Work in progress-seminarium: Thesis Chapter

For Moten, the struggle is always primary, both ethically and temporally. Power arrives at the scene of struggle to individuate those who are assembled, turning them into subjects, but something of their prior insurgency survives; people cannot be fully subsumed as subjects. This remnant of an antecedent struggle is the focus of Moten’s thinking. Here, Mason put this temporality in conversation with Judith Butler, for whom power is a totalizing generative force that arrives before subjects, and whatever people were before their individuation as subjects is permanently unknowable. This chapter proposes a general theory of “Motenism” by discussing the practical ethics of struggle in the works of two of the world’s most important living critical thinkers.