The philosopher, essayist, and poet Fred Moten. Photograph by Kari Orvik

When I met the poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten for lunch near Washington Square Park recently, he ordered a hamburger, and asked the waiter to hold the aioli. When the food arrived, it was clear that his request had not been followed. After a brief, disappointed examination of the bun, Moten, who recently became a professor at N.Y.U. after a few years at the University of California, Riverside, found an idea.

“I think mayonnaise—actually, sorry, this is stupid, this is crazy,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said.

“I think mayonnaise has a complex kind of relation to the sublime,” he said. “And I think emulsion does generally. It’s something about that intermediary—I don’t know—place, between being solid and being a liquid, that has a weird relation to the sublime, in the sense that the sublimity of it is in the indefinable nature of it.”

“It’s liminal also,” I offered.

“It’s liminal, and it connects to the body in a certain way.”

“You have to shake it up,” I said. “You have to put the energy into it to get it into that state.”

“Anyway,” Moten said, “mostly I just don’t fucking like it.”

Moten had agreed to meet so that I could ask him about his newest books, three dense volumes of critical writing, written in the course of fifteen years, and gathered under the name “consent not to be a single being.” The first volume, “Black and Blur,” has writings on art and music: Charles Mingus, Theodor Adorno, David Hammons, Glenn Gould. The second, “Stolen Life,” focusses on ideas that Moten describes as, broadly, “sociopolitical.” The third, “The Universal Machine,” deals with something like “philosophy proper,” as he put it to me, and is broken into “three suites of essays” on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon.

Moten speaks softly and, once he gets going, in long, complex paragraphs. He is drawn to in-between states: rather than accepting straightforward answers, he seeks out new dissonances. On the page, this can take a complex and even forbidding form. “Black studies,” he writes in an essay collected in “Stolen Life,” “is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth.” A reader may need to sit with that sentence for a while, read it over once or twice, perhaps look up the word dehiscence (“a surgical complication in which a wound ruptures along a surgical incision”).

In person, though, Moten’s way of thinking and speaking feels like an intuitive way of seeing the world. Moten was born in 1962, and he grew up in Las Vegas, in a thriving black community that took root there after the Great Migration. His mother was a schoolteacher, and books were always present in the house, from works of sociology to anthologies of black literature. Moten went to Harvard, but falling grades led to a year off, back home, which he spent, in part, working at the Nevada Test Site. Out in the desert, he got a lot of reading done. “I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading,” he said. “And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading.”

Moten’s 2003 book, “In the Break,” a study of the “black radical tradition” through the notion of performance, took up the ideas of such pioneering black-studies scholars as Saidiya Hartman, exploring them within a freewheeling discourse on phenomenology and jazz. For Moten, blackness is something “fugitive,” as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In “Stolen Life,” he writes, “Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” In this spirit, Moten works to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation. One also finds a certain uncompromising attitude—a conviction that the truest engagement with a subject will overcome any difficulties of terminology. “I think that writing in general, you know, is a constant disruption of the means of semantic production, all the time,” he told me. “And I don’t see any reason to try to avoid that. I’d rather see a reason to try to accentuate that. But I try to accentuate that not in the interest of obfuscation but in the interest of precision.”

In 2013, Moten published “The Undercommons,” a slender collection of essays co-written with his former classmate and fellow-theorist Stefano Harney. For a book of theory, it has been widely read, perhaps because of its unapologetic antagonism. “The Undercommons” lays out a radical critique of the present. Hope, they write, “has been deployed against us in ever more perverted and reduced form by the Clinton-Obama axis for much of the last twenty years.” One essay considers our lives as a flawed system of credit and debit, another explores a kind of technocratic coercion that Moten and Harney simply call “policy.” “The Undercommons” has become well known, especially, for its criticism of academia. “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment,” Moten and Harney write. They lament the focus on grading and other deadening forms of regulation, asking, in effect: Why is it so hard to have new discussions in a place that is ostensibly designed to foster them?

They suggest alternatives: to gather with friends and talk about whatever you want to talk about, to have a barbecue or a dance—all forms of unrestricted sociality that they slyly call “study.” The book concludes with a long interview of Moten and Harney by Stevphen Shukaitis, a lecturer at the University of Essex, in which Moten explains the idea.