{"title":"The Failure of Language Amidst the Joy of Grace","authors":"Colby Dickinson","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192070","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless experience of grace, and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192070","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless experience of grace, and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God.
期刊介绍:
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities was established in September 1993 to provide an international forum for vanguard work in the theoretical humanities. In itself a contentious category, "theoretical humanities" represents the productive nexus of work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The journal is dedicated to the refreshing of intellectual coordinates, and to the challenging and vivifying process of re-thinking. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities encourages a critical engagement with theory in terms of disciplinary development and intellectual and political usefulness, the inquiry into and articulation of culture.