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Abstract. Clarice Lispector's narrative in The Passion According to G.H. is a literary enactment of phenomenology at the limit, an attempt at reimagining the world from nonadult and other-than-human points of view. I interpret the term "passion," woven into Lispector's textual production, in terms of the existential intensity that accompanies the transformation of experience as it departs from its human modality. Offering a phenomenological description of such self-alienation, I pay particular attention to metamorphoses in the perception of time, space, and life.
Is love when you don't give a name to things' identity?
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H., like much of Clarice Lispector's writing, hovers on the razor-thin and fragile edge between description and the ineffable, between existence and nonexistence, between the world and its disappearance, between losing and finding oneself. It is no wonder, then, that a plethora of contradictions explode from the very first lines of the narrative that passionately wishes to share an obscure experience, of which the narrator herself is not certain-"I am not sure I even believe in what happened to me," she says (p. 3)1-and which she is unable to organize into clearly delineated forms or molds, without losing its singularly chaotic core. To abandon oneself to such disorganization is to let go of one's world, to witness the crumbling of the old structures of meaning, without as of yet anticipating anything that would take their place.
And passion is, among other things, the pathos of this undergoing that refuses the evidence, wherein phenomenology would find a confirmation of empty intentions. There is no surer way of losing oneself than by losing one's world. I no longer recognize who I am if the coordinates of my existence persistently slip away from my fingertips, if, that is, the time and place of my life are stripped of their familiarity. At issue in Lispector's work is this massive loss of world, which is neither entirely negative-a pure privation-nor the dawn of a new positivity-an assured promise of a new form, a quasi-messianic expectation of a transformation. Hers is a literary phenomenology at the limit: a description of the impossibility of description, an experience of the destruction of the life-world, a signification of potential...