Temporalities of power, sociality, and struggle in Fred Moten and Judith Butler

Throughout his corpus, Fred Moten insists on a unique temporality: sociality is always primary, both temporally and logically. Power arrives to individuate this primary sociality, dividing it into subjects, but it survives fugitively as a struggle against power. At numerous points in their work, Judith Butler also posits sociality as primary, but with a crucial difference: power’s arrival enacts a totalizing constitutive force onto subjects, erasing any possibility of accessing the sociality that preceded and gave life to both power and subjects. This essay elaborates on this fundamental temporal disagreement between two of today’s most influential critical theorists.