Tommaso Bernadini, University of California, Berkeley
“What is required to imagine a free state or to tell an impossible story? [...] Must the future of abolition be first performed on the page?” Faced with these questions, Sadiya Hartman proposes critical fabulation as a counter-narrative to the archive’s violent exclusions and excruciating absences; her re-telling of Venus in the hold is “a history of failure” and yet an “insurgent, disruptive narrative” which reminds us that “our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom.” A creative encounter with the unknowable and irretrievable, critical fabulation resembles affectively engaged readings like the ardent “feel-ology” modeled by Mario Telò and D.A. Miller’s “too-close” fixation on a text’s “drive to futility.” Privileging the details that refuse to mean, these approaches contest the archive’s calcifying logics – the regimes of valuation, the violence of representation – and reclaim the emancipatory potential of its absences and negations through a speculative approach to the refractoriness of form. This experimental paper stages such an encounter between counter-narrative and anti-narrative through an ardent reading of a Roman poem – fabulates an “impossible story” – and calls to reorient philology’s political commitments through a renewed relation to nonmeaning. An abolitionist Classical philology must embrace the archive’s paradoxical drive to destruction (Derrida), work between reparation and rupture, representation and its negation.
Within the Classical archive, Hartman’s Venus finds a kindred spirit in Statius’ Earinus. Ostensibly commemorating the dedication of a lock of Earinus’ hair, Silvae 3.4 focuses less on the event in question than on its prehistory in imperial sex trafficking, unraveling an archival narrative of abduction, perilous ocean passage, mutilation, and consignation in Domitian’s court. Contemporary scholarship has cast this puer delicatus as a testament to the brutal excesses of Domitianic rule, or as an avatar for the castrated court poet, the emptiness of imperial encomium as sterility incarnate (Gunderson et al.). Complementing such approaches, I fabulate an abolitionist future for a figure and text embroiled in the “art of complicity”
(Gunderson) by attuning to the anarchival “ensemble”’ (Moten) of forms coursing through the gnarled, warped texture of the ‘rough draft’ (silva). Interruption, deformation, and repetition in the formal register, I wager, per-form an immanent critique of the carceral, castratory, and consignatory logics that constitute the poem’s content, offer the possibility of escape where meaning collapses.
This reading hinges on an uncanny echo: the very word by which the lock is preserved for storage (arcanos iterat liquores) repeats the iterative injunction (ite) with which the poem begins mid-voyage. This coincidence of embalming and frenetic movement reinscribes the archive’s repetition compulsion as iterability (Derrida). We will find traces of the opening ite reiterated consistently at the beginnings of lines, and venture an affinity with Fred Moten’s “anoriginal” impulse, “an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line — a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity.” Similarly, at the scene of Earinus’ castration, elisions anagrammatically recast their ‘cut’ elements, vexing the sexuating partition and the archival division of beginning and end, so that Earinan poetics contest, even as they constitute, the stability of the ‘cut,’ sexed body, and so interface with contemporary trans liberation struggles.
As it aims to illustrate the abolitionist critique of the subject imbricated in 3.4’s formal texture, then, this paper proposes fabulatory exploration of representational failure in poetic form as one way of aligning philological inquiry with the negativity at the heart of black and trans radical traditions.