“O Conto da Aia”, de Margaret Atwood: a literatura distópica sob a dominação sem sujeito

Abstract

This paper starts with an analysis of the literary work "The Handmaid's Tale", seeking to develop a structure of feelings specific to literature characterized as dystopia. Our hypothesis consists of a methodological understanding of the structure of feelings in dystopias based on a conceptual and aesthetic approach to the idea of contemplation, as an astonished condition of the modern subject in the authoritarian and reified consequences of Enlightenment reason, which produces an unconscious social domination among individuals. In this sense, we argue about the characters' incapacity for praxis in the dystopian literary representation, understanding, in the form and content of this artistic representation, the diagnosis of a bourgeois ideological decadence (a crisis of Enlightenment values), as well as a mediation that converges with the elements and meanings expressed in this crisis, such as irrationalism. Thus, we seek to explore social representation within dystopias based on the concept of domination without a subject, developed by Robert Kurz, in which we highlight the self-reproduction of dystopian society based on a rationalization of subjects, in which they are instrumentalized for an alien purpose, or rather, contrary to human emancipation. In this way, we will demonstrate how the social representation of the dystopian plot, based on this absolute alienation between the subjects, understands modern sociability based on the fetishism of the commodity and its valorization of value. Finally, we discuss the critical dimensions of dystopian literature, pointing out its negative perspective and rejection of bourgeois, Enlightenment elements, as well as its exploration of decadent aesthetic elements that absolutize the split between subject and object, manifesting a total unknowability of social being, a conception of modern irrationalism as an expression of a reactionary Philosophy of History.