A Note on Fugitivity

The notion of “fugitivity,” which Fred Moten and Stefano Harney reconfigure in a positive sense in The Undercommons, must be anchored in a prior sense.  “Fugitive being” for Moten and Harney means its disentanglement from insistent hegemony, for the sake of a liberation.  But it seems to me there is a prior fugitivity, which is the fugitivity of insistence as such: the refusal to ex-sist, the absolute concern with in-sistence.  This could have been portrayed in the starkest terms with the Ethan character (John Wayne) in John Ford’s The Searchers.  Ethan is the in-sistent, his rage and tribal hatred, his obsession (which at the end redeems itself), are fugitive, they are fugitivity itself.  This is the fugitivity Moten and Harney invert, for the sake of freedom.  To be thought out is then the connection of primary or original fugitivity with the notion of revenge: such is Friedrich Nietzsche’s overwhelming concern.  At some point in the film Ethan tells the Reverend that he cannot swear himself in as a Texas Ranger, since there is only one oath given to any man, and he has already given his oath to the Confederate Army.  For Ethan this frames his essence as both fugitive and vengeful.  And he cannot escape (although at the end he does).  This final escaping, which no doubt Ford proposed as some kind of fantastic national allegory, is precisely a fugitivity from fugitivity, which I would argue is the one Moten and Harney propose (even if they never make it explicit.) There is a residual question, which is whether Moten and Harney’s inversion must still keep a reference to a national allegory of any kind, or whether for them any kind of national allegory is no more than in-sistent hegemony.