The Failure of Language Amidst the Joy of Grace

Reading Lispector’s Água Viva as a Philosophy of (Non)religious Insight

Bibliographic Data

ID3774806
AuthorsColby Dickinson
Year2023
Volume28
Issue2
Pages102-112
Publication date2023-03-04
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAngelaki (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0969725x.2023.2192070
OpenAlexW4366296836
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited7

For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless experience of grace, and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God.Keywords: mysticismredoublingimpersonalgracelove disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 As the thought continues in A Breath of Life: “Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void,” as well as, later in the book, Then – having to surrender myself to the Nothing – the miracle happened: I could taste like food in my mouth the flavor of Everything. This flavor spread like light and the sensation of taste throughout my entire body, and I surrendered to God, with the delirium of a soul drinking water. (Lispector, Breath of Life 36, 138)In another place, she will go so far as to suggest that “When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul – and that emptiness is all I can ever have” (Lispector, Hour 6).2 There is a strong theoretical resonance with her depictions of potentiality and the almost mystical register of philosophical thought on display in Agamben, Potentialities.3 As she continues, “I’m in the category of things that cannot be categorized” (Lispector, Breath of Life 60).4 Oh, how uncertain everything is. And yet part of the Order. I don’t even know what I’ll write to you in the next sentence. We never say the final truth. May whoever knows the truth come forward. And speak. We shall listen contritely. (Lispector, Água Viva 61)5 On her experience of words, she continues: We desperately try to find an identity of our own and the identity of the real. And if we understand ourselves through the symbol that is because we have the same symbols and the same experience of the thing itself: but reality has not synonyms. (Lispector, Água Viva 73)6 Lispector frequently writes of her feeling a kindred spirit with animals, going so far as to suggest that people who fear animals are afraid of themselves (Crônicas 171

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Glory · Immanence · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sensibility · Sociology · Undoing · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Philosophy

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