Dom Casmurro, the semiotic novel of whiteness or the genocity of Capitu's infinite body

ABSTRACT

Proceeding from the premise that Dom Casmurro is the semiotic novel of whiteness, whose foundational historical nexus is the enactment of the Free Womb Law and its surrounding contexts, this article approaches the novel through two contiguous moment. The first consists in laying out the terms of this semiosis, that of whiteness, by analyzing the narrator's discourse as an exposition of the "pact of whiteness" (Bento, 2022)[1] – a process of racialization and capture of Capitu's undefinable body. Second, I demonstrate the immaterial power of this corpus infinitum (Silva, 2019), which does not conform to the stigmatizing semiosis and is therefore rendered a killable body, through the lens of the crisis of the ideology of Brazil’s seigniorial order.

KEYWORDS: Dom Casmurro; Whiteness; Racialization; Corpus infinitum.