Abstract
It is a truism, that we are not self-created beings, that each of us has been singularly brought into the world by others, that we did not beget ourselves. From the Biblical image of the fall of humankind to Heidegger’s existential schema of the “fallenness” of human existence, what it is to be has been reflected upon in terms of what it is to have been not self-created. To have been marks our being, and yet, we only come to know, or realize, our own created existence belatedly, after the fact, in a sudden awareness that we have already been before we have been for ourselves. This realization of having been born is often experienced in a register of emotional shock, as the trauma of creation. As a trauma, it is structured by the disjointed time of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. The “shock” of having been born is only experienced as an affect after the fact, even as this fact must have occurred before; the affect is disjointed from the shock even as the shock can only affect us afterwards. Through an exploration of the literary writings of Clarice Lispector, this paper examines the philosophical significance of the “emotional shock” of having been born. In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the anxiety of “being towards death” or Sartre’s nausea, I argue for the originality of Lispector’s conception of createdness in the radiance of its realization, as expressed in the pithy formulation: “the pain of creation, yet without the creation.”
Mein Leben ist das Zögern vor der Geburt.
—Kafka
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, p. 17. “Il y a dans le fait de naître une telle absence de nécessité, que lorsque’on y songe un peu plus que de coutume, faute de savoir comment réagir, on s’arrêtte à un soirire niais” Cioran, Oeuvres, (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 1281.
- 2.
Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, p. 4. “Nous ne courons pas vers la mort, nous fuyons la catastrophe de la naissance, nous nous démenons, rescapés qui essaient de l’oublier. La peut de la mort n’est que la projection dans l’avenir d’une peur qui remonte à notre premier instant.” Cioran, Oeuvres, (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 1271.
- 3.
The Trouble with Being Born, p. 22.
- 4.
The Trouble with Being Born, p. 15.
- 5.
For example, Rosi Braidotti’s generic statement: “In her choice of language, Lispector echoes the century-old tradition of mystical ascesis, but also moves clearly out of it. G.H. symbolizes a new postmodern kind of materialism: one that stresses the materiality of all living matter in a common plane of coexistence without postulating a central point of reference or of organization for it. The emphasis is on the forces, the passions, and not on the specific forms of life. In other words, I think that Lispector is better read with Spinoza and Nietzsche via Deleuze than as Christian mystic” (Nomadic Subjects, p. 120). Benjamin Moser, however, proposes without further elaboration: “The result [The Passion According to G.H.], which might be called mystical Spinozism or religious atheism, is her richest paradox yet” (p. 262) and thinks of her God as “nothing” and “everything: Life” as “a Jewish definition” (p. 268).
- 6.
As an example of the former, Luisa Muraro, “Commento alla Passione Secondo G.H. di Clarice Lispector,” in: Le Amiche di Dio: Scritti di Mistica Femminile, (Napoli: D’Auria, 2002); for the latter, Adriana Cavarero, “La passione della differenza,” in: Storia delle passioni, ed. S. Finzi (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1995), who characterizes Lispector’s mysticism as “ormai oggetto di una sconfinata letteratura specialistica di grande interesse.”
- 7.
For example: Helene Cixious observes that Lispector “has treated as no one else to my knowledge all the possible positions of a subject in relation to what would be ‘appropriation,’ use and abuse of owning.” In this “dis-appropriation,” or, in the term proposed here: neutralization, Lispector’s narrative pursues a “relentless process of de-selfing” and “de-egoization.” Entirely disregarded, however, in Cixious’ appropriation of Lispector, the divestment, detachment, and abandonment of the self from herself, her arranged world, and her relation to others—her becoming-nothing—accedes to the living nothingness of God and living hell of materiality. [get] [130].
- 8.
The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 168.
- 9.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 169.
- 10.
As Renata Wasserman remarks: “the reference to the Gospels and the representation of the Passion, as well as the themes of a desire for infinity and for transfiguration present in the novel make a reading in terms of religion almost obligatory; specifically, given not only the thematic material as the terminology, the novel invites a reading in terms of a tradition of mysticism, that Benedito Nunes addresses with clarity and erudition.” Central at the Margin: Five Brazilian Women Writers (Bucknell: Bucknell University Press, 2007), p. 123.
- 11.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), p. 76.
- 12.
Rosi Braidotti describes this itinerary towards “otherness” as passing through different transgressions of boundaries: racial, class, style of life, inhuman, animal, and cosmic. “Femminismo, corporeità e diferenza sessuale,” in: Questioni di teoria femminista, ed. P. Bono (Milan: Edizioni La Tartaruga, 1993). See also Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Chapter Four.
- 13.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), pp. 63–63: “Seja apenas empregado para liberar a alma de suas limitações pelo conhecimento, ou também para uni-la a divindade, o ascetismo e um método que visa fundamentalmente ao sacrifício do eu, extirpando o senso de propriedade da criatura humana em relação a si mesma.”
- 14.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), p. 64.
- 15.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), p. 76: “O estado de indiferenciação orgianco (dionisiaco), desindividuando o sujeito […]”
- 16.
Max Scheler, Schriften aus dem Nachlass, Band II, ed. M. Frings (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1979), p. 251 ff.
- 17.
“It is a species (or kind) of black, sacred, and primitive communion, which ritualizes the consummated sacrifice.”
- 18.
My thanks to Victor Portugal for bringing these resonances to my attention.
- 19.
O drama da linguagem, p. 65.
- 20.
Cited by Nunes, O drama da linguagem, p. 64.
- 21.
Bastide’s understanding of participation bears the imprint of Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of “participation mystique” as a defining trait of “pensée primitive.”
- 22.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 61.
- 23.
Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” in: Heterologies. Discourse on the Other, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 1986), p. 90.
- 24.
For this argument, see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): “The hypothesis is that there is too much discontinuity between what the mediaeval Neoplatonic apophaticist meant by the ‘mystical’ element in theology and life and what modern people have come to mean by ‘mysticism,’ to permit of the common assumption that Western Christianity possesses a single ‘mystical tradition’ embracing both […] At its boldest, my hypothesis is that modern interpretation has invented ‘mysticism’ and that we persist in reading back the terms of that conception upon a stock of Mediaeval authorities who knew of no such thing—or, when they knew of it, decisively rejected it” (p. 7). “I have argued that not even in The Cloud of Unknowing […] is the apophatic ‘unknowing’ to be described as the experience of negativity […]; rather it is to be understood as the negativity of experience (the absence of experience). The apophatic is not to be described as the ‘consciousness of the absence of God,’ not at any rate, as if such a consciousness were an awareness of what is absent” (p. 264).
- 25.
Anthony Steinbock, Phenomenology & Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 241.
- 26.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 7.
- 27.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 10. Nunes speaks of “‘não-entendimento’ dos místicos.”
- 28.
The Darkness of God, p. 201. Giles of Rome, Ordinatio, 1 Prol, Fol. 8raB, cited in A Companion to Giles of Rome, ed. Charles Briggs and Peter Eardley (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 44.
- 29.
Roger Bastide, Le sacré sauvage, (Paris: Stock programme ReLIRE, 1997), p. 11. These lines are (perhaps) echoed in the final line of Lispector’s narrative. In the Spanish translation of Bastide’s essay: “una transformación de la personalidad, que se vacía de su ser propio, de sus instintos, de sus tendencias distintivas, para de cierta forma salir de sí misma y comulgar con el objeto de su adoración.” Roger Bastide, “Um misticismo sem deuses,” in: O Sagrado selvagem e outros ensaios, trad. Dorothée de Bruchard (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), p. 14. Whether or not Lispector knew of Bastide’s writings remains unknown to me. However, see Fernanda Peixoto, “DIÁLOGO INTERESSANTÍSSIMO: Roger Bastide e o modernismo,” in: Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1999): 93–109. Peixoto remarks: “De sua pena [Bastide], poucos escaparam. José Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Orígenes Lessa, Augusto Frederico Schmidt e uma infinidade de outros nomes conheceram umas linhas do crítico. Em relação aos artistas plásticos propriamente ditos, analisou obras de Tarsila do Amaral, Di Cavalcanti, Rebolo, Segall e outros.”
- 30.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 3 (translation modified) “– – – – – – estou procurando, estou procurando.”
- 31.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 9.
- 32.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 10.
- 33.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 10.
- 34.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 13.
- 35.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 15.
- 36.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 16.
- 37.
See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God, Chap. 1.
- 38.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 59.
- 39.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 4.
- 40.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 4.
- 41.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 24.
- 42.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 23.
- 43.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 22.
- 44.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 20.
- 45.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 16.
- 46.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 24.
- 47.
The Passion According to G.H., p. 23.
- 48.
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 290.
- 49.
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 296.
- 50.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 27.
- 51.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 34.
- 52.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), p. 60.
- 53.
Benedito Nunes, O drama da linguagem, (São Paulo: Quiron, 1973), “A barata que o provocou nada tem de entidade alegórica.”
- 54.
For the appearance of a cockroach in Lispector’s other novels, see Benjamin Moser, Why This World. A Biography of Clarice Lispector, (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 263–264.
- 55.
For this reading of H. P. Lovecraft, see Mark Fischer, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), p. 19ff.
- 56.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 54.
- 57.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 59.
- 58.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 55.
- 59.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 74.
- 60.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 90.
- 61.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 93.
- 62.
Claire Varin, Langues de feu. Essai sur Clarice Lispector, (Laval: Editions Trois, 1990), p. 74. Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Clair Varin for helping me locate a copy of her wonderful (and regrettably hard to find) book.
- 63.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 86.
- 64.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 141.
- 65.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 121.
- 66.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 183.
- 67.
The Passion According to G.H, p. 181.
References
Bastide, R. 1997. Le Sacré Sauvage. Paris: Stock programme ReLire.
Cavarero, A. 1995. La Passione della Differenza. In Storia delle Passioni, ed. S. Finzi. Bari: Editore Laterza.
Cioran, E. 1973. De l’inconvénient d’être né. Paris: Gallimard.
Cioran, E.M. 2012. The Trouble with Being Born. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.
Lispector, C. 2012. The Passion According to G.H. New York: New Directions.
Muraro, L. 2002. Commento alla Passione Secondo G.H. di Clarice Lispector. In Le Amiche do Dio: Scritti di Mistica Femminile. Napoli: D’Auria.
Nunes, B. 1973. O Drama da Linguagem. São Paulo, Quiron.
Scheler, M. 1979. Schriften aus dem Nachlass. Band II. Edited by M. Frings. Bern: Francke Verlag.
Warner, M. 2006. Phantasmagoria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Warren, N. (2021). The Radiant Indifference of Being: The Mystic Fable of The Passion According to G.H.. In: Falcato, A., Graça da Silva, S. (eds) The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56021-8_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56021-8_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-56020-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-56021-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)