A Gospel for Venus. On Saidiya Hartman and the Limits of the Archive¹
“The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.”²
This phrase, written by the Marxist and Jewish mystic Walter Benjamin in a moment of utmost despair, keeps intruding into my reading of Saidiya Hartman’s article “Venus in Two Acts” whenever I try to make sense of the urgent message she is trying to convey.³ Since I cannot cast the phrase away, I might as well write about the intimate connection I see between Benjamin’s and Hartman’s proposals, two invitations to communal reckoning that strain to produce a new “concept of history” (to borrow Benjamin’s title) in the face of irremediable loss. Although we’ve been living with Venus for more than ten years now, I feel some of its theses have still so much to say. I don’t claim mine is the definitive reading of Hartman’s work. Not even the best. Not even one of which she would approve. But I do claim I am not too late. When work is rigorous, and writing is heartfelt, it comes back to haunt you. No one can blame me, then, for attempting this sketchy exorcism, which wonders when (if ever) history can work as gospel.
I believe both Hartman and Benjamin see history as both an impossible discourse and an eschatological project. In their view, while history would make redemption of the present possible, such a path is closed by the limitations of the archive, which puts a limit to our capacity to retrieve the past. I believe there is a way out of this conundrum if we focus on the problem of narrative genre, recognizing that history is not the only discourse available to make the past present. In my view, an historical approach to theology such as the one presented by the Liberation Theology, open the possibility of using gospel as a genre that, while still concerned with retrieving a real, historical past (therefore, not fictive), gives an ethical solution to the problem of lack of archival evidence. I believe Hartman is implicitly aware of this type of solution and that her proposal in Venus, like Benjamin’s work, is capable of a theological reading.
But first we need to address the problem of redemption. Can history heal our fractured community? Is the study of the past a possible way to redeem the dead? And how? Hartman approaches these questions through the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery, introducing the idea that writing about a single inaccessible life can serve as a “history of the present.”⁴ We are still living in the aftermath of slavery, still confronting the ways in which race makes some lives appear all too provisional, almost disposable. Writing about Venus, a slave girl murdered inside a slave ship, illuminates “the way in which our age is tethered to hers.”⁵
In Hartman’s understanding of the history of the present, our present is a kind of middle ground, an interval between “the no longer and the not yet,”⁶ a purgatory between the end of slavery and the promise of a free state (or, in Christian terms, between the crucifixion and the second coming). A free state, Hartman tells us, is anticipated as a future, not remembered “as a time before captivity or slavery.”⁷ How can we bring this state to life? How can we “resurrect lives from the ruins”?⁸ There is a past that has “yet to be done”, Hartman claims, but appears impossible to recover: the archive simply won’t give enough information about the lives of the enslaved.⁹ The archive is inscribed in the same “play of power that murdered Venus” and therefore remains painfully silent about Venus and all those that shared her fate.¹⁰ “A storm,” Benjamin tells us, drives the angel of history “irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky.”¹¹ He can no longer put together the remains of the catastrophe, how is he then to make sense of the wreckage? This debris is for Hartman “the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend.”¹² There will be no redemption, no putting together of our fractured community until we can reconstruct that past. Benjamin says: “Only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past –which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.”¹³ The gap in the archive is a reminder of our wounds.
We need then to transcend the limits imposed by the archive. We need to resurrect what has been irretrievably lost. Hartman asks: “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?”¹⁴ It took for me the insight of Herbert McCabe, also a socialist albeit a Christian one, to understand that this is the challenge posed by Babel.¹⁵ There was once a language that spoke to all humankind, but it has been lost. The quest to rebuild it, however, is impossible. “Humankind” no longer has any meaning; it designates no existing community. Does it speak of the future then? That’s what sacraments are all about. They are a language of the possible, a history in “subjunctive” mode.¹⁶ So the eucharist, for example, points to a community of love in the sharing of the bread, a community that does not yet exist (fractured as we are) but which in some sense is already here (because we are, already, materially, sharing the bread): “In the eucharist”, says McCabe, “the future world is made present to us; we already belong to the future.”¹⁷ But sacraments are rituals, paths of remembrance. The eucharist is a commemoration. Maybe this is all we have. “The past,” says Benjamin, “can be seized only as an image,” an image that, like Venus, “flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.”¹⁸ What we desperately need is a narrative.
. . .
Throughout her essay, the absence of a proper narrative mode to talk about Venus is one of Hartman’s main concerns. “Is it possible,” she asks, “to reiterate her name and to tell a story about degraded matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate, but instead ventures toward another mode of writing?” Is it possible “to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envision a free state from this order of statements?”¹⁹ We must strive to find a liminal space between fact and fiction,²⁰ one that enables us to talk about what could have been without exceeding “the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive.”²¹ That space, in my view, is provided by “gospel” as a literary genre.
As the liberation theologian (that is, a practitioner of Marxist theology “made in Latin America”) Juan Luis Segundo has shown, the bible is not one book but many.²² It contains codes of law (Leviticus), letters or speeches (First Epistle to the Corinthians), genealogies (like those contained in Genesis), myths (Genesis again), and, the best-known part of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Lucas, and John. The question of the genre of the gospels has troubled theology since the advent of Enlightenment, but it has become clear, even for a mainstream theologian such as Dale Allison, that it is neither history nor fiction.²³ In other words, though the gospels intend to tell a true story about a real person, they do so through the mixing of true factual statements, possible (subjunctive) statements, and fictitious statements and parables that, though not factually true, give better expression to the true meaning of the event. That gospels were not purely factual descriptions was evident even for the evangelists that wrote them. In modern historical terms, we would simply say they are false. Such a conclusion misses something important about the use of narrative to bring healing in the present. In their blend of fact and fiction (fictions that intend to be true to facts) gospel may have served in antiquity the function of history but now they constitute a particular form of narrative.
The gospels were, in Hartman’s sense, a true counter-history “at the intersection of the fictive and the historical.”²⁴ According to modern critics, none of the evangelists knew Jesus. It is not even clear that each gospel was composed by a single person. Some, like Luke, were probably many decades in the making. Clearly none of the evangelist could give proof of Jesus existence and even some of them consciously invent parts of his life to make it coincide with popular narratives of a divine origin. Jesus appears here, like Venus, both a single life and a construct, a symbol for a particular form of existence, both innocent and humiliated. Nevertheless, the gospels are united in the intention to tell the true story of a man and, at the same time, the story of the community that was being formed around his absence. This counter-history is “one of failure” because at the moment of their writing (before being corrupted by the hegemony Christian discourse acquired) the gospels “[had not] been able to install themselves as history, but rather [as] insurgent, disruptive narratives that [were] marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing.”²⁵
The Christian gospels are the story of a humiliated life, of loss and mourning. How long did the mourning last? We don’t know. Tradition says Jesus was resurrected on the third day, but it is clear that the choice of a trinitarian figure is meant to convey the eternal. It was long, long enough to lose all hope of preserving history, except for the persecuted and marginalized community that was formed around the gap. It is this absence and adversity that forced the first Christians to stay united, to give oral testimony, to transform their memories into a tradition, and to finally, decades or centuries later, to write it down. They allowed the “impossibility that conditioned [their] knowledge of the past” to “animate [their] desire for a liberated future”²⁶ What else could the evangelists do? Like Hartman, Christians couldn’t even find a body to give proof of Jesus’ existence. But “why would you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke, 24:5).
. . .
Benjamin describes historical knowledge in a Marxist key as the history of “the struggling, oppressed class itself.”²⁷ Liberation Theology describes theological knowledge as a “preferential option for the poor.” Hartman knows that writing a history of the oppressed is more than “to brush history against the grain”²⁸ or to “describe the resistance of the object.”²⁹ It is to write a history conscious of the “ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril”³⁰ or (to point out another parallel between Hartman and Benjamin) to be conscious that “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”³¹
“With whom does historicism” (that is, history as science, history as progress) “actually sympathize?” Benjamin asks. “The answer is inevitable: with the victor.”³² Does history need to be scientific? Does Marxism need to be scientific? Does theology need to be scientific? In each one of these demands we have been robbed of a part of the language we used to speak about the past and, therefore, of our ability to cope with it. We have been confined to the “locus of impossible speech” from which Hartman attempts to write a story.³³
Can theology be Marxist? Can history be gospel? To quote Hartman: “Must the poetics of a free state anticipate the event and imagine life after man […]?”³⁴ I answer in the affirmative. I don’t think Jesus of Nazareth is the only human being deserving of a gospel. Whenever a scholar writes about the life of Christ, he is making theology, even if an implicit and historically informed theology. That’s the space that gospel has created for the figure of Christ and its greatest power. The life and death of a man are the founding point of a community. These events can no more be historically questioned than the community can be dissolved. The existence of the community, its endurance in the face of an empty sepulcher (or a gap in the archive), is the only proof.
Could Venus be made into a Goddess? Hartman likens her archive to a tomb.³⁵ May entering the sepulcher then be seen as a baptism, because being baptized is nothing else than to be born in her death.
[1] I thank Isaiah Lorado Wilner for many useful comments to a previous version of this piece. All mistakes remain my own.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), Section II.
[3] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” in: Small Axe, 26, 12:2 (2008) [1–14].
[4] Hartman, Venus, 4.
[5] Hartman, 13.
[6] Hartman, 14.
[7] Hartman, 4.
[8] Hartman, 3.
[9] Hartman, 13.
[10] Hartman, 11.
[11] Benjamin, Concept, Section IX.
[12] Hartman, Venus, 13.
[13] Benjamin, Section III.
[14] Hartman, Venus, 3.
[15] Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London and Sydney: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 111.
[16] Hartman, Venus, 11.
[17] McCabe, Law, Love and Language, 149.
[18] Benjamin, Concept, Section V.
[19] Hartman, Venus, 7.
[20] Hartman, 10.
[21] Hartman, 12.
[22] Juan Luis Segundo, El Dogma Que Libera. Fe, Revelación y Magisterio Dogmático (Santander: Editorial Sal Terrae, 1989), 31.
[23] Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010).
[24] Hartman, Venus, 12.
[25] Hartman, 13.
[26] Hartman, 13.
[27] Benjamin, Concept, Section XII.
[28] Benjamin, Section VII.
[29] Hartman, Venus, 11.
[30] Hartman, 13.
[31] Benjamin, Concept, Section VIII.
[32] Benjamin, Section VII.
[33] Hartman, Venus, 3.
[34] Hartman, 10.
[35] Hartman, 2.
