Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector: Água Viva and A Breath of Life

In the essay “On Writing: Which Reveals Nothing” (1994), written almost twenty years after the publication of The Literary Absolute (1978) that is coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and which touches on German Romanticism, Jean-Luc Nancy would suggest that we move beyond Romanticism.¹ According to Nancy in this essay, Romanticism, invested in a “making poetic of the world” (71), is no longer of critical pertinence to the twentieth century and beyond. The contemporary world is concerned with something else, with “being in the world” (71), which is to say, concerned with being engaged with the real, present world and what it brings to us – all things good and bad, instead of evading or repressing all that by constructing an imaginary world of a bygone era. As Nancy suggests, contemporary literature should reflect, if not respond to, that concern. In other words, literature, instead of inscribing either an idealistic or nostalgic world, to which one could turn and in which one could at most only textually dwell so as to escape from the discontents of the actual world, must write in a way that approximates itself as best as possible to the mode of existing at the present time, highlighting as well the complexities, if not the harsh or raw truths, of that existence in relation to the world and others. That is what must be understood when Nancy says that contemporary literature must be a writing that seeks “to identify life with writing and writing with life” (76). This identification has nothing to do, I repeat, with a representation of life through which one returns to an old world, the idealism of which is but of an imaginary order; it has nothing to do with inscribing “the niceties of taste” with regard to life, and that is what Nancy means when he says that literature after Romanticism puts an “end to the belief that life could be written (as narrative or effusiveness)” (“Roger Laporte” 80).

That identification of life and writing, moreover, cannot be taken in any literal sense, for Nancy will quickly explicate that there is always an incongruity between writing and life; or better, each is never adequately commensurable to the other. According to Nancy, “life is indeed writing, and that it has to be written, but because writing and life do not attain their sense, therefore do not attain one another” (“On Writing” 77). Nancy will continue to say that “this sense is not a sense,” meaning that the sense in question in writing and life goes beyond intelligible meaning, which may be comprehensively captured either by signification or logic; at the same time, though, “[by] the fact that it is not a sense lies its sense” (“On Writing” 77). In other words, despite the difficulty posed by writing’s inadequation to life (and vice versa), one must persist in that endeavor to write, through which the sense of life could be to some extent inscribed, no matter how minimal that extent might be, since that inadequation is but part of experiencing sense, experiencing the sense of life. “The sense of existence,” therefore, is “indefinitely to be inscribed,” Nancy asserts (“Roger Laporte” 80).² To be sure (again), one is not committed to “prettifying sense” here (“Roger Laporte” 81). The form of writing that interests Nancy is not concerned with a poetics that would put in place some form of dialectics that begins with a lost sense and ends with the recovery of that sense in some sublated or sublimated form. In place of that “metaphysical poetics” (“The Necessity of Sense” 112), Nancy calls for a “poetics of being or of being born in the sense that they are, born of meaning where meaning is absent, arising from and for nothing” (“Robert Antelme’s Two ‘Phrases’” 127). For that poetics, Nancy will state that “in the minute interval” between understanding that the implication of life and writing is not about meaning as we know it and realizing that it is nonetheless that non-intelligible sense that links life and writing, “it is necessary...