Um espelho para outros sujeitos: o poder pastoral e a mística de Marguerite Porete

Abstract

This thesis aims to create an archive built around three objects: pastoral power as conceived by Michel Foucault; the mystical text of Marguerite Porete; and the feminist critique proposed by Luce Irigaray. In 1976, Michel Foucault published the first volume of The History of Sexuality, which aimed to analyze the role of sexuality in Western society but ended up producing a genealogy of subjectivity through the analysis of discourses. The project then reverted to the study of Greco-Latin texts and was completed in volume IV, The Confessions of the Flesh, which examines works from the early centuries of Christianity, addressing themes such as baptism, penance, sexuality, and confession. The work also seeks to understand how Christian practices produce the subject and the influences they have on the constitution of a type of power named "pastoral." In this context, Marguerite Porete, a beguine who lived between the 13th and 14th centuries and wrote only one work: The Mirror of Simple Souls, can be understood as a Christian dissidence to the confessional logic studied by Foucault in his genealogy of subjectivity produced through disciplinary practices mediated by the pastor. Through negative theology, Porete proposes that the encounter/union with God should be preceded by the annihilation of the soul. Understanding Marguerite Porete's theory as a counter-conduct to the terms of pastoral power, this thesis seeks to reflect on the consequences of the author's thinking on the problems of subjectivity examined by Foucault’s genealogy. In this sense, reading mysticism as a counter-conduct will also allow for demonstrating how Porete’s mirror, when articulated with Irigaray’s Speculum, can be read as a subversion of means and ends, enabling a form of language that takes alterity into account, as it allows for the disarticulation of the masculine symbolic language promoted by pastoral power.