The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle

4. Knowledge Beyond Borders: Clarice Lispector Chronicles Affect in Dictatorship Brazil

Sinto-me tão perto de quem me lê. O contato com o outro ser através da palavra escrita é uma glória [. . .] Como explicar que me sinto mãe do mundo? Mas dizer “eu vos amo” é quase mais do que posso suportar! Dói. Dói muito ter um amor impotente. [I feel so close to those who read me. Contact with the other through the written word is glorious [. . .] How do I explain that I feel like the mother of the world? But saying “I love you” is almost more than I can bear! It hurts. It hurts a lot to have an impotent love.] —Clarice Lispector, “Adeus, vou-me embora,” O Jornal do Brasil, April 20, 1968 I mean, suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know that we don’t already know? —Eve Sedwick, Touching Feeling (123) The one for whom I write (to whom I say tu), out of compassion for what he has just read, will need to weep, then he will laugh, for he will have recognized himself. —Georges Bataille, quoted in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (23) Knowledge Beyond Borders Clarice Lispector Chronicles Affect In Dictatorship Brazil  4  139 140 THE EVERYDAY ATLANTIC Throughout this book I have argued that what I call meanwhile reading, which refers to the idea that the subject is inscribed in multiple epistemologies that come together—and sometimes enter into conflict— in the moment of reading, can allow us to think about the subject of the everyday Atlantic as palimpsestic, always occupying multiple knowledges, and therefore multiple understandings of community, at the same time, if only momentarily. From this perspective the nationstate or any hegemonic structure is dismantled on a daily basis as a primary or singular category of power over the subject. Analyses that leave out this multiplicity of knowledges tend to oversimplify—and therefore rehegemonize—the more complex understanding of everyday life in the Atlantic world that the figure of the palimpsest denotes. The last two chapters demonstrated how the corporeal experience and ethical imagination of meanwhile reading suggested by the newspaper chronicle identify the limits of a singular understanding of power over the subject of knowledge in the nation-state. They also showed how in the process the chronicle rethinks the nation and imperialism by dialoging with external intellectual influences and creating new community imaginaries that go beyond state borders. This chapter continues that discussion. Here, though, I concentrate on the affective aspect of the palimpsestic subject, which questions the power of even the most repressive regimes— in this case the military government in power in Brazil during the second half of the twentieth century—to produce and maintain a particular subjective identity. This chapter argues that, from within the censored newspaper, novelist Clarice Lispector’s chronicles theorize the knowing subject as at once within and beyond the linguistic structures of power that uphold the Brazilian government. They do so by presenting an affective notion of knowledge distinct from that circumscribed by the nation-state. Rather than simply focusing on an external relationship between Brazil and another culture, however, Lispector often presents a way of thinking the subject beyond the ideological borders of the nation-state by turning her focus inward. Inverting the transatlantic movement between continental epistemologies that we saw in the last two chapters, Lispector’s intimate and local focus on herself, her family, and the immediate carioca community challenges the construct of national ideology as a coloniality of power.1 This occurs, moreover, at a moment when Cold War rhetoric and politics imposed a globalized ideology on the Atlantic space, erasing Knowledge Beyond Borders 141 certain borders and overdetermining others. Lispector’s deployment of affect therefore complicates traditional Western notions of rational epistemology rooted in the subject-object or self-other divide that—as I showed in chapter 1—upholds national or imperial structures of power, by introducing affect as a kind of relational knowledge that cannot be discursively or ideologically explained...