Abstract
Clarice Lispector’s concern with writing life beyond the limits of identity and representation leads her to posit the univocity of being in a series of surprising corporeal and linguistic gestures to reveal a fundamental shift in time. I explore the convergence between this project in Lispector and both major and minor terms in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (from “encounter” and “immanence” to “savage” and “birth”), shedding light on some fundamental aspects of the latter’s transcendental empiricism. Furthermore, focusing especially on the 1973 fiction Água Viva, I show that Lispector’s work insists on impersonal life’s relational condition, which extends to the creation of an original reader-writer relationship, through a mode of receptivity beyond meaning in which feminine and natal approaches are crucial.
Highlights
From “my life” to “inhuman life”Until now I had called life my sensitivity to life. But being alive is something else
Clarice Lispector’s concern with writing life beyond the limits of identity and representation leads her to posit the univocity of being in a series of surprising corporeal and linguistic gestures to reveal a fundamental shift in time
Being alive is inhuman—the deepest meditation is so empty that a smile exhales as from a matter.1 (Lispector 1964, p. 171)
Summary
Until now I had called life my sensitivity to life. But being alive is something else. The sauvage aspect of transcendental empiricism, involves breaking thought and language out of the limits of its own domestic mores to confront the differential time of the event that persists alongside representation or “human montage.” In Lispector’s cited passage on beatitude, a “form,” an “author,” and the latter’s “need to think (an object)” would be instances of the domestic mores to renounce, privileging instead the passage of sensations that strips away the neat distinction between self and other This uncanny freedom, encapsulated by a life, is difficult to attain or even to want to pursue in the first place
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