Fabulação do corpo hospiciado: escritas comprometidas e pensamento antimanicomial

Abstract

This dissertation is based on a concern with the setbacks that have been occurring in the process of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, in the midst of a return of conservative and reactionary policies that go beyond the field of mental health, but which hit it seriously. In the introduction, I trace a brief history of this context that has been called Psychiatric Counter-reform. Taking as main reference texts elaborated, in different ways, by people who were hospitalized in hospices, I move on to a methodological chapter in which I discuss the relations between the distant gaze and the central concept of this work: the fabulation of the hospitalized body. The body is considered here not as an origin or an end, but as a process of constant making — whether to be interrupted, paralyzed or petrified in fixed forms, in its asylum mode, or to unleash the creative and transforming forces aligned with the potencys of life, in its anti-asylum modality. I begin the route of the text by discussing the practices through which death is cultivated in the Hospice and beyond its walls. Then, I walk through the ways in which the asylum hierarchy is formed, together with the fable of mental illness, perpetuating asymmetrical equality and differences that legitimize the judgment of our actions. At the end, I discuss the relationships between the body and the practice of writing, contrasting the distanced asylum textuality with the compromised writings. Subverted, writing can appear as a practice of passing and transfiguring oneself and the world that causes the statuary formation of mental illness to collapse, putting itself in contact with the mystery that triggers the movement. Through compromised writing, it becomes possible to free the imagination to return to fabulating, collectively, a society without asylums.