Could it be that what I'm writing to you is Behind Thought

This text gives an account of the experience of reading Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in the form of a brief dialogue with the text. It foregrounds the writing voice’s address of a second person and the attention this address brings to the acts of writing and reading that hold the two pronouns in relation, producing at once an infinite and nonexistent distance from being to being. The dialogue observes Lispector’s insistent return to the formulation “atrás do pensamento,” which has been translated into English as “beyond thought” and can also be translated as “behind-thought” or as the background of thought, in a more spatial sense. Nancy reads the translation into French, where this spatial nuance is preserved, in consultation with Lusophone interlocutors about the specificities of the Portuguese original. The dialogue interrogates the link across this dimension, the recurrence of the pronoun it in the original Portuguese version of Água Viva, and the acts of writing and reading a text that brings awareness to a living, pulsing, ongoing, and escaping instant beyond meaning that is nonetheless the cause of the address in the first place. The dialogue follows the thread of this movement as it slips out behind thought, where Água Viva meets other books attuned to the instant and in which the dialogue’s “I” feels their vitalizing effects.Keywords: behind-thoughtÁgua Vivareadingyou Notes1 “Ce que je suis en train de t’écrire, serait-ce derrière la pensée? (dialogue avec Água viva de Clarice Lispector).” Conference paper presented at the colloquium La littérature sans condition, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle 19–21 (PRISMES), Collège international de philosophie on 14 June 2019 and published in French in 2020. Translated from French by Fernanda Negrete. Translator’s note: Nancy’s title is a phrase from Água Viva. I have consulted and lightly modified Stefan Tobler’s translation to reflect the verbal, spatial, and conceptual specificities Nancy plays with throughout his essay. Tobler translates from Portuguese “atrás” as “beyond,” emphasizing the sense of remoteness and off-limits that Clarice Lispector certainly evokes with the locution “atrás do pensamento.” Nancy read the French translation of Água Viva, by Regina Helena de Oliveira Machado, which I also consulted. With thanks to Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback for proposing this paper for the issue and to Irving Goh for offering feedback on my translation.2 Marcia Cavalcante tells me that the usage varies regionally in Brazil. But she is certain that the use of você in this text corresponds to a certain distinction or an emphasis. I’m not the same reader depending on the address. This is what bothers and intrigues me.3 Translator’s note: in French Nancy writes “d’être” and “de naître,” which rhyme, which also happens in Portuguese between ser and nascer.4 Translator’s note: “I know that after you read me it’s hard to reproduce my song by ear, it’s not possible to sing it without having learned it by heart” (Lispector, Água Viva 74).5 Fernanda Bernardo tells me that at first the title of the book was going to be Atrás do pensamento: monólogo com a vida. Behind Thought: Monologue with Life. How to understand “with”? Is life mixed in with the monologue or is it addressed to it? In the latter case, the reader is life. I am life. Is this why you say you live me? could I be the life you live? the reading of (the) writing?6 Translator’s note: Nancy writes au fil de la plume, literally “as the quill goes,” C.L. writes “ao correr da mão,” “as the hand goes.” The English translation reads “I write to you wherever my hand leads” (Lispector, Água Viva 46).7 Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji; Pushkin, The Stone Guest; Lucretius, De natura rerum (On the Order of Things); Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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