FCJ-223 Fugitively, Approximately

Abstract

Two phrases haunt my thinking. The first comes from Fred Moten: all black life is neurodiverse life. It might also have been black life is always neurodiverse life. The second is approximation of proximity. The feeling is that the ambiguity of memory in the first has a connection to the approximation of the second. Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review before the publication of The Minor Gesture in 2016 felt vitally important when I received them. But The Minor Gesture was already too close to completion to fully carry the force of the proposition, and so, while I did signal it in the book, I decided to make Moten’s words the fugitive force of the thinking to follow. I say fugitive force both to carry forward Moten and Harney’s concept of fugitivity, and to emphasize that this is how work comes into itself: with the quality of a reorientation moved by a spark that connects to an intensity already moving transversally across a work. This is what Moten’s words did: their deep thinking-with exposed the stakes of what stirred as yet unthought in the thinking. This fugitivity at the heart of thought is what I want to address here. For what Moten’s words did at that singular moment of writing/thinking was create an opening for thought to travel in directions as yet in germ.

Keywords

• minor socialities
• executive function
• undercommons
• fred moten
• stefano harney
• neurodiversity