Fatalism and Fabulation: Hartman’s Critical Fabulation as an Impossible Intervention Against Althusserian Interpellation

Abstract

This essay compares Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses and Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts in order to examine the intrinsic relationship between ideology and violence. It argues how Hartman’s archive of slavery serves as a literary analogue to Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses, thus contending that readers are interpellated into archival violence in precisely the same way that subjects are interpellated into dominant ideology. Their crucial divergence, however, lies within their diverse responses to the inevitability of interpellation: for Althusser it culminates in fatalistic resignation, whereas for Hartman it necessitates an ethical attempt to retaliate - however impossible that attempt may be.