Philosophy with Clarice Lispector

Abstract

Clarice Lispector was widely recognized in her country for her modernist fiction and weekly contributions to the newspaper Jornal do Brasil in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although she wasn’t academically trained as a philosopher, her writing consistently explores problems that concern philosophy too, such as being, time, death, language, embodiment, freedom, action, consciousness, life, and aesthetic feeling. Clarice Lispector’s writing does not offer a conceptual system or even arguments to defend a perspective on these problems. Yet her meditations across genres and over four decades engage remarkably with ontological, ethical, aesthetic, and cosmological questions, featuring a persistent practice of thinking at the limits of language that places writing and reading on the edge of thought, on the threshold of the unthinkable. One could therefore suspect that her work falls within literature, not only given the production of short stories and novels, but more specifically and alongside other modern writers involved in questions of thinking, language, and their limits, as the particular space where this thinking and the limits it interrogates can be tested. However, Clarice – as she is better known in Brazil and increasingly among anglophone readers and commentators – objected to the label of literature to name her writing, insofar as, to her mind, literature referred to an external, institutional perspective, foreign to her lifelong experience of the act of writing (Outros escritos 96). She is concerned instead with the standpoint of experience and of an act, whose only consistency resides within the moment of undergoing the experience and of undertaking the act. And this strange, unstable standpoint, always passing, involves a confrontation with the unprecedented – any definition or predetermined form to grasp it is thus set to fail. An attempt to control this writing act, in the interest of understanding, interpreting, or explicating it, for instance, can easily betray or even miss its efficacy. This, of course, makes the work of giving an account of one’s reading quite challenging. Indeed, Clarice’s writing act beckons the reader, often addressed in the second person in the newspaper contributions but also in the novels – “I must hold this hand of yours” (Passion 10), “you who are reading me” (Água Viva 29, 49) – to join the writing voice on the level of the act, in the