{"title":"We are all the Smallest Woman in the World","authors":"Luz Horne, J. Brodie","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192062","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"28 1","pages":"45 - 56"},"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.2023.2192062","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 This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal.
摘要本文探讨了Clarice Lispector文学中的一个位置,即试图用一种超越象征的语言来触及生活的主要基础,以便从人类主义、后人类主义和女权主义的当下来解读它。它认为,故事《世界上最小的女人》(Laços de família,1960)将利斯佩克特所有文学作品中发生的事情发挥到了极致,我们可以在《阿荷拉·达·埃斯特雷拉》(1976)中马卡的角色身上找到这一点,这是世界上最小女人的延续。在故事和小说中,物质性都变得鲜活起来,它与一个中性的背景联系在一起,这个背景超越了人类和非人类、女性和男性之间的区别,与语言和单词相吻合。这两个角色都是残余和阻力,在故事中的运作方式与利斯佩克特笔下的单词运作方式相同。因此,德勒兹的未成年人概念及其对内在概念的延续不仅被解读为一种超越物种的思考方式,而且被解读为通过破坏“女性”这一普遍概念的稳定而起作用的方式。因此,利斯佩克特的写作使我们能够将当代女性主义与对女性和男性身份的肯定区分开来,并将其纳入父权制之外的秩序——无论是否体现在女性身上。
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.