This article explores how two key problems of philosophical aesthetics, temporality and form, are rethought in Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being trilogy. The article proposes that Moten's work is notable for its refusal to affirm a link between aesthetic experience, or aesthesis, and the future-bound possibility of political community. This refusal distinguishes Moten's work both from the political philosophy underlying Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and from the dialectical critique of Kant found in contemporary theoretical work prioritizing formal experimentation. The article contends instead that Moten's work is shaped by a sustained attention to “informal” patterns of aesthetic experience, for which the graphic materiality of writing functions as a privileged index. The article then explores the political and temporal implications of writing's materiality in two essays from Moten's Black and Blur. To pursue this task, it draws on Walter Benjamin's understanding of philological interpolation and argues that Moten's work, particularly in its insistence on “renomination” rather than conceptual creation, can likewise be understood as philological. The article concludes, however, by showing how the idea of linguistic freedom advanced in recent philological work is complicated by Moten's recognition of a link between predication and blackness.

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