[From the publisher]
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.
