Reviews with content warning for Sexism - Caliban et la Sorcière

women’s bodies and labor as the new commons to make up for the loss of access to land and communal living. Nuclear family emerged to systematically disappear womens labor and isolate people so they are less able to organize

dissection of the body and breaking it down into working parts was necessary to force bodies into the unnatural capitalist work cycle. destroy the magic and the nature of the body and make it nothing more than a tool and then what are you to do with a tool but use it

magic is allowed to return now in pop culture because it is no longer a threat to capitalism. our society is so orderly and regimented that commodified magic is no threat.

LETTING THE SOFT ANIMAL OF YOUR BODY LOVE WHAT IT LOVES IS RESISTING

“The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which much social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body was gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. And it was here again that the scientific use of torture was born, for blood and torture were necessary to ‘breed an animal’ capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules.”

In places where land enclosures were not happening the witch trials were not present. Access to land has a community building effect on humans and once you remove people from the land it becomes easier to remove them from their rights and consideration for each other as a united whole.

Persecution in the Americas mirroring what was “perfected” in Europe as a way to break up organizers. Fear and suspicion of the neighbor as a means of bringing the other to order.

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krkvt's review against another edition

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Incredibly well researched and well written, but very dry and hard to get through. It's fairly academic.

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thevampiremars's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

Let’s get this out of the way first and foremost: Silvia Federici is a TERF. I hear her recent works are more explicitly trans exclusionary, but even here, in this book published in 2004, her firmly cissexist worldview is apparent. And, look... I get it. Federici is a Marxist philosopher and her analysis, as such, focuses on material reality. I understand why this perspective might lead her to reject a nebulous model of identity rooted in subjectivity and social constructivism in favour of something more tangible. So, while I find her approach to gender rather lacking and overly simplistic at best, I do recognise that it’s not entirely reactionary.

It’s tricky, because gender has historically been conflated with sex. Caliban and the Witch is about gender in Early Modern Europe (predominantly England), a society which, to my knowledge, had no concept of a third gender or of transness. Sure, there were almost certainly people who we would retroactively label trans or nonbinary or genderqueer, but they wouldn’t have thought of themselves that way. Those categories didn’t exist yet, let alone the terminology, so Federici’s exclusivity is a little more defensible here than it would be in a book about gender in the 21st century, or the 20th, or perhaps the 19th. “The female body, the uterus” works well as commentary on how women were reduced to their anatomy and their supposed purpose of bearing children... until you realise that is how the author genuinely conceives (no pun intended) of womanhood.

There’s a lot more I could say about this particular aspect of her philosophy and politics, but I don’t want it to be the only thing I talk about. I took it upon myself to critique this book in good faith and, while the bioessentialism is indeed disappointing, Federici’s writing is otherwise quite thoughtful and insightful.

Caliban and the Witch is surprisingly accessible for how informative it is. It delves into primitive accumulation and the origins of capitalism, the changing role of women in society, the policing of sexuality, and the origin of “the witch” as a figure to fear and punish. It challenges the mainstream view that the witch trials came to an end because the Enlightenment’s scientific discipline triumphed over superstition, instead arguing that superstition was never the point. The Middle Ages were rife with superstition, yet no witches were burned then, and many proponents of the persecution (eg: Thomas Hobbes) didn’t believe in magic. Federici argues that the witch trials existed primarily to subjugate women, and that they came to an end because women were no longer seen as a threat to those in power. She notes similarities with Nazi ideology, which uses a contradictory combination of science and superstition as a means to an end, and with counter-terrorism, which rallies suspicion even without evidence of wrongdoing.

The book has a preface and an introduction, and each chapter has its own separate introduction as well. Together with the meandering and tangent-laden text, it makes for a slow read. It’s also quite dense in places, though the artwork did help to break it up. I often find that illustrations in academic literature don’t add much, but these Early Modern woodcuts and engravings did complement the writing well.

Would I recommend Caliban and the Witch? Yes, I think so. Perhaps it would be best to buy a second hand copy or borrow it from a library if you’re uncomfortable giving money to this particular author, but I don’t think it’s a book that ought to be avoided outright. It’s interesting, I learnt a lot from it, and I’d consider it a solid demonstration of Marxist feminism.

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savvylit's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

4.0

During the late Middle Ages, European thought and philosophy shifted to a view of man as machine. This separation between body and mind created a larger cultural distaste for anything natural and animalistic. The church also reinforced these same ideas. Church and state united to encourage European people to think of their body as inherently sinful and to instead use their minds to avoid lazy or hedonistic behavior. Work was godly. Work was good. Work required disciplining your mind and treating your body like a tool. Thus, we have the dawn of assessing humans by their labor-power. The foundation for capitalism. Additionally, the church and state disdaining all things bodily made it so that women's traditional work and knowledge became necessary to destroy. Thus, the dawning of the witch-hunt.

"The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy their social power."

The witch-hunt was essential to early capitalism. So many of the harmful views that Western culture still retains were established during the witch-hunt era specifically to create and serve an increasingly labor-obssessed capitalist society. Not only that, but so much was lost. Unknown amounts of communal culture burned at the stake alongside the "witches." A culture of resistance, of healing & midwifery, of art, of feminine and collective power... It is incredibly unsettling to think of how little this literal and cultural genocide is studied in modern world history courses. I am so grateful that reading this book has allowed me to see how the intentional omission of this topic has allowed some of the worst aspects of witch-hunts to be perpetuated to this day.

I highly recommend this book. If you hate the patriarchy and hate capitalism then this book is for you.

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amelreads's review against another edition

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informative

5.0

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