Tracing an Ethics of Risk With Clarice Lispector

This essay explores the sense and embrace of risk in Clarice Lispector’s writing. Beginning with a newspaper contribution from her Crônicas, the essay foregrounds the dimension of repetitive tracing to transmit the notion that the risk of living is ongoing, inescapably, but that there is a possibility of stepping forward to embrace this risk differently. The essay then turns to a scene that captures this gesture well: the scene of a woman bathing in the sea, which Clarice returned to and published several times. This gesture is compared to philosophical considerations of risk in terms of what escapes reason and calls for a different disposition – of faith (Søren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal) or ecstasy (Georges Bataille). The essay examines the particular notions of joy and saber that Clarice insists on as the consequence of risk, and it explores different responses to this joy’s discovery in Clarice’s fiction, showing their relation to what psychoanalysis calls “feminine jouissance.” This joy is a human experience that exceeds cultural formatting. Clarice’s writing, I suggest, is traversed by a nomadic voice beyond meaning whose work bears a striking resemblance to that of drawing and the voice in Willy Apollon’s account of Haitian Vodou. I propose that writing in Clarice Lispector is the field of an ethics of risk insofar as it welcomes, upholds, and gives what has been excluded from language.Keywords: riskrepetitionjoyClarice Lispectornowpsychoanalysis disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 She is known by her first name in Brazil and increasingly among her readers. After decades of reading and writing on her work, this is my first essay referring to her mostly as Clarice.2 A full account of this network of risco across Clarice’s production would require more space than available here, where I focus on showing the ethical stakes of risk in her writing.3 Its first version appears in Near to the Wild Heart. Pena examines its ontological revelation (75–76). In “Sea-Bathing,” the crônica of 25 January 1969, Clarice relates the childhood memory of an extremely similar ritual at Olinda, led by her father (Discovering 224–25).4 Gilles Deleuze also makes this point in discussing the example of learning to swim to study Spinoza’s Ethics. See his Seminar of 3 February 1981.5 In “See the Neverbeforeseen,” Cixous reads Água Viva and its retracing-reading by Horn in the installation Rings of Clarice Lispector. Cixous observes Horn’s spiral tracing of Clarice’s phrases “Now is the domain of now. And as long as the improvisation lasts, I am being born” as “a single instant in its passage” (“See” 70). On the notion of captar as transmission of what escapes words, see Negrete, “Water.”6 On Água Viva’s “atrás do pensamento,” see Nancy’s essay in this issue and Schuback, Atrás.7 Horne examines this stance through a scene near the end of Clarice’s The Hour of the Star, where Macabéa meets her fate, as one in favor of “minor futures” (Horne 18–19).8 Many of Clarice’s characters are developed in relation to a strong sense of loss, and examples of them getting lost in an experience that nothing can shore up abound. Virgínia, for instance, is introduced with her “insoluble vagueness as the only reality that for her should always be the lost one” (Lispector, Chandelier 9) yet she “had never lost the magic” (9). The novel underscores a series of losses throughout her life, including that of her strength with the loss of virginity, which her name evokes.9 I examined the exit from ordinary life toward “the impersonal” and “beatitude” in “Approaching Impersonal Life with Clarice Lispector.”10 Clarice’s story “Where were You Last Night?” features a nocturnal, trance-like scene with an androgynous godlike presence, commanding and speaking to an ecstatic multitude atop a mountain. At one point “the She-he emanated the strong scent of crushed jasmine because it was the night of a full Moon. Voodoo or witchcraft” (Lispector, Complete 464).11 Moser points out Clarice’s name hiding in the names of female characters of hers, such as Lóri and Lucrécia (33

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