Dimensions of the Impersonal in Clarice Lispector Ecstasy, Horror, Solidarity

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Constructing/Dismantling Personhood

Humanity as a Dispositif

“Human Setup”: On the History of the Notion of a Person

Persona as Human’s Ontological Status

Beyond the Dispositif of a Person: What Remains

Ethics of Impersonality

Chapter 2. Depersonalizations: Modernism and Jewish Tradition

Modernist Depersonalizations

Fernando Pessoa: Depersonalization and Abulia

Hermann Hesse: Through Multiplicity Toward Unity

Impersonality in Brazilian Modernism

Clarice Lispector: A Writer, a Mystic, a Messianist

Chapter 3. Dialectics of Personhood: Infancy and Puberty

Telephone as a Synecdoche of the Dispositif

A Person as a Dispositif: Humanization as Banishment from Being

Human Life as a Dialectic of Personalization and Depersonalization

Fetal and Infant Life as an Impersonal State 

Domestication of Child, Animal, and God

Maturing as the Emergence of a Person from an Impersonal Background

Chapter 4. Crisis of Personhood: Horror and Ecstasy

Home and Ontological Security

The Vegetal Space of Impersonality

Freedom and Beauty

The Horror of Impersonality: Lispector and the “Heart of Darkness”

The Ascetic-Mystical Experience: From “the Self” Toward Nothingness

Layers and Seduction

Biological Life as an Object of Disgust

Chapter 5. Impersonalist Ethics: Toward Solidarity with the Bare Life

The Political Dimension of the Bare Life

Encounter with the Cockroach: Approaching the Bare Life 

Literary Study of Conditions for “Affirmative Biopolitics” 

Messianic Coda: “We shall be inhuman…”

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Wojciech Sawala is an assistant professor in the Department of Portuguese at Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, Poland. Comparatist and Latin Americanist, he specializes in the continent’s twentieth-century narrative classics, including Borges, Cortázar, Lispector, and Guimarães Rosa. His research interests include biopolitics, postsecularism and Jewish messianism.

Sawala’s journey into “impersonality” in Lispector’s work offers a profound insight on the hiatus between subjectivity and “life itself,” that is, the “inhuman” areas of existence. His singular analysis enhances our understanding of modernist literature while illuminating significant ethical implications. It is, thus, an essential contribution to contemporary literary debates.

– Diana Klinger, Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil

 

With a fresh and au courant theoretical approach, this study underscores incisively and masterfully Clarice Lispector’s ideological concerns regarding the invisible and unjust social and racial relations in Brazil which, for the most part, have heretofore been critically scant or neglected in her work.

– Nelson H. Vieira, University Professor and Professor of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and Judaic Studies, Brown University, USA