Critical fabulation as counter-conduct

Saidiya Hartman with and against Michel Foucault

Abstract

 In this article, we analyze Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in critical dialogue with Michel Foucault’s thought, proposing an ethical and political approximation that goes beyond the question of the archive. Although both authors begin from the impossibility of recovering subalternized lives in their “free state” within historical documents, we argue that Hartman’s gesture of fabulating the unsaid operates as a form of counter-conduct and care of the self. To support this hypothesis, we draw on feminist readings of Foucault, especially those of Margareth Rago and Marilda Ionta, which update the notion of practices of freedom. The article centrally highlights how friendship — exemplified in the relationship fabulated by Hartman between two young women in Venus in Two Acts — constitutes a gesture capable of creating affective forms of resistance in the face of institutional violence and historical oppression