Witches, madness, and the hermeneutics of confession Sexual difference and Foucault's 'history of truth

This dissertation is a feminist project that has as its primary objective to elucidate the role, status and significance of women (as subjects of knowledge and experience) and woman (as a discursive construct and an object of knowledge) within specific interpretive paradigms of Western European Renaissance. Moving "beyond hermeneutics," I make use of what Dreyfus and Rabinow call interpretive analytics, the post-hermeneutic method that Michel Foucault developed in the 1970's for him to show how "man" became "subjugated" within Modern regimes of knowledge and power. Concerned with the "politics of truth" that are proper to "scientific" knowledge of madness and sexuality, this archeological-genealogical methodology also works well to develop questions about the historical subjection of women, to investigate a spectacular pre-Modern discursive event largely ignored by Foucault's histories and erased by the very design of his interpretive methodological problem: "woman" -- women's nature, women's power, and woman's sex-emerged as the subject of ecclesiastical, judicial, and medical "official" discourses and regimes of power in Renaissance Europe. With the aim of making the formative moments of Foucault's influential "histories of truth" --the histories madness and sexuality-accountable to the woman question, I trace an elaborate mythology of demonic temptation, a mythology generated through the confessions of witches, elaborated in ecclesiastical, judicial and medical demonological discourses, and linked to the sudden and unparalleled recrudescence of the judicial witchcraze in the late 16th century. Revisiting a domain that vanishes into the lacuna of Foucault's histories, I sketch a counter-history of the "knowledge of madness" that foregrounds the economy of sexual difference within specific ecclesiastical, judicial, and medical systems of subjection. I show how the truth games played around the confessions of witches made systematic use of a "hermeneutics of suspicion," of strategic operations of doubt and disbelief that performatively generated and reinforced profound and marked differential relations of the sexes to the politics of interpretive practice, and to the knowledge of madness and sexuality such practices produced. I hope to make clear that the historical mobility and complexity of woman's relation to madness and sex are irreducible to the popular Foucauldian formulas that find the knowledge of madness free of sex and power until it becomes feminized and "hysterized" in psychiatric institutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.