought and poetry." Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals

"In The Universal Machine, Fred Moten's extraordinary prose and thought lights up with love 'the other, dancing civilization black radicalism is.' As political philosophy the elliptical and attentive analysis reanimates Levinas, Arendt, and Fanon, among others, learning from their dissident phenomenology and repudiating the Enlightenment racism that shaped their concepts and politics. Reading in the Black Marxist tradition of Cedric Robinson and civil rights too, the book induces its own kinetic revolutionary blackness, its own figures of fugitive improvisation and solidarity. Each reading minute is absorbing and reverie-inducing, dissolving the ground of the interpretive habits we've been taught to bring to thought and the world." Lauren Berlant, is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and co-author of Sex, or the Unbearable

"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 magination

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and the author of Black and Blur, Stolen Life and In the Break: the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition.