Moten, The Case of Blackness

So you pause at the reci­ta­tion of lost names and the mum­bled jar­gon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utte­rance remains unheard. In the space that jar­gon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-the-out­side ; an appo­si­tio­nal spa­cing or dis­pla­ce­ment of the encoun­ter in the inter­est of a sub­jec­ti­vi­ty whose pre­sence remains to be acti­va­ted ; a space not deter­mi­ned by the zero encoun­ter that rup­tures the sub­ject or the nos­tal­gic return to an other sub­ject before the encoun­ter ; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us : pier­cing and pos­ses­sing, disa­bling and enabling media­tion and medi­ta­tion) the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utte­rance, our attu­ne­ment to which assures us that we are “in the tra­di­tion.