In the Matter of Nat Turner by Tomlins Christopher;

Author:Tomlins, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

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To use so apparently abstruse an engagement in the philosophy of history as an interpretive prism on empirical events is not without risk.50 Still, in Turner’s confession—its first part at least—and in the Southampton County Court’s response to Turner we are dealing with philosophies of history quite as much as with historical events. Hence, resort to one species of messianic philosophy of history to help unravel another may be worthwhile.

With this in mind, consider first the philosophy manifest in Turner’s utterly fractile statement that he did not feel guilty. Saidiya Hartman has drawn to our attention law’s ruthless annexation of the African American, whether slave or freed, to guilt/debt. The self haltingly realized by the African American is entirely supplanted by a self imposed by law—a self of criminality and obligation.51 Here (in Hamacher’s terms) Turner is refusing that burden, stating that he is the not of the “load of guilt” that the court insists he bear for the dispatch of “valuable citizens” from “Time to Eternity.” In the first part of the Confessions he has explicitly located the self of faith he has fashioned for himself far beyond the universalized guilt/debt nexus in which the court (with its cultic insistence that its acts be worshipped and credited) is so plainly embedded. To the court’s demand that he humbly accept its retribution he has “nothing more to say.”52

How can he stand beyond that nexus, which, we have seen, Benjamin appears to hold inescapable—a perfect fusion of the economic and the juridical with the moral and the psychological?53 Consider the terms of Turner’s decision to act: “I heard a loud noise in the heavens and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened and Christ had laid down the yoke he had born for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent.”54 In Christian eschatology the final battle against Satan immediately precedes the Last Judgment, when all forms of existence known hitherto are annihilated,55 when “whosoever … not found written in the book of life [is] cast into the lake of fire,” leaving only pure origin and end, “Alpha and Omega”: God’s eternal, forgiving, reign over man.56 In Benjaminian terms, God’s final abandonment of His burden of guilt (laying down the yoke) signifies Hamacher’s “jump back” to origin—a distinct representation of the “not” of guilt—and the end of the time of retribution in the tempest of Messianic forgiveness and judgment. The parallel between the two representations of extremity is remarkable:

If [liberation] is neither possible within the guilt-relations of the capital religion nor without them, then it is possible in a place—and only here—where these relations have reached an extreme that belongs neither to these relations themselves nor to their outside. The possibility of liberation from guilt can thus only be located at the very extreme of guilt. This extreme would be the outer- and innermost limit upon which guilt is no longer itself and yet is nothing other than itself, where it is—as guilt—freed of itself.

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