by David A. Maldonado 

In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons (Harney & Moten, Undercommons)¹  

The university is ultimately unable to deliver its liberal fantasy based on the weakness of the enlightenment’s selective and contradictory premises. This is particularly so for formerly incarcerated students, like this author, based on our subject position. Higher education, as institutional project, promotes enlightenment’s liberal promises while simultaneously being a place of labor and labor reproduction. The university claims to produce consciousness as value that would seemingly be outside of labor or outside of its role in reproducing labor power to enter their role in racial capitalism. Even those that want that well-paid line faculty position (the one they ‘promised’), it certainly cannot bear the title of endowed chair of abolition, liberation, or revolution studies. Those movements rely on a distinction between the work of political education and institutional education. They will not be funded.  But alas, these contradictions rely on flawed premises of the enlightenment itself, especially evident in Kant’s judgment of beauty.² Marx’s early work used the judgment of beauty toward liberatory ends.³ However, Kant’s theory does not account for the ways race, particularly Blackness, and the concept of abstract labor trouble the liberal incorporative fantasy of this framing.⁴ Even if these promises could be delivered for those who believe in the logics of incorporation and absorption, the problems of race and labor (at the conceptual level) trouble the university as a site of delivery in this impossibility. That is, even Kant’s most generative claims toward political evenness, which I think Marx improves on, assume a liberal subjectivity unable to escape its ontological and epistemological weaknesses.

I start with a core contradiction to point out the critical distinction between Moten’s use of stolen life and the idea of stealing one’s self.⁵ At a conceptual level, coming to understand ontology as a self to be stolen back concedes the possessive individualism that is sutured to enlightenment’s insistence on the subject/object divide wherein the subject rules over objects as possessions. Moten explains, 

if we understand that settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the emergence of philosophical formulations that essentially provide some modern conception of Self that has as its basis a kind of possessive heteronormative patriarchal individuation—that what it is to be a self on the most fundamental level (emphasis mine). 

The Undercommons’ maroon fugitivity that Harney and Moten offer suggest a much deeper negation than stealing one’s self.⁶ A Black radical consciousness should be understood as an ontological totality dedicated to this negation.⁷ As Kelley’s treatment of Robinson so incisively argues,   

These people were humans, exploited, but ripped from “superstructures” with radically different beliefs, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, intellectual traditions, etc. So, Robinson tries to push beyond Marx to imagine how we might advance a radical interpretation of liberation movements by examining their rebellions not as expressions of precapitalist people or examples of primitive accumulation but as modalities of struggle against the world system of capitalist exploitation. (Emphasis, mine).⁸

The university is not capacious enough to hold these epistemological antagonisms. As my comrade Erica R. Meiners always reminds me, the so-called elite institutions are “restrictive enrollment institutions” and begs the question why knowledge is for sale, why the university wealth hoards, except because of exchange value and the value form.⁹ A Black radical consciousness is maroon from the entirety of these categories, the categories that Marx puts under such beautiful duress. Marx gave us the anatomy of capital in hopes that we will reverse engineer it towards its negation and abolition. Foucault gifted us with a similar look at disciplining institutions that must also be torn down or at least reimagined and reappropriated in the world building project of abolition.¹⁰ The university is, of course, one in a long line of these disciplining institutions.  

Marx further argued that we have come to normalize, as transhistorical, the process by which labor creates value.¹¹ In particular, Wetkritik, or value form,¹² readings of Marx put the categories of the capitalist mode of production themselves in question. Further, this essay argues that education is invested in creating value for some and what Harney and Moten would consider the correction/disciplining of “perversion” for others. The opening quote captures this dynamic using what they, borrowing generously from Foucault, call “total education,” a project that uses “instruction” to “discipline the social individual” across institutional arenas. Their concept of “partial education” captures the necessary abolition sociality that would produce a (non) subject that is “all incomplete,” fugitive, and could produce the kind of maroon consciousness necessary to take steps toward abolition.¹³ The well cited passage from the Undercommons tells us that abolition, then, is not so much the abolition of policing and prisons but the “abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage…not abolition as the elimination of anything, but abolition as the founding of a new society.”¹⁴  

Their insistence on abolition bearing an “uncanny resemblance” to communism in the subsequent passage warrants more attention than the academy has given it. However, the preceding passage itself sets up this “resemblance” through their use of the term have. I see the term as an invitation to problematize the possessive nature endemic to Western philosophy. Possessive individualism is a key technology for capital. Therefore, a society that could “have” signals not only the un-sharing and uncaring that this form of individualism demands but exposes a complicity that blurs the lines between people and institutions. The world making project of abolition thus depends on subjectivities that refuse the logics and practices of these institutions.   

Education as Correction 

Educational institutions, pace Foucault, discipline subjects through total education. Of course, disciplining structures unevenly discipline people using rubrics of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. Borrowing from Foucault’s concept of total education, Harney and Moten tell us that “through instruction…perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit.”¹⁵ Total education completes perverted subjects/subjectivities through corrective instruction, while partial education remains social, fugitive, or can even exist in certain forms of political education. These critically incisive passages make clear a differentiation between total education and what they call “partial education.” They remind us that institutional forms of education are always invested in disciplining the “perverted body” (read Black, Brown, queer, poor, disabled, and especially the pathologized ‘criminal’). That is, total education begins its instruction by disciplining, constraining, reforming, and straightening out the “perverted body” and continues and progresses throughout the various institutions that lay claim to raise us. Instruction thus also searches to form completed subjects and subjectivities by preparing us as labor power to commodify ourselves (as living commodity) through abstract labor. When the antagonism between capital and labor power is unrecognizable to the laborer, when inclusion in racial capitalism appears as solution to the problem of post racial fantasy, and when choice represents freedom, the instruction is complete in some sense. Capital can therefore more easily continue to accumulate and expand through the hierarchies it produces and requires. Racial capitalism  

The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated know all too well this mode of instruction. We have been told since grade school how to line up, how our lack is antithetical to productivity, and that our perversion can only be corrected/reformed and made legible when we succumb to the dictates of instruction as redemption—total education will save us and it “reduces recidivism.”¹⁶ Harney and Moten point out that the goal of total education crystalizes in the oxymoronic term “perverted individual.” Because perversion is already designated as outside of whiteness and normativity—the preferred subjectivities in racial capitalism, the subjectivity of possessive individualism is rendered unavailable and unreachable. In other work, Moten points out that this is perhaps how we understand Blackness as being, as always out of place. He invokes Wilderson to explain that Blackness is not so much “a quality that Black folks are said to have but instead the name of the insurgency as refusal against the regulative force that has to be exerted to form subjects.”¹⁷ Because Blackness is never given the capacity to be a subject and because Blackness simultaneously refuses the normative process of subject making, Black folks have a better understanding of what the possibilities of a partial education look like. Refusal is a fugitive starting point.  

A Black radical consciousness is maroon, fugitive, and social, but also importantly not reducible to an essentialized construction of Black people, it is capacious. The Black Radical Consciousness is especially not reducible to an American Blackness as it signals an ontological totality that is an African consciousness. Robinson insisted that we see the limitations of Western epistemology and nationalism by attributing a world view to the line of inquiry.¹⁸ Al-Bulushi’s incisive work reminds us that an autonomous Black radical tradition is “one not dependent on its material conditions of exploitation but instead comprising its own (neglected) historical events, practices, strategies, and theories of struggle.”¹⁹ It is in many senses the negation to the negation.  

Blackness is thus in some ways the condition of possibility for partial education and a vehicle towards being “all incomplete.” This query into Blackness as all incomplete perhaps helps us understand Moten’s taking up of afropessimist thought. For Moten, Blackness helps us understand why “perverted individual” is an oxymoron. The unwanted promises of possessive individualism are always just out of reach, but he points out, we are told that the problems with the state, institutions, and the market are our fault.²⁰ Instruction “requires us to see the straight line it imagines (in a deeply regulatory modality of imagination as self-picturing, as a picturing of the self as one, Einbuildungskraft) for the sake of a kind of transcendental desire for improvement.”²¹ Surely improvement has value, we are told.  

Even mainstream Black class politics embraced the call to “hustle harder” in the spirit of responsibilized improvement.²² Spence’s critical work shows how this is irreconcilable with Black freedom. We already know, the result is police killings of Black people when they sell compact discs in front of the corner store, sell loose cigarettes, or even just stand in the middle of the street, out of place. That is, racial capitalism not only needs a hierarchy to accumulate and to displace its costs onto that unequal distribution, but it also promises itself as solution to the problem it created. You need to hustle to be incorporated. At the outskirts of the university, it looks just like it does when perversion comes too close to the student, the storekeeper, the cop, sometimes on camera, always with forms of violence. UC police and Berkeley police made this clear to my comrades and I in 1992 during the Rodney King protests near the UC Berkeley Campus. A young white man (presumably a student) was pointing a shotgun at us four local formerly incarcerated young adults of color from his porch when the police asked us what we were doing. They told us to leave or be arrested. We knew better than to say “we were just protesting in the free speech haven of the world”—that is reserved for the student. Reacting to either the student or the protectors of correction and instruction could have meant an endless video roll of our deaths on camera. The formerly incarcerated suffer a dialectical subjectivity and we know correction looks at us as the perverted. We ‘need’ correction and instruction from both institutions. Total education offers instruction as neutral medium as if we could be the student or at least relatively innocent.²³ But we can glimpse these forms of elite capture, an incorporative fantasy.²⁴   

Asking for less correction of our perversion is always a reformist reform—that is it extends the life scale and scope of the thing it promises to reform.  From a conceptual standpoint, perversion is not reformable but has to be abolished at the conceptual, technological, and logistical level. We want to stay perverted and incomplete, but not in the way instruction understands it. Perversion, after all, was created by the very institutions that also must be torn down in the world making project of abolition. These institutions often claim to be the solution to the same problems they create, especially the University.²⁵ They are, to invoke Derrida, pharmakon, both poison and remedy.²⁶  

This is carcerality and policing. When Moten spoke of Darren Wilson as a drone, he was alerting us to the ways that antiblackness exists apriori in the construction of perversion. Police/drones, as extension of permanent war, do not think for themselves and are not culpable, they mechanically assess “threat” as perversion and are therefore justified as technologically violent correction.²⁷ Racism is both algorithmic and colorblind—a drone. The production of vulnerability to premature death vis-a-vis the killing abstraction is perfected and relies on geography of the “hot spots,” predetermined by the production of perversion.²⁸ This is where the irrationality of racism as extractive technology comes into sharp relief. As Wang notes in citing this passage by Moten, while afropessimist critique and racial capitalism can work as simultaneous axes of dispossession, this version of unending gratuitous violence against “the black” doesn’t fit a logic of expropriation. The police will continue to kill, cities will pay, and shit will continue because perversion (as Blackness in its afropessimist specificity) is, again folks, always out of place. As Moten so rigorously insists, it is Black social life itself that poses a threat to the terms of order.²⁹ When children are playing with toy guns, when men are walking down the street, when women who resist the racial banishment of gentrification are home asleep, when public school workers drive home, they are out of place. It is Black social life that provokes state counterinsurgency.  

Racial capitalism in the university 

Racial capitalism depends upon instruction that uses labor upon labor. In the university, as Harney and Moten gesture, the value form remains labor through a process of “rais[ing] labor as difference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth.”³⁰ In other words, Wertkritik, or value form readings of Marx which have become popular in contemporary Critical Theory, encounter contradiction when functioning in the university. Wertkritik is a specific reading of the mature Marx. These more contemporary readings of Marx rely on a theoretical stretching of sorts. First, and perhaps most importantly, labor must be abolished as the value form. This is where the close reading of Marx is critical and differs from many other readings of the mature Marx and of his concept of ideology. Value form theory sees the fundamental categories of capitalism “value, commodity, money” not as a transhistorical categories but as social constructions of capitalist relations that become “reified and fetishized as objective necessities.”³¹The fundamental misrecognition of these categories as “second nature” and as natural social relations thus “masks the internal contradictions of capitalist society, contradictions form which stem the latter’s inexorable tendency toward crisis” (Larsen, p. xviii).³² This has profound implications for the concept of commodity fetishism and value then,

This reconsideration of the fundamental categories of the economic sphere of commodity producing society has radical and profound consequences for the relationship between value-critique and classical economics. For if value is no longer seen as reducible to an empirical category that can be positively determined by calculating the number of hours of socially useful labor that are embodied within any particular product, but a fetishistic result of the internalization of processes of dispossession, then the Marxist attempt to solve, for example, the so called transformation problem, to explain how a commodity’s price can result from its value and to account for any divergence between them, is revealed to be a categorical mistake.³³ 

Here is the problem. Before we can wrestle with this and experience its promise and praxis, we have to question how the university is in some sense the unresolvable contradiction as site of delivery. The hardened and lauded figure of the professor is performing labor that prepares labor by appearing as if we can question labor from that vantage point (to borrow from both Kant and Marx). Critique then appears as ideological in the Althusserian sense,³⁴ as material force that makes us go, as permanent, and not as if it were an end in itself. Remember for Marx the term “appears” too often doubles as an “is” but never serves as an “is.” Appears serves as a “necessary form of appearance” that reveals the deeper truth, the dissembled “is” of commodity production of wage labor, of fictitious capital, and across categories specific to the capitalist mode of production.³⁵  

The transhistorical ideological commitment to value is why labor has to “clear the roadblock of ideology.”³⁶ In a value form reading, this ideology reifies through instruction the very object it wishes to interrogate, labor. The university’s liberal fantasy of enlightenment obscures the production and reproduction of the worker as commodified labor power and as student. This collapses the two categories. Beyond the exploited student worker and the faculty, themselves former students, the actual function of the university is largely to “professionalize and credentialize” the student so he can become labor power, petty bourgeoisie capitalist, and in some cases the capitalist.  

To be clear, this work does not wish to trouble labor struggle as if we should favor inaction. Rather by treating labor as conceptual category, Wertkritik puts conceptual categories themselves under duress. This is how ideology should be applied to the unfixed category of commodity fetishism. This forces a rereading of many of well-read passages from chapter one, 

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it.³⁷  

Through commodity fetishism, ideology functions not in the vein of early Marx’s false consciousness, as even the orthodoxies would have it, or in the spirit of Althusser’s material force that makes us go.³⁸ Wertkritik sees ideology as the act of bearing witness to something you actually know to be false (in this case commodity fetishism) but struggle to visualize as anything but inevitable, again as transhistorical rather than social construct of the capitalist mode of production. This slippage allows for inaction and complicity to become common sense, in the Gramscian sense.³⁹ Marx’s claim that we “are not aware of it,” then, does not suggest we are dupes but rather that the mystification contained in the value of commodities needs to be seen as an historically specific monstrosity specific to the capitalist mode of production. When we confront the ugly complicity required for the ideological contours of commodity fetishism, we take steps toward disentangling the ideological slippage.  

Liberal for Who?  

Derrida’s work from the University Without Condition starts from explicitly Kantian principles, especially by presenting an as if,⁴⁰ contained in the phrasing “ought,” to state his thesis clearly; 

The [modern] university “demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth.⁴¹  

Of course, Derrida explicitly states that the university without condition does not exist, but we can imagine it as if it did through a series of deconstructive moves, especially by imagining what he terms a new humanities. The university, much in the Kantian sense, “should remain an ultimate place of critical resistance—and more than critical—to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation.”⁴² Derrida’s new humanities will be more than critical in that it will treat the unconditional right to deconstruct the history of the concept of man, the notion of critique, and the authority of the question. Instruction is full of authority and power. Even subversive thought then must question the trace of the dominant term. To achieve this Derrida unravels seven as ifs to question the inside and outside of the university as a locust of knowledge, to question the professionalization the university produces, the performative it gestures, and the sovereignty of the university and its relationship to the nation state as performative as if, among others. As Derrida says, “the university deconstructs, resists, resists by deconstructing the phantasm of the indivisible border-of the subject, the state, the nation, or any other sovereign institution.”⁴³ 

The seminar produces contradiction when it operates as if it can be clearly differentiated from the machine that credentializes and professionalizes. The circle of labor upon labor becomes instruction and our complicity, however subversive, is required. But there is risk in the seminar, precisely because we snuck in, because the Undercommons is the space that enacts “fugitive enlightenment,” where labor doesn’t count and can’t be counted, where the conditional sees the limits of reason, to borrow from Jay. The planning there might fire off another Black Marxist reading group that sees shared maroon labor as value form. We might steal space to make space and then turn that space into place for placemaking.⁴⁴ Remember that Ruthie told us “freedom is a place,” where sharing is shared, where the burdens are unburdened, and the degrees don’t count and can’t be counted. Where instruction stops and Study begins.⁴⁵ To reiterate, Study, involves planning and moving with other people, or as Harney and Moten describe: “talking and walking around with other people working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.” The gravediggers that Marx and Engels promised are Studying.⁴⁶  

Study wants bad debt because bad debt is social and bad debt stops credit from producing more credit, stops the expansion and spiral that capital needs to stay capital. Capital is vampiric for Marx because it drains the lifeblood of labor power, the only living commodity. Speculative capital feeds on good debt (more credit) as blood. Bad debt understands that the debtor is a political category and therefore building immunity to the vampire’s bite in some sense.⁴⁷  We want bad debt. If we all don’t pay, good debt can’t extend more credit. But this involves rejecting relative innocence.⁴⁸ Relative innocence, much like the violence of value,⁴⁹ depends on members of a devalued ingroup appealing to power along the lines of being the most eligible of that group, as the relatively innocent members of that group. The university has long used innocence to differentiate.⁵⁰ The student is relatively innocent and should therefore have their debt erased. The student is worthy and thus should not be policed but other police are “necessary” for the unworthy, in the hood, my hood down the street—West Berkeley. The student becomes the container of unlimited possibility that made all the right choices, responsibilized themselves. But my homegirl, the single mom Chicana, her debt is not worthy, unworthy, and she is personally failing, irresponsible. She got pushed out of our neighborhood down the street. Now she and her beautiful young children are in Stockton, California. Stockton now has a poverty and “gang” problem. The college student should not be policed because they have studying (lower case) and partying to do. But the homies and homegirls in the surrounding area, their Study is dangerous. Their parties are illegal. They should be policed and shipped out of the liberal haven formerly known as Berkeley. Again, to be clear, we all should refuse to pay, we are all bad debt, we are all capable of building a society without good debt, without capital, police, and prisons. We are all worthy not just those with proximity to correction, instruction, whiteness, capital…you in the car now? Can we go?  

Perhaps the historic 2022 academic workers strike here at the UCs, allows student labor to flirt with shedding its relative innocence. Surely, this is the expression of solidarity the university cannot bear, the expression of labor power as perversion that extends beyond bargaining into the unruly and undifferentiated mass. This temptation finds its unfortunate and rude awakening in the history of prior and ongoing worker stoppages. The service workers, mainly Black and Brown, make up a large portion of the labor force for one the state of California’s largest landlords and employers. Their jobs have long been outsourced to private companies, their wages and unions attacked by this pressure, and their wages sorted along racialized and gendered pay gaps. Many of them also cannot afford to live in the surrounding area. Their beautiful children, especially from my generation, were pushed out and squeezed through the gentrification to prison pipeline in the first few waves starting in the late 1980s. The collective beauty of my neighborhood now serves as waterfront shopping for the wealthy and for the relatively innocent student. When they built the Apple store on fourth street and laid new beachfront pathways, soccer fields, and parks along the waterfront we knew it wasn’t meant for us but for those who were coming, the completed, the relatively innocent.  

Perhaps we can borrow the Kantian analytic of beauty from the young Marx when he proclaimed that the species being [subject] “constructs [the world] according to the laws of beauty.”⁵¹ Marx understood that for Kant, the analytic of beauty has no rule-governed, conceptual laws.⁵² Marx therefore allows us to use aesthetic autonomy to imagine a collectively theorized yet-to-come, just beyond the bounds of the conceptual. Because Kant’s laws of beauty are not bound by already existing rule-governed concepts, this opens up an unresolved dialectic for Marx. He is intentionally using a contradiction because presumably Marx sees man’s constructive futurity as always open to new collectively created concepts. A generative reading of the young Marx might glean how he thus troubled labor as the value form in these early texts and sought to abolish it. While we remain indebted to the best of Marx, we might also question the regulative impulse in Kant’s formulations, which would render what Denise Ferreira de Silva calls the transparent “I” [again that completed subject], in stark antagonism and contradiction with the collectivity.⁵³ That is, she shows us how the ontoepistemological account of being and meaning endemic to the making of the Western subject and his Other are not excess concepts to an otherwise liberal project. They are foundational to the subject. This global-historical being [subject] has the tools of history and therefore science cannot be recuperated sociologically or historically. Even the poststructural announcement of his death cannot shake reason’s sovereign role in maintaining his regulative life.⁵⁴ She further proves how Hegel’s dialectic of interiority and exteriority fall short when it comes up against reason’s sovereign role and race making. The transparent “I” has the benefit of using his interiority to intervene in the noumenal/phenomenal divide to make synthetic apriori judgements.⁵⁵ He is rational, self-possessed, and sovereign. We, the exteriority, are an affective Other. We are perversion. Hegel’s dialectic attempt to sublimate exteriority into interiority, from the margin to dominant, becomes antagonism vis-à-vis race. The subaltern can probably say what they want because it is just affective nonsense (Spivak, 1988).  

Moten suggests at the beginning of Stolen Life that “nonsense is fugitive presence” (1).⁵⁶ By way of Mennighaus, he alerts us to Kant’s insistence on a regulative principle that renders the productive conceptual ground of aesthetic judgments contradictory.⁵⁷ Unpacking the above, Kant’s third critique contains the analytic of beauty, largely thought by liberal theorists to contain the seeds of a liberatory universal principle—subjective universality.⁵⁸ Kant’s notion of subjective universality, they would argue, provides emancipatory notions of human equality by showing that the common human experience of aesthetic judgment, especially the judgement of beauty, was not reserved just for elites.⁵⁹ Further, the argument goes, if we all have this capability of judging beauty without social or material interest (disinterested interest) and we feel the need to persuade others of this beauty, we can build on this as a bridge to politics and a public sphere.⁶⁰ Aesthetic judgments are thus critical to the formation of subjectivity. Because this faculty draws on the imagination, “no determinate concept can be adequate, no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.”⁶¹ Within the context of the noumenal/phenomenal divide, aesthetic judgments represent a realm that is just beyond the conceptual (as rule governed) and therefore where new concepts emerge as an “”as if.” It is in the strict Kantian sense a realm of freedom.  

However, as Moten posits, the regulative impulse in Kant’s theory undermines philosophy’s ability to subject itself to its own rigor. Kant contradicts himself on his own terms in his insistence on recuperating a hierarchy. Moten obsesses over Kant’s insistence that for man to experience aesthetic autonomy “the understanding must “clip the wings” of the imagination.”⁶² The faculty of understanding restores for Kant certain terms of order. Imagination must “be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding. For all the richness of the imagination in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense.”⁶³ Kant worries that too much imagination also produces a genius that approaches nonsense and thus claims “taste must restrain genius in order to produce fine art.”⁶⁴ We have seemingly come full circle in the contradiction and are subject to Kant’s hidden, perhaps not so subtle, insistence on elite culture and the violence of normativity and ability. Dare we say critical elements of instruction and completion? We should not be surprised then that he theorizes race as lack of faculty, as perversion.   

Kant, scholars argue, was the first to offer a rigorous philosophical scientific concept of race.⁶⁵ Kant created racial hierarchies and argued that “humanity existed in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of talent. The Negroes are lower and the lowest are a part of the American peoples [indigenous].”⁶⁶ Beyond being personally racist, Kant’s theory of personhood was based on deontological (duty-based/rights respecting) adherence to bourgeois liberal morality. This was in distinction from a previously accepted welfare-based/utilitarian liberalism which would infringe on the rights of some for the good of all. Kant’s categorical imperative defines the right separately from the good, by respecting other persons. Hence, between his moral philosophy and the disinterestedness of judgment, we begin to see that all white men are presumed equal with certain rights and capabilities. Kant’s “distaste for the swarm, for the profligate, for unchecked generativity is crystalized in his invention of race as a philosophical assertion and instrument of antiblackness.”⁶⁷ The imagination, for Moten, is the undisciplined (in the Foucauldian sense), is Black social life, is fugitive (non) subjectivity, and thus specifically outside of the regulative notion that Kant invokes in his public—it is partial and incomplete, it is the sharing of Study and bad debt.⁶⁸ It is we.  

 

Notes on Contributor

David A. Maldonado is a formerly incarcerated activist and Postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley where he teaches anticapitalism and abolition pedagogy. His work is informed by being from and studying West Berkeley and the relationship of the university to it.

 

Notes

1. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

2. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment.

3. Marx, Karl Marx Early Writings.

4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment.

5. I rely on Marx, Kant, and Foucault as philosophers of subjectivity. Within this limited context, I do not make a sharp distinction between the Early Marx and his more mature work from capital. I lean on Kant as the emblematic figure of enlightenment philosophy while being cautious not to claim he represents the entire breadth of the field. Lastly, I see Foucault as somewhat expanding rigid structural tendencies that construct a liberal subject. 

6. Moten, Stolen Life.

7. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

8. Robinson, Black Marxism.

9. Kelley, Amariglio, and Wilson, “‘Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange’: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part.”

10. Maldonado and Meiners, “Due Time.”

11. Foucault, The Foucault Reader.

12. Marx, Capital.

13. Larsen et al., Marxism and the Critique of Value; Callahan, “Repairing the Community: UT Califas and Convivial Tools of the Commons.”

14. Harney and Moten, All Incomplete.

15. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 42.

16. Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, 61; Foucault, The Foucault Reader.

17. Maldonado and Meiners, “Due Time.”

18. Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx.”

19. Robinson, Black Marxism.

20. Al-Bulushi, “Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black Radicalism from Africa.”

21. Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, 65.

22. Harney and Moten, 65.

23. Spence, Knocking the Hustle.

24. Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement | Social Justice.”

25. Táíwò, Elite Capture.

26. Maldonado and Meiners, “Due Time.”

27. Derrida, Dissemination.

28. Wang, Carceral Capitalism.

29. Gilmore, “Race and Globalization.”

30. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).”

31. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 29.

32. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

33. Larsen et al., Marxism and the Critique of Value, xvii.

34. Kelley, Amariglio, and Wilson, “‘Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange’: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part.”

35. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

36. Marx, Capital.

37. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 29.

38. Marx, Capital, 167.

39. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays; Marx, Capital.

40. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

42. Derrida, Without Alibi, 202.

43. Derrida, 240.

44. Derrida, 212.

45. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.”

46. Gilmore; Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

47. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

48. Appel, Power of Debt: Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance.

49. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.”

50. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected.

51. Boggs and Mitchell, “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus.”

52. Marx, Karl Marx Early Writings; Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment.

53. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment.

54. DaSilva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

55. Foucault, The Foucault Reader; DaSilva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

56. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

57. Moten, Stolen Life.

58. Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense.

59. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

60. Arendt; Kant, “Critical Theory since Plato.”

61. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy; Heller, “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity in Kant’s Critique of Judgement.”

62. Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, 15.

63. Moten, Stolen Life.

64. Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, 17.

65. Menninghaus, 19.

66. Bernasconi, Race; Eze, By Eze – Race And The Enlightenment; Mills, “Kant’s Utermenschen.”

67. Eze, By Eze – Race And The Enlightenment; Mills, “Kant’s Utermenschen,” 173.

68. Moten, Stolen Life, 242.

 

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