Reviews with content warning for Cannibalism - Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

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Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

4 reviews

clovelatte's review

challenging informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

Caliban notes. Just some main points I want to remember about what it was saying.

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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brnineworms'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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rzh's review

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challenging informative slow-paced

3.5

read this on recommendation from a lecturer: pretty dense, but full of really interesting points. i’ve studied early modern england before but never really saw it as the ‘advent of capitalism’ until now. really interesting to see it linked to the structures imposed by european colonialism in the americas and how this links into the capitalisation on the female body. did feel at times that the book veered off onto massive tangents and the chapters weren’t really massively cohesive or contributing to a central argument: it felt at times like they were simply linked by an obligatory sentence at the start and end of each chapter, and federici only reached her main thesis by about three-quarters of the way through the book. regardless, really fascinating content in each, and really enjoyed all the pictures and diagrams too, which i felt really leant to the interpretation of the written content rather than just serving as ‘breathing space’ for the text as is sometimes the case in academic and historical texts. 3.5 stars

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amelreads's review

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informative

5.0

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