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ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
funnily enough, i read the last two volumes of *consent to not be a single being* in the wrong order. there's some antinormative black operation for ya! it was an accident. so instead of in my mind moten's mammoth text ending with the case of betty, it ends with his now famous commentary on afropessimism. what i took to be the second volume but is actually the third consists of three long essays orbiting near levinas, arendt and fanon. the start of this volume, actually the second and not the third and last, opens with an essay trying to deal with uncle tolliver, a slave who was whipped to death repeatedly praising the union army. the two moments of this and the case of betty within the black radical tradition bookend moten's concern thunk alongside sora han and saidiya hartman with the invaginative interdependence of slavery and freedom. i prefer my version of the sequence of moten's trilogy to reality, ending with betty rather than frank wilderson and jared sexton, because the betty's movement is an assault on possessive individualism. moten shares sora han's essay on betty, a slave who although abolitionists had got a judge to grant her emancipation she instead chose to return to the plantation. i'd been hawking this paper since streaming video from the lecture multiple times, unable to fully fathom betty's fugitivity. the problem of decision is shared with uncle tolliver speech act, as moten most extensively contemplates something akin but not entirely like a black metaphysics. part of why i was so sure that this was the third volume was because of the obscenity of betty's erotic nonperformance taken with the essay challenging the notion of israeli academic freedom felt like they were spaced near the end to keep the zionists from bailing. if i was induced to muster a gripe it'd be that a grip of these essays were published previously, but then again, as i've noted before, it's possible that my memory of *in the break*'s thematic unity is likely largely guided by fanatical moten worship. i think some people might still await a text comprised of 100% unpublished material.
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