Perm do both: it resolves any residual links, and if not it proves the alt over-totalizes sovereignty and the political and disavows the actual history of fugitive resistance.

Rather than correct his reading of Arendt, note instead how both theorists narrate a history producing impasse and compose romances of a revolutionary treasure each protects from devaluation and danger. Despite moments of blur in their texts, their categorical self-definitions split off natality from a threatening other, albeit lodged in inverted images of sociality and politics. Her reversal foregrounds and redeems natality-as-politics from capture by the social; his reduction of the political—to sovereignty as metaphysics, state power, and antiblackness—redeems fugitive black sociality from capture by politics. Yet as she argues—and manifests—theorists who “reverse” a polarity remain trapped in its terms; arguably, he risks capture by the metaphysics he would undo. The alternative to the canonical tradition, I would say, is refusing an Aristotelian or Kantian split between the political, and its abject (immature, wild, social, abject) otherness. In crucial ways Moten does just that, by finding natality, publicness, and performative pleasure—a “regenerative grammar” of “informal form”—in blackened sociality. But for him, the autonomy and integrity of this grammar, is targeted by correction and endangered by appropriation. Defending it requires refusing politicization, any translation into the “necrophilic” grammar of “sovereignty,” as connoting organized (even democratized) rule, politics by representation, and a subject-centered (possessive, rights-bearing) individualism. At stake in his reversal is warding off this demonic specter, which haunts and harms fugitive life in the undercommon. What Moten calls sovereignty thus names truly destructive forces and fictions but also seems like a charged, disavowed and projected object or specter. For his vision of jurisgenerativity, defined only as the fecundity of informal (noncoercive and multiplicitous) meaning-making, is sustained by disavowing the signifiers of power, exemplified by (participation in) a form of rule, by formal rules, by institutional organization, by stipulations of a collective subject, or by membership in an explicitly bounded political body.

In turn, radical democrats may refuse his reduction of politics to sovereignty, but if we then identify the properly political as nonsovereign action, as nonrule or (fugitive) refusal to be governed, we remain captive to this demonic picture of power and its idealized other. By affirming only the “power to” of solidarity and action in concert, we risk disavowing power “over,” as participation in rule, as explicit rule-making, and as “ruling out” antidemocratic interests and practices. Do we imagine that generativity thrives only by refusing rule, and not also through forms of structure and even imposition, as parents and teachers know? As Prospero, a personification of both sovereignty and theory, finally acknowledged Caliban as the “dark thing” he must “own as mine,” the trope of fugitivity entails a disavowed remainder, the problem of power and rule, which needs to be acknowledged. For freedom requires not only flight from rule, but flight into it, as a problem that no one can escape, but that a democratic politics explicitly acknowledges and undertakes to rework by participatory practices of contest.40

Using Moten’s own idiom, I would ask: “What if” we do not dichotomize the informal assembly and praxis of fugitive sociality, and politics-as-rule predicated on exclusion and regulation of difference? “What if” a democratic theory must blur the social and political but also acknowledge inescapable, fraught, yet potentially fruitful tensions—between tacit grammar and explicit acts of translation, between informal form and organized forms of power, between fugitive aliveness as resistance to rule, and organizing democratic power to make claims on how the world is ruled? “What if” we refuse (not reverse) the abstract polarity between subjection to sovereign rule as such, or statelessness as refusal to be governed as such, and “come down to earth” as Marx put it? We then find politicality not in rule or nonrule, as such, but in the judgments and actions by which subalterns address who makes decisions (and how) about which practices, values, and inequalities are being ruled out, or which encouraged, in the communities they are building by socio-poetic insurgency? In difficult historical contexts they rework and mediate tacit grammars, customary practices, and explicit forms of organized power as they reconstitute democratic forms of rule-making.41

These what-ifs suggest a conversation between Moten and Sheldon Wolin. The parallels are striking. Wolin depicts a “system” so “immovable and interconnected as to be unreformable as a totality”; he calls “pessimism” a “reasoned insight” and “suppressed revolutionary impulse”; and he endorses a “rejectionism” whereby citizens “withdraw and direct their energies and civic commitment to finding new life forms.” Moreover, “instead of imitating most political theories,” which adopt “the state as the primary structure, and adapt the activity of citizens” to it, Wolin refuses “the state paradigm” and the “liberal-legal corruption of the citizen.” He affirms how “common life resides in cooperation and reciprocity that human beings develop to survive, meet their needs, and explore their capacities and the remarkable world into which they have been cast.” He thus rejects Arendt’s splitting of political and social, and her valorization of the “who,” and in Moten’s terms he instead values how “entanglement and virtuosity” are negotiated in the “common life” of the ordinary. Both theorists thus defend “preservation” of customary ways of “taking care of beings and things,” as Wolin says, against neoliberal correction, progressive promises of incorporation, and radical romances of emancipation.42

Moten’s two antagonisms—between the few who run things and things that run, and between informal form and formalization—echo Wolin’s critique of bureaucracy, of “institutionalized systems of power,” and of “constitutional democracy”; and Moten’s refusals resonate with Wolin’s late claim that democracy names not a form of government but “fugitive” moments of insurgency. And though Wolin seems to mean “fugitive” only in its temporal sense of transient or fleeting, he also depicts democracy as interdicted by idioms of governance, contained by constitutions and organized power, and pathologized by norms stipulating the legal and proper. Like blackness— though Wolin never makes this association—his democracy is (called) criminal, transgressive, and chaotic; it is feared, hunted, and enclosed, though also “wanted,” desired, and used for legitimation. Both theorists embrace such epithets while showing how insurgency bespeaks “jurisgenerative” energies, engendered by commonality and memory, that precede and surround formal (state-centric) politics. Their fugitive protagonists—an undercommons or popular insurgency—claim a spatial and symbolic distance from a deranged modern regime, and in Wolin’s words “replace the old citizenship” by “a fuller and wider notion of being, whose politicalness will be expressed not in one or two activities—voting or protesting—but in many.” Of course, this very “politicalness” is one mark of deep differences.43

Though Wolin’s awareness of racial inequality appears in repeated associations of democratic moments and social movements with black insurgency, he does not grasp how “commonality” names not (only) a resource against enclosure but the historical production of whiteness and settler colonialism. He laments the gap between formal citizenship and genuine participation, which effectively disempowers legally enfranchised citizens, but never construes citizenship as a racial status, “standing” as white, constituted by a racial state of exception. His hard-pressed “citizens” draw on tacit (local, rooted) customs, but he does not credit how their “commonality” reproduces popular power by racial terror. Moten thus brings to this idiom of commonality and democracy, as to Arendt’s “common sense” and “world,” a justified presumption that such predicates of the political mean antiblackness. But acknowledging this truth is also the premise of thinking abolition and radical democracy together.44

For if Wolin’s commonality risks racial innocence, his idea of the political remains essential because it highlights the foreclosures in Moten’s sociality. First, Wolin depicts both tacit commonality and explicit insurgency as contingent and, in that sense, as political. Whereas Moten depicts sociality underwritten by ontology, and reproduced as antiblackness generates “common habitation and flight,” Wolin sees every (under)common undone by political economy and individualism, not only by incorporation into formal politics. Whereas Moten imagines the “absolute sufficiency” of sociality informally reproduced, Wolin argues that commonality itself is (re)generated and remade only by practices that, though “emerging out of” sociality, politicize—acknowledge, (re)articulate, or (re)organize—tacit customs and vernacular memories. Tacit commonality is at once discovered, remade and regenerated only [when] people make explicit claims in “public declarations,” or visibly exercise “collective power” to “promote or protect the well-being” of a “collectivity,” including an undercommon.45

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Second, Wolin also links and distinguishes sociality and politicality by depicting the experience and practice of sharing and exercising power. For Wolin, local or customary “institutions and practices are sustained” only by our “capacity to share in power, to cooperate in it.” “Power to,” generated and shared by the ongoing practices of assembly and cooperation that Moten calls planning, is thus the basis of all other goods. But, as “distilled” from the “relations and circles we move within”—call this Moten’s sociality—this power, at once “symbolic, material, and psychological,” “enables political beings to act together.” As the political dimension of sociality, “power” can be extracted by states or undermined by individualism, and thus alienated, a loss that devitalizes the solidarity—and thereby the generative capacity—of sociality. The recurring “loss of the political,” as capacities to articulate the tacit and organize power, reveals the nature of the political as a distinctive “mode of experience,” for “we are always losing it and having to recover it.” But “renewal” is always possible, partly “as human beings rediscover the common being of human beings,” partly by “creating new patterns of commonality” across differences, and partly by (re)making “modes of action” by which to “concert their powers.” Though grounded in sociality, Wolin’s political thus opens an interval between the tacit and the explicit, in which experience is metabolized and (re)articulated. In this interval people question the organization of power and rules of justice, and they answer as they “reinvent forms and practices” that express “a democratic conception of collective life.”46

For Moten, of course, “democratic” and collective” signal the alienated rule that abstracts from lived sociality to “designate” a political to represent us, whereas black fugitives refuse to be governed or represented by others but also to translate themselves into legible political terms. In contrast, Wolin offers a potentially fruitful, not only correctional or appropriative—we might say agonistic—relation between the tacit and the explicit. In fact, practices of “fugitive democracy” recurrently emerge in and from black sociality, as the practices of Black Lives Matter activism most recently demonstrate. For sure, practices of concealment and evasion, which defend black fugitivity from surveillance, regulatory correction, and violence, and practices of public action that engage whites and the state, are contradictory in crucial ways, as Juliet Hooker has argued. But as Rom Coles and Lia Haro argue, frontline communities on the underground railroad also engaged repeatedly in “flagrantly public” action in concert, both in literal self-defense of black autonomy in its fugitive illegality, and to contest the rule(s) of police, the law, and the state; as recent protests suggest, they viewed formal political institutions both as “integral to white supremacy so far,” but also “as potential instruments toward emancipatory ends.”47

If Hooker sees temporal shifts between moments of “black fugitivity” and moments of “fugitive democracy” in the thought and practice of Frederick Douglass, Coles/Haro depict an ongoing “oscillation” between inward-facing and outward-turning practices. Likewise, Neil Roberts defends grand marronage for seeking a “sustainable rather than fleeting form of flight” by forging autonomous spaces, and yet, because “freedom in our world lies not in permanent evasion of Leviathan” but in “taming” it, he proposes an idea of “sociogenic marronage” to reconstruct “an order in need of systemic repair.” Not coincidentally, Wolin’s fugitive democracy, though “rejectionist” and antistatist in its major chords, includes a social democratic minor key, which notes the limits of localism and the necessity of seeking and using state power to address structural inequality and collective fate.48

Complex and generative tensions are lost, then, as Moten recovers the freedom schools organized by Fannie Lou Hamer but not her organizing for the right to vote, to exercise popular sovereignty locally, especially around police and schools, but also to create a “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” that entered national politics. Hamer (like the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter) models how black radicalism has lived in an interval between the tacit grammar and ongoing “planning” of black fugitivity—as loopholes of retreat practiced and concealed in plain sight—and flagrant publicity as fugitive democracy. Whereas for Moten, the historical failure or defeat of outward-facing public action proves the futility of fugitive democracy, I would ask: “what if” we follow his own fugitive view that any being or act is both incomplete and excessive, to infer that specific historical experiments are not definitive failures, but unfinished in meaning, examples we could retrieve and refashion now? If keeping open such possibility risks cruel optimism, foreclosing it reifies the impasse he generatively transvalues in so many other ways.