01/02/2021
Call for Papers - Special Issue
PHILOSOPHY WITH CLARICE LISPECTOR
Clarice Lispector’s writing takes up essential philosophical questions. Writing in her texts becomes the site of an extreme experience of what the narrator in Água Viva calls “thinking-feeling,” which eludes any preestablished method and demands endless tenaciousness. Thought here must do without the certainties of conventional wisdom, even without the full support of meaning and grammatical structure, all while remaining fully sensitive to whatever precipitates thought. Take, for instance, Martim, who finds himself alone early on in A maça no escuro (1949), where he is the protagonist. Alone one day in the middle of nowhere, he loses “the precaution of understanding,” “rejects the language of the others without having even the beginning of a language of his own,” and rejoices in a “hollow, mute” feeling.[1] Precisely this precarious position and this distinctive state of suspension enable a radical thinking to occur, as receptivity to “the whole world” (31). This is an attunement that also gives rise to and sustains philosophy, even if the latter may forget it, under the sway of academic expertise in a certain canon. The motivation to do philosophy nonetheless comes from turning one’s attention to events and questions with regard to which one cannot remain external, in command, unmoved.
Clarice, as she is referred to in Brazil, was undoubtably aware of the Western philosophical canon, as some of her epigraphs, phrases, and characters’ thoughts suggest, featuring surnames such as Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza. While she was and continues to be a well-recognized voice in Brazilian culture, her ideas were not predominantly received with the gravitas generally accorded to philosophers. What is most interesting about the thought at work in Clarice’s texts lies, however, in her own ways of posing questions and problems that some of these philosophers have articulated, and yet other, unprecedented ones. These are at once impossible and crucial questions of life and time, of unknowing, of difference and being, of truth, of beauty, feeling, and embodiment, of finitude, of pain, joy, loss, and love, of language and the unsayable, of cause and fate. Clarice is as rigorous as she is sui generis across the different genres and audiences she engages. The work of thinking is not some accessory in her writing that may interest a few of its readers, while a broader audience appreciates other, more approachable aspects. Rather, the operation of writing and the work with language Clarice undertakes put the resources of literature in the service of a true philosophical endeavor, if by this we understand the initially evoked extreme disposition of thought, which she invites readers to discover in terms of an ethical stance with regard to thought as a vital movement. Thus, reading Clarice’s texts entails, first of all, taking the risk of that extreme act of thought as well. This special issue invites essays that read Clarice and philosophy together, in comparative work that does not merely apply continental theories or other literary writing models to her fiction, but that instead accepts the latter’s proposed reading challenge, and the theoretical contribution it can then offer to these philosophies.
The texts of Clarice, who begins some of her late works by announcing the plunge into a space of boundless freedom, paradoxically entered into the anglophone world through a university press (Minnesota). Translations of A Paixão Segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.) and Água Viva (The Stream of Life) appeared in the late 1980s, when the work of Hélène Cixous, who highly praised Clarice, was also being partially discovered, as a figure of French feminist philosophy. Clarice was often received through Cixous’ mediation, and in the context of feminist theory (Cixous, Cavarero, Kristeva, Braidotti), which is surely important, although this lens, which is not Clarice’s as such, can sometimes leave other perspectives on her work’s theoretical relevance unconsidered, for instance with regard to aesthetic experience, time, being, nothingness, and the limits of language and signification, which are far more frequently remarked in literary works by authors such as Hölderlin, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Mallarmé, or Proust. The singularity of Clarice’s thought is, furthermore, inextricable from her unique, unorthodox treatment of the Portuguese language. More recently, her work in the anglophone world has been the object of new English translations, and of new modes of criticism. The extraordinary theoretical dimension of Clarice’s writing ought to come across strongly and in its own terms this time. It cannot do so as an object that illustrates or is put through the machinery of another philosophy; instead, it is necessary to engage with Clarice’s writing as a form of thought whose conceptual and speculative force can connect and unfold in unprecedented ways with others, especially with philosophies of difference and psychoanalytic theory. What can happen to these theories when, for instance, they hold hands with the writing voice in Água Viva (1973) to dive far into what it designates as “o atrás do pensamento” (the back of thought)? How does Clarice Lispector’s writing conceive of time and what effects does it have on its readers, and on other philosophies of time? What do the limits of meaning entail for thought? What does the effort, for instance in The Passion According to G.H. at writing life in its formless, non-humanized state do to language? And how, then, might a reader approach a highly unusual, untranslatable statement on life being/happening to oneself, such as “a vida se me é”?[2] How might the ethics in this attitude be relevant now? How do differential concepts, for instance of the neutral, of the interstice, of différance, of the nothing, of sensation, or of s*x in contemporary psychoanalysis and Lacanian philosophy find untried possibilities when they enter into conversation with Clarice’s writing? How do Clarice’s texts invite us to rethink the beautiful and the sublime? How does reading Clarice Lispector invite us to an unforeseen event of thought?
To contribute to this special issue of Angelaki, please submit a detailed abstract (800-1000 words) that offers a clear articulation of the envisioned essay to Fernanda Negrete by March 5th, 2021. Selected contributions will be notified by the end of April 2021. Completed papers of up to 7500 words are due August 31, 2021 to enter the peer review process.
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[1] Lispector, A maçã no escuro (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981), 31-32.
[2] A Paixão Segundo G.H. (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1964), 179.
