Epilogue

Abstract

This concluding chapter conjoins, in one constellation, the three texts from which certain observations have been drawn, and ourselves as readers of texts, and thereby attempt to provide this story with meaning and purpose. The first text is The Confessions of Nat Turner. The second is Max Weber's famous lecture “Science as a Vocation,” delivered in 1917 in Munich, on the eve of the Russian revolution. The third is Walter Benjamin's abbreviated fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” written in 1921, unpublished in his lifetime. In this chapter the second and third texts become prisms from the future, as we are ourselves. They, and we, refract and enliven the first, and so reveal its image. They are as unlike each other as each is unlike The Confessions, except in one regard—the glance each casts at the demonic. Though brief, these glances are of significance if we are to assess the final meaning of the “full faith and credit” held due the decision of the Southampton County Court to convict Nat Turner of fomenting “insurrection,” and order that he hang.