Clarice Lispector's Perversion

A brief note

I used to think a lot about Clarice Lispector, but not for a while. She came back into my thoughts like an uninvited guest. I have all these notes on her, her writing, that I hadn't checked for a while. When I went back over them I found that my thoughts on her hadn't changed, at least not drastically, but my infatuation with her has certainly cooled. When I first encountered her she intoxicated me, took me over. Now I'm relatively indifferent, at least emotionally. She continues to fascinate me, however, and needless to say I still consider her one of the greatest writers of the last century.

Clarice Lispector couldn't decide what she was. The "was" of the thing isn't known to us, the "is" when we could express it as "is", even harder. She made sure that we can't grasp her, even in death. Only in death, the real limits of a person, their borders, can someone be (at least partially) understood. But as their memory locks into historical time the perverse premises appear: at once more crystal, definite, intelligible, while presence dwindles and washes into general light, the illuminated index of things we know as the history of people. Lispector, to her readers, is a little like Napoleon, a presence that refuses to shrink away. "I want to possess the atoms of time", she writes, "and to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature". Benjamin Moser thinks this is a Spinozist comment, and I respectfully disagree. "the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now." She says: "I am present. I want to hold the present. I want to know myself. I want to be being. I want myself." She wants to be the thing she is, which is present, presencing, being-there, but she wants to apprehend this presence, to set it up, make it intelligible. Lispector makes it easy to charge her with narcissism: the apprehension (setting-up and drawing-in) of herself follows a track parallel to Narcissus, who ignores the ‘Him’ in the pool, sees another, and is apprehended. Narcissism is not vanity, it is enthusiasm that has fallen asleep to itself. Narcissists never see themselves, they falter and settle for image, get lost in it, dwell in the single instant, overtaking, conquering, a totalisting present instant where and when the victim is captured. This instant reproduces itself forever, forward and back, up and down, total override, becomes the transcendental frame of every instant and therefore of everything experienced, and locks the victim out of instants into a frame which deteriorates, encodes experience outright. It's what makes experience a “series of instants”, frames per second: an arbitrary dam in the river that overflows and destroys life — the thing which delivers the victim to life annihilates any other path of deliverance, any other frame. This is the worldview of the pervert. Lispector desires not to gaze at herself and see another, she desires to locate herself in the gaze and dwell in every instant, and be "present", in the world, she desires to "be-there". She says (in so many words) "I am present. I want to hold the present. I want to know myself. I want to be being. I want myself." She says this when she says "What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look." There is agony in this sentence. She wants to be perceived instantaneously, immediately, and yet here are already 3 mediations: the mediation of talking-hearing, the mediation of writing-reading, the mediation of presencing-seeing. Here she wants to be perceived "like" when one encounters immediately. Why would she ask this of me? Really she says: "I want you to be intoxicated by me and I refuse to be analysed. Don't look too hard, read too much, hear me too loudly. Otherwise you might become aware of my perversion." Yet she has provided ample material for her to be analysed. So she's being coy. In this screaming out not to be seen there is really a demand for the exact opposite. When Lispector asks something of you, do the opposite.