Figurations of Immanence: Writing the Subaltern and the Feminine in Clarice Lispector

Approaching Impersonal Life with Clarice Lispector

“…10 The two novels after Agua viva return to characters attempting a different experiment; there seems to be a concern with exposing the very process of approaching and giving life to a character, and of inhabiting the virtual dimension of writing, as I will show. Shellhorse (2017) reads The Hour of the Star as Lispector's most radical experiment, especially regarding the Latin American political and literary context. 11 Distinct figures such as a man, a flower, a mother cat, a glass of water, a mirror, a closet, or a Saturday do emerge, like reflections in the water, along Água Viva's phrases, but the presence of such images is momentary, and they are effortlessly left behind as the text continues to attend to the rigor of boundless life.…”

“…They write about a female character, and in A Breath, that character, Angela Pralini, becomes a co-writer. On the problem of writing the feminine in A Hora da Estrela, see Chapter 1 inShellhorse (2017).46 This can be conceived in terms of what Lacan calls feminine jouissance, insofar as it is outside "meaning" and existence, yet it insists.47 We find here again the possibilities of joy and pain as not mutually exclusive. Elsewhere she states that pain can be transformed into pleasure "basta um clic" "a 'click' is enough."…”