Fred Moten Talk
watched on October 12, 2015 and 16 October
2015
Notes-
Blackness cannot be reduced to an ontology. Blackness is a
principle- a principle of a condition that is there in all of us: the principle
of being “less than and more than” at the same time. And because blackness is always more and less than one, blackness it is a
condition fundamentally disrupts of the concept of a (whole) self.
(though I personally always find the
distinction between self and individual helpful, I need to think though more
fully what this would mean for this lecture).
What strikes me in the beginning of the piece is how Moten
re-counts philosophical and theoretical notions of ontology and difference in a
way that highlights the ways in which black theorists W.E.B Dubois’ and Franz
Fanon’s major works prefigured the works that Heidegger and – here his argument
is stronger – Derrida’s and well as French philosopher’s work (from the 1960s
onwards).
“One way to think of what Fanon is doing in
1952 is that it prefigures a lot of the work that Derrida will start doing
roughly 10 years later”
He offers an alternative notion of universality- which as a
philosophical premise was exposed in his talk as assuming
the “non-fullness of black selfhood” – because it challenges the notion of
universality that universalists like Kant et al. adhered to.
“As a
matter of theory Kant assumes the non-fullness of my personhood”
“Laws were created to assure that non-fullness”
รจ
American constitution: every black person is 3/5 of a man
The critique of Kant is important in this
lecture (held in Eastern Europe)- and also for me listening from Germany – as a
point of connection- answering the question- what does Blackness have to do
with me – though I think that is very clear from the main argument (as I need
it of Blackness as a principle rather than as an ontology)
But back to Kant and universalism for a
moment:
Moten asks - how do we today understand the
relation between difference and universalism- are still concerned with
universalism?
Kant’s universality regulates difference-
“regulates it, limits it and controls it”
In “contradistinction to Kant” Moten suggests
“the relation between difference and universality is maintained and operates by
way of and is honored not as a function of the regulation of difference, but as
a function of the proliferation of difference”
I
remember Meena’s question- what does this have to do with citizenship? I think,
citizenship is bound up with notions of
the nation which it seem to more often than not, have difficulty or be
incapable of embracing difference.
And for Moten, blackness “constitutes
something on the order of a principle for the proliferation of difference,
precisely insofar as it is neither, as it is always both less than one and more
than one.”
“In this combination of incompleteness and
excess, ok, it constitutes the living embodiment, so to speak, of the
disruption, of differences, of of the of the disruptive force of difference as
a universal principle, ok”
Blackness stands for:
“fundamental irregularity”
“resistance to regulation”
Moten’s connection to queer theory is another
gesture me into his discussion of blackness:
The Queer
and the trans- citizen is also “less than” as well as “more than one” – “infected
by impurity and multiplicity that undermines” singular notions of gender
Cynthia’s internal queer theorist asks “where
is the pleasure in blackness”- I am left thinking- how does the queer notion of
desire connect to Moten’s assertion that in order to embrace non-fullness
(which is possible for everyone) one has to give of the desire of the fantasy
of fullness.
How
does desire live in a queer-of-color debate?
This brings me to he very important question
of who can embrace blackness, who can consent to blackness? Can people who have not been subjected to the imposition
of non-fullness do so?
Q: “would it be a presumption for people who
are not black to claim blackness?”
A: “just call it something else then”
It is not about the ontology. Yes.
Here is where I think I get interested as well
as paralyzed, when he starts looking to bthe histories of black and queer performance
for “clues” for the
“enactment of another way of being in the
world”
In order to claim the “less than/more than”
condition, one has to give up a “normative idea of citizenship”
“a notion of home”
“Relinquish securities”
surrender to exhaustion
Accept the poststructuralist premise that “we
all operate in a certain structure of deprivation and poverty” that we operate
within a desire for a self, but we don’t actually have it: “what cultural and aesthetic resources are
available to us that would make it more possible for us to claim, rather than
to disavow, this condition which is
already ours, irreducibly, in a way that we cannot avoid”
Assignment idea:
I am actually struck by his adjectives, which
he uses with reference to this condition-
e.g.:
Entangled, vulnerable, open non-full, more
than and less than yourself.
I could imagine to make a study based on them
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