Saidiyah Hartman’s “Critical Fabulation”: A Review of the Method and a Case for the Speculative in the Philosophical Study of Religion

Saidiyah Hartman describes her method as one that excavates the invisible and unspoken elements of the archive and brings their possibilities to the fore through the speculative. Such a method has much to inform the philosophical field of Religious Studies. Given the nebulous nature of the notion of religion, there is irony in the disciplinary field being bound to a more rational philosophical approach. The speculative nature of Hartman’s method in many ways resonates with the speculative nature of religion itself. It is my desire and intention in this paper to focus on the method of “critical fabulation” that Hartman both coined and constructed in her article, “Venus in Two Acts” and employs in her latest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In Wayward Lives, Hartman engages themes of freedom, beauty, self-fashioning, morality, and desire, all of which are serious intellectual pursuits in the philosophical study of religion.