Lispector’s Halo : life contemplating itself in the hour of the star

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2023

Authors

Jung, Daae (Author) Other; Guimarães, João Paulo (Author) FLUP

Journal

Title: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Vol. 28 No. 3

Pages: 33-44

ISSN: 0969-725X

Publisher: Routledge e Taylor & Francis

Indexing

Scopus

MLA International Bibliography

Worldcat OCLC

Other information

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192060

Abstract (EN): In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector’s view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben’s notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one’s living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific