Anticristo: feminilidade e loucura na obra de Lars Von Trier

Abstract

This work aimed to analyze femininity s subjective condition. For that, it focuses on Antichrist, a movie directed by Lars Von Trier. Its theoretical guidance is the relationship among reason, femininity, and madness. By using the psychoanalytic interpretive method, this work analyzes such a movie based on the notion of field ruptures, in which field is understood as unconscious structures that maintain singular and diverse relational situations. Therefore, this research is the interpretive method in action, by establishing field ruptures occurring among the researcher, her subject of investigation, and the artwork (the movie). Through the movie s characters, it tries to show theoretical approaches between feminine subjectivity in Freudian terms and the condition of being mad. The Antichrist s Man represents a rational and pragmatic universe whose systematic logic seems to have all the answers and whose objectivity predominates both in the way of seeing the world and of searching for an object of desire; it is the hegemonic logic of the Western thought, the foundation of the scientific revolution. The analysis of the Woman in this work considers her as a representative of the feminine universe permeated by a subjective, symbolic logic in reverse to the rational, logical thought. She represents the feminine condition as another subjectivity whose singularity was apprehended and made possible by the psychoanalytical discourse showed in Freud s theoretical analysis of hysteria. The same way, madness places itself as antagonist to the rational thought, which justifies as it happens to femininity the many excluding discourses, philosophical thoughts, and social actions. That said, in this work femininity and madness are subjective conditions opposed to the rational thought, supported by the Cartesian cogito, and needing to have their meaning promoted by other way of listening to them.