STEFANIA FANTAUZZIRebellious Body, Vulnerable BodyCiclo Imagens de Pensamento

Curated by Susana Camanho & Emídio Agra

(Photograph: Bárbara Fonte, 2023)

Why talk about the witch-hunt again? In recent years, the topic has been brought to light and has been given its due weight in both European and American history. It has been pointed out how witch-hunting managed to deprive women of their medical practices, forced them to submit to the patriarchal control of the nuclear family, and at the same time dismantled the holistic idea of nature that, until the Renaissance, had imposed limits on the exploitation of women's bodies. Moreover, the New History and also Carlo Ginzburg's microhistory led us to open and study small archives and documents that have given us a more detailed picture of many trials. In this regard, Silvia Federici's book Caliban and the Witch is fundamental, as it shows how the community controversies that led so many women to torture and death were the beginning of a new world order. According to Federici, the witch-hunt lies at the intersection of social processes that paved the way for the birth of the modern capitalist world. Within this framework, Federici's work explicitly reflects on women's bodies, their domination, and their vulnerability. Indeed, dealing with witches is very significant because in the figure of the witch one finds both vulnerability and rebellion in a specifically corporeal dimension.

Stefania Fantauzzi is philosopher and researcher in the “Philosophy and Gender” seminar group at the University of Barcelona and a member of the GAPP (Arendtian Group for Thought and Politics) and professor of Philosophy at UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona). She has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. After completing her PhD, she carried out research at the Hannah Arendt Zentrum in Oldenburg, where she increased her knowledge on the role of violence in Arendt’s thinking, an author to whom she has dedicated and on whom she has published several articles and essays. She is the editor of the volumen Participar del món (Editora Lleonard Muntaner, 2020), which presents Arendt’s writings published in the journal Aufbau in the 1930s and 1940s and author of the prologue to Hannah Arendt’s Desobediencia civil (Lleonard Muntaner Publishers, 2022) and the afterword to Günther Anders’ L’home dalt del pont (Club Editor, 2023). She combines her research with translation work; she has translated Come fare cose con i ricordi (2009) and I brutti scherzi del passato (2010), both by Manuel Cruz, and Democracia surgente (2022) by Adriana Cavarero. 

Thought-images

Thought-images gives the title to this cycle of conferences opening a space in Sismógrafo’s program to think images and through images. The purpose of these conferences is to unite the discursive and the image, to confront them, to recognize the potential of an image, of a fragment, rescuing vital experiences threatened in an uncertain present. This age, a turbulent and disturbing age, an age of pandemic, ecological, financial, political and social crises, these times of “post-truth” and "alternative facts” are "interesting times", to use the expression popularized by Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting times especially for thinking. Thinking is already contributing to a change. This cycle calls for a cooperation between the expressive strength of art and the precision of philosophy. Without a language that embraces images, images can blind us or say nothing. With these conferences, Sismógrafo seeks to take care of what Alexander Kluge calls a “garden of cooperation”, a place that preserves the moments when word and image converge in order to produce something new, a space for discrepancy and cooperation in the face of cacophonies of information, in the face of industrial manipulation and enslavement of feelings. In difficult times, times of divisions and segregations, cooperation presents itself as an antidote to tribalism (Richard Sennett). To open this garden, this space for debate and polyphony in the city, Sismógrafo has invited speakers linked to philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, fine arts and cinema who, at different times and from different perspectives, will try to present a diagnosis of the present.