This chapter foregrounds the affective dimension of the Early Modern witch-hunts. Specifically, the author examines the important and overlooked role that envy plays in this moral, political, and psychological landscape in order to illuminate specific forms of affective injustice and resistance relevant for thinking about feminist agency. The argument relies on a reading of Silvia Federici’s Marxist-feminist analysis of the witch-hunts, highlighting the domination and impoverishment of women as significant forces driving the proliferation of envy. Against contemporary philosophers of envy who reject or disparage the forms of “spiteful envy” characteristic of the witch as morally and aesthetically ugly, the chapter argues that envy is diagnostic of the culture and conditions that characterized the witch-hunts, and that practically, it functioned as a subversive mode of resistance to those conditions.

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Green with Envy: On Affective Injustice and Resistance

  • Katie Howard

摘要

This chapter foregrounds the affective dimension of the Early Modern witch-hunts. Specifically, the author examines the important and overlooked role that envy plays in this moral, political, and psychological landscape in order to illuminate specific forms of affective injustice and resistance relevant for thinking about feminist agency. The argument relies on a reading of Silvia Federici’s Marxist-feminist analysis of the witch-hunts, highlighting the domination and impoverishment of women as significant forces driving the proliferation of envy. Against contemporary philosophers of envy who reject or disparage the forms of “spiteful envy” characteristic of the witch as morally and aesthetically ugly, the chapter argues that envy is diagnostic of the culture and conditions that characterized the witch-hunts, and that practically, it functioned as a subversive mode of resistance to those conditions.