Additionally, Schelling’s post-Kantian metaphysical speculation of that which is “in itself” also resembles Moten’s interest in Kant’s understanding of “the black and the thing (das Ding)” as “anti- or ante-intentional” structures which disrupt the laws of understanding – that “blackness” is something akin to an “animaterial, metaphysical thing in itself [Ding an sich] that exceeds itself” (Moten 2018a, 15–16). Moten’s post-Kantian account of blackness as a supra-phenomenal or even metaphysical “in itself that exceeds itself” notably resonates with early Schelling’s post-Kantian (and post-Fichtean) conception of Nature (which carries certain traits of his later notion of the Absolute) that is unconditioned and absolute in itself but nonetheless “exceeds itself”. Indeed, for early Schelling, Nature “exceeds itself” since it is not inanimate but autonomous and productive – as Bowie (1993, 36) puts it: “The ‘productivity’ [of Nature] is not, then, a separate, inaccessible thing in itself (even though it is not an object of knowledge), because it is also at work in the subject, as that which moves the subject beyond itself.” See Bowie (1993, 30–44, esp. 31–36). Note also the surprising parallel between what Bowie (1993, 47) calls “the resistance of the object world” in Schelling’s early philosophy and Moten’s (2003, 1–24, 233–254) account of blackness in terms of what he calls the “resistance of the object” (see especially the discussion of Kant’s Ding in Moten 2003, 243–50).

King-Ho Leung

“Our resistant, relentlessly impossible object is subjectless predication, subjectless escape, escape from subjection, in and through the paralegal flaw that animates and exhausts the language of ontology. Constant escape is an ode to impurity, an obliteration of the last word.”

Fred Moten

“The hard materiality of the unreal convinces us that we are surrounded, that we must take possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency, on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but an illusory right to what we do not have, which the settler takes for and as the commons. But in the moment of right/s the commons is already gone in the movement to and of the common that surrounds it and its enclosure.”

Fred Moten