Estado bruxólico: tecnologias de resistência das bruxas

Abstract

This thesis investigates the witch as a figure who catalyzes a certain state of existence, called the witch state by researcher Franklin Cascaes. To follow the clues left by Cascaes, I investigate the figure of the witch historically, initially in the European context and then in Brazil. The main hypothesis I work with is that we can identify five "marks" that characterize the witch's body: the womb, infanticide, chance, resentment and the animal. These elements are analyzed throughout the work, in theoretical-philosophical articulations that seek to present a conceptual drawing of this body, which is both physical and psychic. I divided the research into five central axes involving a historical survey, reconstitution of the imaginary that the theme invokes and the theoretical articulation of the body-thought-bruxolic. The first movement consists of a topographical survey of the inquisitions in Spain and Portugal, using authors such as Francisco Bethencourt, António José Saraiva, Meyer Kayserling, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Adriano Prosperi. In the second, I evaluate the establishment of an ontology of the witch, from its emergence in Germany, crossing Europe, taking refuge in the Azores and later arriving in southern Brazil. I look at centuries-old texts such as Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and Innocent VIII's Papal Bull (1484), as well as more recent ones such as Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons, which analyzes the artifice common to books and public pamphlets from the 15th to the 18th century, focusing on the relationship between the authors and their intellectual commitments. And the last part of the work, which comprises the conclusion, undertakes the exercise of reconstructing, or making visible, the attempted subjection of a particular body-woman-witch, banished from the heart of the Middle Ages. It's no coincidence that one of the first steps in the investigation of witchcraft was to look for the mark of the devil on the body of the accused. A birthmark, an anesthetized spot, and it was in the search for this mark that the inquisitors created it: Nature made them witches. It was a tendency of the female gender, of its temperament. Men hunt and fight. Women plot, imagine and devise. The marks on the body. The public execution of hundreds of women is the production of the mark, of social and sexual identity, of a feminine and a masculine, of a body, a desiring machine that, because it desires, is susceptible to evil and can lead the whole world to damnation.