Clarice Lispector: The Existentialist Mystic

CLASS DESCRIPTION

“Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century.” - Parul Seghal, The New York Times

Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) is a figure that remains partially shrouded in mystery to this day. Her works were largely unknown to Western audiences prior to the 2009 publication of her biography, Why This World? by Benjamin Moser. A subsequent wave of interest brought forth projects to expansively translate her work; readers were enthralled by her weaving together of disjointed prose with refined philosophical inquiry, unsettling depictions of her characters’ interior life, and her confrontation of meaninglessness through literary absurdism. One motif repeats throughout her texts: the dissolving of identity, the total collapse of the subject, who then turns to face the nothingness underlying existence in a state of ecstasy. It is for this reason that Lispector has been described as having a “passion for the void”; her texts evoke the desire to approach a dissolution of the self.

This breakdown of the self and all worldly significance is the foundation of existentialist thought, inspiring the exercise of crafting one’s own meaning out of the revelation that meaning is not readily given in the human experience. In the works of many existentialist thinkers (including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and de Beauvoir), this exercise is depicted as cultivating the self, breaking it down and its relation to the world in order to re-establish it more authentically, or indeed to leave it in its undone form as an attempt to approach oneness with all that is other. This latter form is equally relevant to the spiritual exercise of deindividuation in mysticism (such as in the works of Weil, Spinoza, and Bataille), the desire for surrendering one’s self for absorption into the divine.

This lecture positions Lispector’s writing as poignantly bridging existentialist ideas with the mystic. Through close readings of works such as The Passion According to G.H., A Breath of Life, Near to the Wild Heart, and The Complete Stories, her approach towards the “void” of existence will be demonstrated through her use of experimental language, fragmentary and interrupted, showing the absurdity of existence on the level of form; her questioning of societal conventions, particularly those imposed on her female characters, who often find themselves at thresholds, encountering moments that rupture the boundaries between domestic banality and metaphysical insight; and her grounding of existence as an intimate embodied experience, inseparable from the world, yet transcendent. The acceptance of meaninglessness - inhabiting the anxieties offered by the void and allowing it to disintegrate the self - becomes a deeply liberatory act.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Anna Titov is a writer and researcher in continental philosophy. She is a CHASE-AHRC funded doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia, working on embodied experience and perceptions of nature in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her areas of interest are phenomenology and existentialism, deep ecology, and esoteric spiritualities.

Instagram: @aatitov

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