Dimensions of the Impersonal in Clarice Lispector

Wojciech Sawala is an assistant professor in the Department of Portuguese at Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, Poland. Comparatist and Latin Americanist, he specializes in the continent’s twentieth-century narrative classics, including Borges, Cortázar, Lispector, and Guimarães Rosa. His research interests include biopolitics, postsecularism and Jewish messianism.

Sawala’s journey into “impersonality” in Lispector’s work offers a profound insight on the hiatus between subjectivity and “life itself,” that is, the “inhuman” areas of existence. His singular analysis enhances our understanding of modernist literature while illuminating significant ethical implications. It is, thus, an essential contribution to contemporary literary debates.– Diana Klinger, Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Universidade Federal Fluminense, BrazilWith a fresh and au courant theoretical approach, this study underscores incisively and masterfully Clarice Lispector’s ideological concerns regarding the invisible and unjust social and racial relations in Brazil which, for the most part, have heretofore been critically scant or neglected in her work.– Nelson H. Vieira, University Professor and Professor of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and Judaic Studies, Brown University, USA

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1. Constructing/Dismantling PersonhoodHumanity as a Dispositif“Human Setup”: On the History of the Notion of a PersonPersona as Human’s Ontological StatusBeyond the Dispositif of a Person: What RemainsEthics of ImpersonalityChapter 2. Depersonalizations: Modernism and Jewish TraditionModernist DepersonalizationsFernando Pessoa: Depersonalization and AbuliaHermann Hesse: Through Multiplicity Toward UnityImpersonality in Brazilian ModernismClarice Lispector: A Writer, a Mystic, a MessianistChapter 3. Dialectics of Personhood: Infancy and PubertyTelephone as a Synecdoche of the DispositifA Person as a Dispositif: Humanization as Banishment from BeingHuman Life as a Dialectic of Personalization and DepersonalizationFetal and Infant Life as an Impersonal State Domestication of Child, Animal, and GodMaturing as the Emergence of a Person from an Impersonal BackgroundChapter 4. Crisis of Personhood: Horror and EcstasyHome and Ontological SecurityThe Vegetal Space of ImpersonalityFreedom and BeautyThe Horror of Impersonality: Lispector and the “Heart of Darkness”The Ascetic-Mystical Experience: From “the Self” Toward NothingnessLayers and SeductionBiological Life as an Object of DisgustChapter 5. Impersonalist Ethics: Toward Solidarity with the Bare LifeThe Political Dimension of the Bare LifeEncounter with the Cockroach: Approaching the Bare Life Literary Study of Conditions for “Affirmative Biopolitics” Messianic Coda: “We shall be inhuman…”BibliographyIndex