Choreographies of Consent: Clarice Lispector’s Epistemology of Ignorance

Rocío Pichon-Rivière (bio)

Abstract

This essay argues that, after studying law, Clarice Lispector never abandoned her engagement with political theory, and shows that her fiction and chronicles were a continuation of her philosophy of law by other means. Lispector developed an epistemology of ignorance through the analysis of two key social practices: “choreographies of consent” and “orchestrated oblivion.” In light of a 1941 article published in a law school journal, the essay traces the development of Lispector’s increasingly complex conceptions of law and examines how she adapted them when historical events forced her to confront willful ignorance as a pervasive condition of possibility for the social reproduction of injustice.

Introduction

Scholars rarely mention that Lispector—one of Brazil’s most prominent modernist writers—was a lawyer. This frequent omission suggests that her relation to the law was external to her literary work. This essay argues the opposite: I claim that Lispector’s literature was a continuation of her philosophy of law by other means precisely because it allowed her to narrate the gestures and feelings that constitute the outside of legal discourse.¹ In doing so, she enticed her readers to see what remains unspoken in the language of the law as its implicit historical conditions of possibility.² Whether the law is sanctioned by a secular State or enforced in religious communities through moral consensus, her concern had to do with the legitimization of such law in social rituals of consent and approval. In an early essay published in 1941when she was a student in law school, titled “Observações sobre o fundamento do direito de punir” (“Observations on the foundation of the right to punish”³), Lispector explores the continuities between moral and secular law. She makes the case that historically one institution leads to the other and that moral law and positive law share a common genealogy in the invention of the right to punish (“Observações”). The essay exposes the lack of foundation of the right to punish and hoped to prove that punishment was a dubious ritual that served to conceal rather than heal injustice. With the exception of this essay on crime and punishment, which makes analytical arguments against the letter of modern philosophies of right, Lispector developed her philosophy of law mostly in her fiction. Literature provided her the freedom to describe and narrate the spaces of law rather than replicating the language of the law in its redundant abstraction. In the ambivalent spaces of law, silent yet efficient gestures can be grasped or imagined as an outside to its scripture, thereby challenging and subverting its (often) well-intended meaning. I argue that the underlying phenomenological analyses of affective moods in the spaces of law in Lispector’s writings articulate a progressive series of theses that together compose an epistemology of ignorance. Simply put, an epistemology of ignorance examines the structural mechanisms through which society lies to itself.⁴ Lispector’s fiction focuses not only on what is said and what remains unsaid, but also observes with an anthropological gaze the choreographies of heads bowed down in shame or denial. Lispector’s engagement with these and other performances of powerfully constitutive forms of ignorance delineate the social and material conditions of possibility for the criminal justice system as we know it.

In what follows, I focus first on what I call “choreographies of consent”: the narration of the gestures that performatively organize the social practice of moral justification regarding a decision. Choreographies of consent are the link between Lispector’s philosophy of law and her epistemology of ignorance, and involve cognitive processes in a dance of agreements and omissions regarding the validity or applicability of a law. The short story “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor” (1960) serves as an example of this literary device that reappears in other texts as well. The second section examines Lispector’s critical phenomenology of ignorance as it is fleshed out in a chronicle about a case of police brutality titled “Mineirinho” (1962). In light of the epistemology of ignorance articulated there, this section proposes a reading of her novel, The Passion According to G.H. (1964), to introduce the concept of the entbildungsroman.⁵ The entbildungsroman is a literary genre that parodies the traditional bildungsroman and in doing so advances a theory of the place of ignorance within the processes of ideology reproduction.

Choreography of Furtive Consent

A study of the notion of injustice lies at the center of Lispector’s phenomenological descriptions of the spaces of law as they appear both in her fiction and in her non-fiction. Biographically, this concern goes back to her first political intuitions when she was a child living in Recife, a city in Brazil’s Northeast region—one of the poorest and most State-abandoned areas of the country. In contrast to Lispector’s glamorous public image as a sophisticated diva of literary modernism, her upbringing was quite humble. Her father—a Jewish student of the scriptures forced to migrate from a violently racist Russia, where his wife was unspeakably maimed—had to take manual work to feed his family upon arriving in Brazil. In a chronicle from 1968, Lispector recounts her first experiences of political rage that inspired her to become a lawyer. She visited the mocambos in Recife—the poor Black neighborhoods where the formerly enslaved lived—just a few decades after the abolition of slavery, where she had the opportunity to hear the inflamed speeches of social leaders calling out their unjust conditions. Lispector wrote that she “vibrated” as a child with the heat of those discourses and promised herself that when she grew up, she would become a defender of the rights of the most vulnerable.⁶ Yet after graduating from law school in 1943, she did not follow through on that promise. Instead, she followed her new husband on his diplomatic missions in North Africa, Europe, and finally Washington, D.C., where they spent seven years. In a letter to her sisters written in Paris in January 1947, Lispector confesses her disgust with the hypocrisy that had become her new way of life. She recognizes that the lies hidden in the excessive cordiality of diplomatic conversations are a type of drunkenness—one in which she can no longer see her best self.

Com a vida assim parece que sou “outra pessoa” em Paris. É uma embriaguez que não tem nada de agradável. Tenho visto pessoas demais, falado demais, dito mentiras, tenho sido muito gentil. Quem está se divertindo é uma mulher que eu detesto, uma mulher que não é a irmã de vocês. É qualquer uma. (Correspondências 115)

In such a life it seems as if I am “another person” in Paris. It is a drunkenness that brings no satisfaction. I have seen too many people, talked too much, told lies, have been too gentle. The one having fun is a woman that I hate, a woman who is not your sister. She is a nobody.

The delicate drunkenness of diplomacy suggests sophisticated choreographies of politeness that worked as a sedative for the rage of her youth. In her letter, Lispector seems to have surrendered to this intoxication with the sweet shame of an addict. Her being muito gentil—excessively gentle and gentile—begins to describe the tone of the choreographies of social oblivion that eventually became the theme of her fiction as well as of some of her chronicles. All her writings explore insistently how it is cognitively possible to forget what one used to know well.

In an autobiographical essay, “Literatura e justiça” (“Literature and Justice”), Lispector comments on the reason she never wrote under the guise of engaged literature, like so many of her contemporaries in the Latin American Boom. Her essay explains her intellectual motives to produce instead an epistemology of ignorance:

Desde que me conheço o fato social teve em mim importância maior do que qualquer outro: em Recife os mocambos foram a primeira verdade para mim. Muito antes de sentir “arte”, senti a beleza profunda da luta. Mas é que tenho um modo simplório de me aproximar ao fato social: eu queria era “fazer” alguma coisa, como se escrever não fosse fazer. … O problema de justiça é em mim um sentimento tão óbvio e tão básico que não consigo me surpreender com ele—e, sem me surpreender, não consigo escrever. E também porque para mim escrever é procurar. O sentimento de justiça nunca foi procura em mim, nunca chegou a ser descoberta, e o que me espanta é que ele não seja igualmente óbvio em todos.(Para não esquecer 25)

Ever since I knew myself the social fact had in me an importance more prominent than any other: in Recife the mocambos were for me the first truth. Long before feeling “art,” I felt the deep beauty of political struggle. But I have a simplistic way of approaching the social fact: I wanted to “do” something, as if writing was not doing. … The problem of justice is in me a feeling so obvious and so basic that I cannot manage to be surprised by it—and, without being surprised, I cannot write. And also because for me writing is seeking. I never had to seek for the feeling of justice within me, it was never a discovery, and the thing that terrifies me is that it is not equally obvious to others.

This passage resembles the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: without surprise and a certain lack of understanding there can be no thinking, because thinking begins as a search with an unknown destination. That certain circumstances are unjust is so obvious for Lispector that injustice does not require redundant representation. What remains a mystery is the willingness of others to remain ignorant about injustice despite its obvious presence.

Lispector best parodies redundancy as the structure of engaged literature in her posthumous novel, A hora da estrela (1977). There the narrator (a novelist whose words we read as he struggles to convey social facts) says he is interested in facts because they are “pedras duras” (hard rocks) and therefore inescapable (25). While some read in this a naturalization of poverty (Peixoto), the pleonasm in the expression “pedras duras” might rather be a reference to the redundancy inherent in the enterprise of representing the inescapable as such.⁷ If this is correct, the thesis is not that social injustice is itself inescapable, but that the truth about existing, contingent social injustice cannot be dissimulated effectively and should require no additional help to be visible unless something is cognitively off—something that I call here “ignorance.”

Lispector’s fictional inquiries both ask and seek to answer this fundamental question: how do people escape the inescapable truth of social injustice? And yet I want to challenge the simplicity of this distinction between herself and others, between those who can see injustice and those who remain ignorant. I want to foreground the tense subject position that Lispector articulates elsewhere, when she represents those whose lives perform a drunken ignorance despite showing glimpses that they know better. As we shall see in the chronicle “Mineirinho,” Lispector eventually self-represents as a subject defined by this dynamic contradiction, blurring the line that separates ignorance and knowledge.

After they left Europe, her husband took on a diplomatic position in Washington, D.C., where they stayed for seven years during the dawn of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. One can only imagine the conversations among the white diplomats as the orchestrated oblivion of racial injustice was interrupted by an increasingly organized movement and its public cry for justice. Lispector’s epistemology focuses on the ways in which it is cognitively possible to ignore what everybody knows. The drunkenness of diplomatic hypocrisy would become the examined subject of a theory about the orchestrated oblivion of injustice that organizes society despite the occasional glimpses of just political anger.⁸ In 1959 Lispector divorced her husband, left Washington, D.C., and returned to Brazil with her two children. In the following years, she published two texts that develop the question of the oblivion of injustice: a short story, “O crime do professor de matemática” (“The Crime of the Mathematics Professor”) (1960) and a chronicle about a case of police brutality, “Mineirinho” (1962), titled after the nickname of a man murdered in cold blood by a pack of policemen. In what follows, I read these together, next to the essay from 1941. In these works, Lispector shows links between punishment and oblivion and thereby ties the philosophy of law to the epistemological inquiry of a social production of ignorance.

The short story “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor” starts in medias res with the professor carrying a heavy bag of unknown contents, which represents an unspoken crime he has committed. He is trying to find redemption through a punishing ritual that he first has to design because “they hadn’t yet invented a punishment for the great crimes in disguise and for the profound betrayals.” (“Pois ainda não haviam inventado castigo para os grandes crimes disfarçados e para as profundas traições.” 83) If there is a crime in the story, the avowed crime of the mathematics professor was abandoning his dog, José. What this crime means as a metaphor is not fully revealed at first, except to the extent that it suggests an action (or inaction) not considered a crime or a sin in hegemonic culture that can still burden a conscience. The question of improving existent social norms, whether through mild reform or radical change, is ciphered here. To borrow Derrida’s expression, this story points to the problem of “a democracy to come.”⁹ What our current democracy tolerates can burden the conscience of someone who might dare to imagine a higher standard. Yet such a standard to come cannot be expressed in the idiom of present norms. Abandoning a dog is an inaction or oversight that can go unpunished, but some time after the fact, the professor begins to find this lack of punishment unbearable. Readers soon learn that there is a dead body of another dog in his bag that he wants to bury with full honors in order to redeem himself for the wrongdoing committed against his own dog. The moral release that he craves is a curious theatre of confession, punishment, and absolution: “tratava-se de tornar o fato ao máximo visível à superfície do mundo sob o céu. Tratava-se de expor-se e de expor um fato, e de não lhe permitir a forma íntima e impune de um pensamento” (80). (“It was a question of rendering the fact as visible as possible on the surface of the world beneath the heavens. It was a question of exposing himself and exposing a fact, and not allowing the intimate and unpunished form of a thought.”) The fact that not even the church—as his inner monologue states with mild desperation—would consider his behavior a sin leaves him without a ritual of punishment and divine grace that would allow him to forget that dog’s face.

From the story’s first sentence, the narrator contrasts the orderly entrance of Catholics into the church down below with the mathematician’s improvised and erratic dance of absolution up on the hill: he swings his heavy burden in search of the geometrically logical spot to bury his crime. His stream of consciousness follows the impromptu choreography of his feet meandering in the desert. In the distance, he sees the last tiny Catholics walking hastily into the church as “joyful bells peal once more summoning the faithful to the solace of punishment” (“Os sinos alegres tocaram novamente chamando os fiéis para o consolo da punição“) (80). This choreography of punishment brings solace to the faithful, and the professor tries to invent a new amendment to this kind of liturgy, to acknowledge his presumed crime and, by way of a gentile alchemy, to allow himself to release his guilt at last and forget his dog’s eyes.

The question of why he abandoned his dog vaguely haunts the professor’s stream of consciousness. Whether such a question could ever be answered, however, is not made clear in the story. At some point he remembers the excuses he had given himself when he made the decision. Trusting their validity no longer, he unveils the full scene of consent:

Abandonou-te com uma desculpa que todos em casa aprovaram: porque como poderia eu fazer uma viagem de mudança com bagagem e família, e ainda mais um cão, com a adaptação ao novo colégio e à nova cidade, e ainda mais um cão? ‘Que não cabe em parte alguma’, disse Marta prática. ‘Que incomodará os passageiros’, explicou minha sogra sem saber que previamente me justificava, e as crianças choraram, e eu não olhava nem para elas nem para ti, José. (Laços 83)

[I] abandoned you with an apology that everyone at home approved of: since how could I move to a new house with all that baggage and family, and on top of that a dog, while adjusting to a new high school and a new city, and on top of that a dog? “For whom there’s no room,” said Marta being practical. “Who’ll bother the other passengers,” reasoned my mother-in-law without being aware that she was preemptively justifying my plan, and the children cried, and I looked neither at them nor at you, José.

The universal claim in the first line (“with an apology that everyone at home approved of”) is immediately contradicted when we learn that the children were crying and that he avoided their gaze as well as the dog’s. This is a classic choreography of consent: the dance of rhetorical cooperation among those whose opinions are admitted in the consensus while their eyes follow rehearsed movements to avert excluded gazes. This kind of consent, which I would call furtive, is tautological: it averts precisely those gazes that presumably express a dissent.

As the professor directs his silent speech to the presumed victim of his crime, the verb in the second person singular points to another gesture, even if imaginary and belated: that of finally looking into the dog’s eyes, so to speak, acknowledging at last his formerly effaced interpellation. The universal predication at the beginning of the sentence contrasts with the direct address at the end: the first one legitimizes the act of abandonment, as hyperbolic (“everyone”) as it is false; the latter comes retrospectively and seems to open up the old wound of a truth that had been awkwardly averted. The falsity of the first is the truth of the second. The first follows the universality of the law; the second opens up the intimate interpellation of an ethics of the other.¹⁰ The first one soothes the angst of decision-making with the fantasy of final approval; the second haunts the decision-maker—from outside their discourse—with the uncanny temporality of an eternal recurrence that resists the attempted closure. This contrast between the linear temporality of erasure and the haunting, enduring truth of what happened is emphasized again when the professor realizes that he had done with the dog something that will last “forever,” with impunity evermore (“Só agora ele parecia compreender, em toda sua gélida plenitude, que fizera com o cão algo realmente impune e para sempre” 83).¹¹ With this realization, the theater of punishment that he had been staging reveals its vanity. He notices, “more mathematical still,” that the logic of his redemption is no better than the logic of his previous excuses and so he dramatically unburies the dog, under the heavens:

Olhou a cova coberta. Onde ele enterrara um cão desconhecido em tributo ao cão abandonado, procurando enfim pagar a dívida que inquietantemente ninguém lhe cobrava. Procurando punir-se com um ato de bondade e ficar livre de seu crime. Como alguém dá uma esmola para enfim poder comer o bolo por causa do qual o outro não comeu o pão.

Mas como se José, o cão abandonado, exigisse dele muito mais que a mentira … agora, mais matemático ainda, procurava um meio de não se ter punido. Ele não devia ser consolado. … E assim o professor de matemática renovara o seu crime para sempre.(84)

He looked at the covered grave. Where he had buried an unknown dog in tribute to the abandoned dog, attempting at last to repay the debt that distressingly no one was demanding. Attempting to punish himself with an act of kindness and be free of his crime. The way someone gives alms in order at last to eat the cake for which another went without bread.

Now, more mathematically still, he sought a way not to have punished himself … as if José, the abandoned dog, demanded much more from him than a lie. He must not be consoled. … And so the mathematics professor renewed his crime forever.

This final unearthing of the corpse of the anonymous dog that he no longer wants to bury coincides with the revelation of what his crime represents, as it bears the weight of a newly-introduced metaphor. The narrator compares the professor’s desire to be forgiven with the act of giving spare change as a way to seek absolution for being complicit with (and benefiting from) social inequity. Social injustice is also “the debt that distressingly no one was demanding.” As this passage suggests, the abandoned dog might represent those whose lives are treated as less than human with impunity, even if it might also evoke the position of non-human animals before the law.

In the profound arbitrariness of the self-inflicted penalty of burying a “strange and objective” dog, in relation to the crime of abandoning a different dog, one can read Lispector’s take on the modern notion of punishment: too impersonal and abstract to be a debt paid to the actual victim or to offer restorative justice and, as a matter of general principle, completely useless insofar as it does nothing to prevent similar events from taking place. As the young Lispector argues regarding positive law in her 1941 essay, the concept of punishment implicit in the criminal justice system is scientifically invalid for similar reasons: it does nothing to address the root of the problem, hence nothing to prevent the repetition of such acts in new generations; and it does not heal the wounded parties (healing being the only real form of addressing the hurt at the root of such conflicts). There she compares punishment with morphine: a mere palliative, rather than a cure, for society’s condition.¹² The 1941 essay states that there is no such thing as a right to punish, only a power to punish, and that the concept of a right to punish is the labor of “the first intelligent men.” (67) In her narrative, the genealogy of the right to punish goes back to “the first intelligent men” who lacked power individually (in a state of nature) and yet managed to build power by rhetorically claiming and physically executing a right to punish.

Though this short story explores the trope of punishment from the perspective of self-examination and religion, the professor’s mathematical method of reasoning works as a parable of the role of intelligence in both the concept and the institution of punishment. The arbitrary and cruel nature of punishment is sanitized and presented as a scientific necessity and considered just by a too-intelligent rhetoric that ultimately serves to distract attention from the real issue: “the crimes in disguise” (Laços 83) that are not listed in the penal code precisely to protect the status quo. The mathematics of the professor speaks to the loop of tautological reasoning in an institution concerned with conserving rather than eliminating injustice. This form of ignoring a crime in disguise is a kind of “ignorance that presents itself unblushingly as knowledge,” to borrow Charles Mills’s words, and its most complex and non-appealable expression is positive law (13). In the sphere of self-examination, as represented in this story, ignorance takes the form of a too-pristine rationalization that seeks to avert feeling—hence its morphine-like sedative effects.¹³

Immune to Knowledge: The Sonsos Essenciáis and the Entbildungsroman

In Lispector’s last interview, the interviewer asks her about which text she is most proud. From among her numerous novels and pitch-perfect short fiction, she mentions a chronicle titled “Mineirinho” that denounces police brutality (1977). The choreographies of averted gazes reappear in this text, which explicitly addresses an assassination that shook Rio de Janeiro in 1962. José Miranda Rosa, a.k.a. “Mineirinho,” the man executed in cold blood by the police, was already famous for his robberies, had been sentenced for murder, and later managed to escape the psychiatric detention center where he was imprisoned. After a manhunt that lasted several days and involved dozens of policemen, he was gunned down by a group of police officers. The morning after his death, the newspapers enumerate in gory detail the limbs and organs where each of the thirteen bullets had entered, intensifying the spectacularized horror of an assassination that was also a message for inhabitants of the slums in Rio. The day of his murder, many gathered to honor his body, choreographing an impromptu ceremony that the police dispersed with violence.¹⁴ Mineirinho’s notoriety was not due to his lawlessness; paradoxically, he was famous for his generous heart. He had earned the reputation of being the Robin Hood of the favelas in Rio. The people from the favelas seemed to love him despite his violence because of the redistributive justice he enacted. He was no ordinary criminal: his work was a mise-enabîme of the concept of crime, for his crimes were exercises of justice. They expressed his dissent from the social system that had marginalized and racialized him and others. The obscenity of his public death seemed to aim at punishing his redistributive justice efforts more than his crimes. It was an authoritative statement about the police force and its unconstitutional yet very real power to kill at gunpoint—and more, to control any revolt of the poor. This was sheer expressive violence as a sovereign act (Segato), and the violence of that expression shocked the public more than its message.¹⁵ The newspaper A Noite observed that the police disposed of his body “as if he were an animal” (“Polícia”) and reported that, after being wounded by the first gunshots, José Miranda Rosa had the strength to murmur, “Estão matando um homem” (“You’re killing a man”).

A month later, Lispector published a text about this execution in the cultural magazine Senhor at the request of the editor. It begins with an interpellation of its readers, as she claims to speak “como um dos representantes de nós” (“as a representative of us”):

É, suponho que é em mim, como um dos representantes de nós, que devo procurar por que está doendo a morte de um facínora. E por que é que mais me adianta contar os treze tiros que mataram Mineirinho do que os seus crimes … não matarás … Esta é a lei. Mas há alguma coisa que, se me fez ouvir o primeiro e o segundo tiro com um alívio de segurança, no terceiro me deixa alerta, no quarto desassossegada, o quinto e o sexto me cobrem de vergonha, o sétimo e o oitavo eu ouço com o coração batendo de horror, no nono e no décimo minha boca está trêmula, no décimo primeiro digo em espanto o nome de Deus, no décimo segundo chamo meu irmão. O décimo terceiro tiro me assassina—porque eu sou o outro. Porque eu quero ser o outro.(“Mineirinho” 112)

Yes, I suppose it is in myself, as one of the representatives of us, that I should seek the reasons for the pain felt after the death of a thug. And why does it make more sense to me to count the gunshots that killed Mineirinho rather than his crimes. … Thou shall not kill. … That is the law. But there is something that, if it makes me hear the first and the second gunshots with relief brought by a feeling of safety, at the third puts me on the alert, at the fourth unsettles me, the fifth and the sixth cover me in shame, the seventh and eighth I hear with my heart pounding in horror, at the ninth and tenth my mouth is trembling, at the eleventh I say God’s name in fright, at the twelfth I call my brother. The thirteenth shot murders me—because I am the other. Because I want to be the other.

Lispector signals that the form rather than the content of his assassination seemed out of place, as she witnessed the first two gunshots with relief: safe at last from the threat of him. She explains in that last interview that this text is constructed around the excessive shots that were not necessary to kill him. If, in retrospect, after the last bullet was shot, the first one can be resignified as unjust, this does not erase the fact that the first impression was relief. This admission is essential to understanding who is speaking. The morphine of punishment in this case has to do with numbing the fear of insecurity. Two precise shots would have provided that without conflict, but this should not be mistaken for peace.

Lispector’s chronicle finds its rhetorical power in its use of the first-person plural. Rather than accusing others in a blame game that could have implied her own innocence, the narrator does not disguise her complicity in a system that kills with predictable, unblushing regularity.¹⁶ Epistemologies of ignorance study the ways in which privileged social groups collaborate to assure that ignorance will prevail despite occasional encounters with knowledge of the perspectives and predicaments of the oppressed. Lispector’s inclusion of herself in the social group whose consciousness she condemns quite boldly implies that no amount of critical knowledge in and of itself will suffice to subtract her from that group.

The question of who exactly belongs to “us” is structured as an anaphora in both senses of the term: an insistent repetition and a pronoun whose reference in this case is not antecedent but oddly postponed. The device itself replicates the initial interpellation of the ominous death and works almost as an invitation, too polite to be explicit; the readers are welcome to decide whether they identify with this “us.” Chantal Mouffe—reading Carl Schmitt—says that any “us” presupposes a “them” (43). Here, “us” could name the readership of the magazine Senhor, an elite publication dedicated to the dissemination of modernist art. If “us” names the social class this audience represents, the contrasting “them” would then be the favelados. And yet there is no mention of “them” in this text. Quite on the contrary, this problematic word is avoided with care, and “us” is only juxtaposed with “him.” “Us” then could name the living—such is its initial vagueness. Or, in light of the story about the mathematics professor, the “us” might connote the universality of the law (as it is often proclaimed in constitutions or declarations of independence) in contrast to “him.”¹⁷ As in Lispector’s short story, the echo of one absent gaze interpellates the narrator, haunting the universality of a furtive consent and showing it to be false.

Later in the text—only after the last of the thirteen shots elicits an epiphany—a name for “us” is finally revealed. The chronicle defines “us” with a suggestive epithet: “os sonsos essenciais” (“the essential phonies”) (114).¹⁸ This translation is imprecise as the word “phony” does not fully capture the Portuguese “sonso,” a term that one would also use to translate the expression “playing dumb.” A sonso is someone who pretends to ignore something that he knows all too well. And yet it also connotes plain stupidity. The essential phonies, os sonsos essenciáis, are the political agents of a social charade. An intriguing question arises: why are these sonsos essential? They could be essential in the Aristotelian sense of being the principle of movement, just as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the sovereign State and its laws are the principles according to which the social body moves. The phonies would be essential, in this sense, as the political class with enough agency to decide what constitutes a crime and who gets to be executed while others stay safe. The term sonsos essenciais seems to imply as well that there are more sonsos, yet they are not essential: these would be the inessential, disposable sonsos.¹⁹

Lispector ciphers the difference between “us” and “him” in a formula: “Tudo o que nele foi violência é em nós furtivo” (“Everything that was violence in him is furtive in us”) (113). The adjective furtivo (in English, furtive, secretive) means something surreptitious or clandestine, done in a quiet and secretive way (Dicionário; Merriam Webster). There is again something untranslatable in this formula because the root of this word is also at play in the word furto, which means theft in Portuguese. Furto in legal terms is emphatically different from latrocínio; the latter means robbery as opposed to theft precisely inasmuch as violence is involved, and the punishment for it is therefore much harsher. “Tudo o que nele foi violência é em nós furtivo” means that we are also thieves, but the kind of theft at stake is one without violence, or a violence with no visible author in the eyes of the law. A more untranslatable notion that exists only in Portuguese reverberates in this sentence as well: the verb furtar has a pronominal form, furtar-se, which means to avoid or to pretend to ignore, that is to say, to play dumb. For example, one can say: “V. Exa. Furtou-se a responder àquela que é a mais crucial das questões” or “É preciso que as pessoas deixem de furtar-se a responsabilidades.” (“Your majesty refused to respond to the most crucial question” or “People need to stop avoiding their responsibilities.”) The connections between the adjective furtivo (secretive), the verb furtar (to steal), and the pronominal verb furtarse (to play dumb) are not at all obvious in Portuguese, because these words evolved to mean discrete concepts. Yet Lispector’s full sentence brings the philological connection together:

Tudo o que nele foi violência é em nós furtivo, e um evita o olhar do outro para não corrermos o risco de nos entendermos. Para que a casa não estremeça. (113)

Everything that was violence in him is furtive in us, and we avoid each other’s gaze so as not to run the risk of understanding each other. So that the house doesn’t tremble.

What began as theft is followed by a secret that becomes a form of self-evasion from responsibility. What begins as playing dumb can result in becoming dumb—or ignorant—if this active ignoring of each other’s gaze can indeed protect the subject from “the risk of understanding each other.” When the playing dumb is choreographed at a structural level, with the complicity of the most powerful subjects, it produces faked stupidity at the level of institutions, or, as she calls it, “a stupid justice” (justiça estupidificada) (114). This is the secret that lies at the foundation of the republic.

From Lispector’s discussion of a furtive consent that forms around a justice filled with stupidity, the pair friend/enemy appears at last. Yet it appears in a way that defies Schmittian logic and the paradox of liberal democracy: the enemies are “us,” the essential phonies trying to justify a form of living with the blessing of “a god invented at the last minute”; the friends are those who interrupt the choreography of consent by refusing to find excuses:

[Mineirinho] foi fuzilado na sua força desorientada, enquanto um deus fabricado no último instante abençoa às pressas a minha maldade organizada e a minha justiça estupidificada: o que sustenta as paredes de minha casa é a certeza de que sempre me justificarei, meus amigos não me justificarão, mas meus inimigos que são os meus cúmplices, esses me cumprimentarão; o que me sustenta é saber que sempre fabricarei um deus à imagem do que eu precisar para dormir tranqüila e que outros furtivamente fingirão que estamos todos certos e que nada há a fazer. Tudo isso, sim, pois somos os sonsos essenciais, baluartes de alguma coisa. E sobretudo procurar não entender. (114)

[Mineirinho] was gunned down in his disoriented strength, while a god fabricated at the last second hastily blesses my organized cruelty and my justice filled with stupidity: what upholds the walls of my house is the certainty that I shall always justify myself, my friends won’t justify me, but my enemies who are my accomplices, they will praise me; what upholds me is knowing that I shall always fabricate a god in the image of whatever I need in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will furtively pretend that we are all righteous and that there is nothing to be done. All this, yes, for we are the essential phonies, bastions of something. And above all of trying to not understand.

As the words furtar (theft), furtivo (secret), and furtar-se (playing dumb) branch out from their common root, they indicate the three stages of oblivion through which the epistemological labor of actively ignoring takes place. Social injustice—the furtive theft of the land that left Mineirinho in a state of nature fighting for survival in a hypocritical society marked by extreme inequities—suddenly becomes apparent, as a first truth previously averted. The chaos resulting from Mineirinho’s brutal and public execution ultimately reveals the secrets that surround injustice as well as the irresponsibility protected by such secrecy.

Living a life of diplomatic dinner parties in Europe and Washington, D.C., after law school, must have been an invaluable source of inspiration for Lispector to think about white ignorance, hypocrisy, and the potential—though quite infrequent—interruption of choreographed oblivion. Lispector was in the U.S. when Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and his mother’s decision to leave the coffin open for everyone to see was one of the triggers for the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps this event was a first occasion for her to think about how an entire system of furtive violence can explode in the flesh of one man. The crime revealed in that coffin was not just a child’s horrific murder but an entire way of life that Jim Crow made possible. Likewise, the crime revealed in Mineirinho’s wrecked flesh was not the manhunt for one person but the violence against favelados altogether. In the Brazilian case, however, the murder did not fuel a social justice movement, and ultimately nothing changed. As much as Lispector’s dramatic rhetoric tried to turn the event into an earth-shattering revelation, the public’s indifference only confirmed one of the most cynical theses of her epistemology of ignorance, which she formulated in the years immediately following: the kind of ignorance discussed here cannot be simply overcome by knowledge. Having an epiphany—by way of finally looking into previously averted eyes—is not enough to change a thing.

While the bildungsroman is a narrative of overcoming ignorance and so may seem suited to Lispector’s thinking on social justice, her fiction in fact often mocks this genre. In novels such as A Paixão segundo G.H. (1964), Lispector subverts the bildungsroman, developing instead what I call an entbildungsroman: a novel that shows how ignorant a character can remain in the face of blatant truth in order to avoid ethical or emotional consequences that might follow from acknowledging that truth. Much of Lispector’s fiction is populated by upper-class characters who one day encounter the eyes of their social other (a Black maid, a beggar, a young brown woman from the northeast, etc.) and suddenly have a disarming epiphany. Lucia Villares claims that Lispector used novels such as this to make visible racial inequality in Brazil. I would take that observation a step further and say that Lispector’s thesis is more subtle and less optimistic: she narrates the uselessness of “making visible” as a political strategy or as the politics of literature. The politics of making visible forgets that what needs to be “made visible” is already bluntly visible.

The narrator of A Paixão segundo G.H. parodies the bildungsroman (and the modern project that it ciphers) by elevating the character of G.H. to the highest peaks of existential revelation, inviting the reader to follow her to the climax of so-called indescribable (yet passionately verbalized) epiphanies, only to let her fall comically and brutally back into her old, secure ignorance. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator describes this ignorance—so almighty that it can survive the event of knowledge untouched—as “sacred” (120). Like Christ’s resurrection after his gory series of punishments, G.H. punishes herself with the thought of racial injustice, only to be reborn again from the ashes of that revelation, as innocent and as ignorant as ever before. The first pages signal in advance that ignorance is the ending of the novel, as the narrator struggles to remember and put in writing the revelation that she just experienced in silence:

Talvez me tenha acontecido uma compreensão tão total quanto uma ignorância, e dela eu venha a sair intocada e inocente como antes. … Pois ao mesmo tempo que luto por saber, a minha nova ignorância, que é o esquecimento, tornou-se sagrada. (8)

Maybe what happened to me is an understanding as total as an ignorance, and I am going to come out of it untouched and innocent like before. … Because at the same time that I struggle to understand, my new ignorance, which is oblivion, has also become sacred.

While the novel is structured around the event of an epiphany—as a classic bildungsroman—the ending sings the praise of an ignorance that challenges the Enlightenment project of modernity. G.H.’s stream of consciousness, like that of the narrator in Lispector’s posthumous novel A hora da estrela, can be read as a search for punishment and forgiveness. Her passion is precisely the experience of seeing at last, through her window, the lights of the favelas in the far distance and thinking that those precarious structures could have been palaces—echoing the realization of her former maid’s Black beauty and dignity, until then anxiously denied. The passion of G.H.—defined as a series of realizations hurting her fragility—ends up making her stronger, not because she reaches enlightenment but because she develops a sort of immunity to knowledge. Her ignorance becomes sacred. Read in light of Lispector’s philosophy of crime and punishment, this novel characterizes engaged literature as a ritual of moral punishment in the hands of those readers who are willing to face the painful truth but only to become invulnerable to it. Instead of being moved by truth toward restorative justice efforts, these imagined readers use the pain of truth as a ritual of performative remorse and furtive absolution, as they continue to uphold the status quo with their powerful ignorance and inaction.

Rocío Pichon-Rivière Rocío Pichon-Rivière is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and a visiting scholar at the Pratt Institute. Recent works include essays on hemispheric trans theory, Latin American women’s political thinking, and phenomenologies of shame.

Footnotes

1. Foucault in “La pensée du dehors” (1966) defines a notion of an “outside” of discourse as the element around which much literature was already doing its work, pointing toward what exceeds its intentional representation. “The reason it is now so necessary to think through fiction—while in the past it was a matter of thinking the truth—is that ‘I speak’ runs counter to ‘I think.’ ‘I think’ led to the indubitable certainty of the ‘I’ and its existence; ‘I speak,’ on the other hand, distances, disperses, effaces that existence and lets only its empty emplacement appear” (page number needed). Taking Foucault’s argument a little further, one can say that the outside of the law points to the level of the performativity of language and the institutions in which such discourses circulate. The narrated “presence” of the speaker’s body and their actions in a literary scene shed light and cast a shade over the content of their speech, a shadow drawn with the direction and intensity determined by their positionality in broader power structures that become keys to understanding not just what the discourse intends to say but also what it performs in terms of such structures. By challenging the purity of the abstract ‘I’ or the ‘we’ that seems to enunciate the law, fiction begins to point outside of its interiority. This outside can be defined as the realm of the unspoken injustice that the law fails to name while silently becoming a vehicle for its reproduction.

2. This essay is part of a larger project that studies the thought of Latin American women, who often wrote in minor genres, in the margins of professional philosophy. I take the risk of presenting ideas through storytelling around the figure of the author, knowing that in the field of literary studies many have been disciplined by formalist methods and might have a visceral reaction against this type of narrative: bear with me. Indeed, many thinkers have convincingly established that a text should be studied in and of itself, regardless of the presumed, unverifiable intentions of the human who penned it, for a text has a life of its own. While I agree with this argument, I claim that it is necessary to narrate rather than describe systems of thought. In the field of philosophy—where I was most disciplined—quite paradoxically storytelling is often more favored than mere conceptual analysis and the figure of the author often lives in ways that literary critics might struggle to accept. To think is to think otherwise. And precisely that movement of thought advancing against the grain of previous limiting ideas creates a moment that is irreducibly dramatic and demands to be narrated before conceptual analysis can begin. In other words, non-tautological thinking has a narrative arch. Where—if not in time—can contradictions play a more interesting game than the impossible? In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari wrote that we would not be able to understand a philosophical system of thought if our imagination had not first drawn the figure of the philosophical character who thinks the ideas presented. Such character is needed to breathe the pauses of any thought that is not tautologically foreclosed to external examination. The character performs, so to speak, the clumsy possibility of change. Narration favors contingency over necessity.

This essay studies the works of Clarice Lispector and observes her philosophical character as a changing rhetorical trope in her writings. This figure of the author—however evanescent and filled with contradictions—is a necessary logical step to address questions of epistemic injustice, the main theme of this article, for the social drama of knowledge production can only be fleshed out through the figure of the thinkers. Inasmuch as she was addressing her own epistemic privilege and limitations, such argument necessitates the figure of the author to be predicated upon. Historically, Lispector only began to include herself as an explicit subject of enunciation in the 1960s as she became an increasingly public figure. This article analyzes one of the first times in which she pointed at herself in the text that she was writing, “Mineirinho.” Additionally, this essay ends with a commentary on novels that seem to be parodies of the figure of the engaged writer, further advancing an argument about her characterization of this type of figure.

3. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise.

4. Linda Martín Alcoff writes in “Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types” that “in mainstream epistemology, the topic of ignorance as a species of bad epistemic practice is not new, but what is new is the idea of explaining ignorance not as a feature of neglectful epistemic practice but as a substantive epistemic practice in itself. The idea of an epistemology of ignorance attempts to explain and account for the fact that such substantive practices of ignorance—willful ignorance, for example, and socially acceptable but faulty justificatory practices—are structural. This is to say that there are identities and social locations and modes of belief formation, all produced by structural social conditions of a variety of sorts, that are in some cases epistemically disadvantaged or defective” (39–40).

5. I alternatively use the terms epistemology of ignorance (Alcoff) and critical phenomenology of ignorance (Weiss) because both disciplinary frameworks study the same phenomena: the ways in which ignorance is actively produced in society. Epistemology and phenomenology are two traditions that address this question: the first with a historical concern for what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge is produced unevenly depending on social positionality, the second with a focus on the experience of such knowledge production or lack thereof. This later tradition is closer to Lispector’s use of stream of consciousness narratives to convey the messiness of the experience of denial. Yet the conversation between these different traditions is where the complexity of these phenomena can be articulated with most nuance.

6. “Por que foi o destino me levando a escrever o que já escrevi, em vez de também desenvolver em mim a qualidade de lutadora que eu tinha? Em pequena, minha família por brincadeira chamava-me de ‘a protetora dos animais’. Porque bastava acusarem uma pessoa para eu imediatamente defendê-la. E eu sentia o drama social com tanta intensidade que vivia de coração perplexo diante das grandes injustiças a que são submetidas as chamadas classes menos privilegiadas. Em Recife eu ia aos domingos a visitar a casa de nossa empregada nos mocambos. E o que eu via me fazia como que me prometer que não deixaria aquilo continuar. Eu queria agir. Em Recife, onde morei até doze anos de idade, havia muitas vezes nas ruas um aglomerado de pessoas diante das quais alguém discursava ardorosamente sobre a tragédia social. E lembro-me de como eu vibrava e de como eu me prometia que um dia esta seria minha tarefa: a de defender os direitos dos outros” (Lispector, A descoberta 217).

7. Since I here affectionately disagree with one of Marta Peixoto’s articles, I feel the need to mention that she read several versions of this essay and gave me invaluable feedback, criticism, and support for which I am in debt to her and deeply grateful.

8. Audre Lorde in “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981) speaks of the political power of anger that stems from its double nature, both epistemic and physical: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Sedating it with any narcotic not only diminishes its physical power to elicit change but also obscures the clarity of its content rendering it devoid of its epistemological power to point at a truth that a group seeks to ignore. Lorde writes: “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlying our lives” (127). Marc Brackett, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, defines anger as the emotional response to injustice, while distinguishing it from mere frustration, as a response to unfulfilled expectations (Bracket). If anger points us toward injustice, then the mechanisms at work to sedate it can be seen as functional to the reproduction of injustice.

9. See Derrida, Spectres de Marx (1993) and Politiques de l’amitié (1994). This note might sound anachronistic insofar as Lispector could not have read Derrida’s texts on a democracy to come, as they were yet to come, for he started publishing them in the 1990s. Incidentally, it is quite possible that Derrida read this story, given his closeness to Hélène Cixous, who introduced Lispector’s works in France. Questions of direct influence aside, these authors were discussing a philosophical problem that predated them both. The fact that this is a mathematics professor points to the calculus that defines the logic within established laws. The professor’s stream of consciousness can be read as a phenomenological exploration of the problem of the incalculability of justice and the experience of trying to think beyond current democratic practices and laws while still struggling to use their logic and idiom. The result is a bit ridiculous, and the story’s ending can be seen as a parody of such enterprise.

10. See Levinas, Le temps et l´autre (1947) and Humanisme de l’autre homme (1972). Of course, when Levinas writes about the Other, he does not include dogs. The case has been made quite convincingly that he did not even include people of color. For a recent critique of the limited, racist scope of Levinas’s ethics of the other see Moten. Lispector’s implicit reference to the interpellation of the face of the other as an ethical calling was possibly mediated by the Latin American reception of Levinas, which often read the figure of the other through an anti-colonial lens, as was the case most famously with liberation theology.

11. In the aforementioned chronicle, “Literature e justiça,” where she discusses the question of engaged literature, Lispector writes something that perfectly parallels the mathematics professor’s late logic, this time talking about herself:

não estou me envergonhando totalmente de não contribuir para nada humano e social por meio de escrever. … Do que me envergonho, sim, é de não ‘fazer’, de não contribuir com ações. … Disso me envergonharei sempre. E nem sequer pretendo me penitenciar. Não quero, por meios indiretos e escusos, conseguir de mim a minha absolvição. Disso quero continuar envergonhada. (25)

I am not totally ashamed of not contributing with my writing to something human or social. … What does provoke shame in me is not contributing with actions. … Of that fact I will be forever ashamed. I don’t even intend to punish myself. I don’t want, through indirect ways and excuses, to obtain from myself my absolution. Of that, I’d rather continue to be ashamed.

The enduring temporality of this shame does not seem to capture the duration of actions or inactions as much as it reveals and is itself an epistemological relation to history: no amount of penitence or excuses can change the past. Such is the temporality of truth from a perspective “more divine,” sub specie aeternitatis.

12. The trope of gazes averted was present in the 1941 essay as well. Though mostly written in the style of abstraction and deduction, as demanded by the academic nature of the journal where it was published, the article ended with a theatrical finale: a gesture—precise, meaningful—and a blackout:

Só haverá ‘direito de punir’ quando punir significar o emprego daquela vacina de que fala Carnelucci, contra o gérmen do crime. Até então seria preferível abandonar a discussão filosófica dum ‘fundamento do direito de punir’, e, de cabeça baixa, continuar a ministrar morfina às dores da sociedade. (“Observações” 69)

There will only be a ‘right to punish’ when the term punishment is used to signify the administration of that vaccine about which Carnelucci spoke, against the germ of crime. Until then it would be preferable to abandon the philosophical discussion of a ‘foundation of the right to punish’ and, with head down, continue to administer morphine to society’s pain.

The suggestion that this excuse for a justice system should be administered “with the head down” might prescribe the gestuality of shame for a broken system or a choreography of consent to avoid the gaze of the victims of this system.

13. Later on, in the late sixties, in one of her chronicles in the Jornal do Brasil, Lispector would correct someone who said that she was intelligent. Intelligence was not her “strength,” she humble-bragged as she clarified: she did not value pure intelligence as much as this other faculty that she could provisionally call “intelligent sensitivity” (“sensibilidade inteligente”) of which she had more. Though this notion is undertheorized, this provisional name seems to stand for a holistic perception where sensation, emotion, feeling, and the clarity of thought are intertwined in a way that they cannot be abstracted. This, she claimed, was more useful regarding personal relationships and understanding others. People who balance these two forms of clarity follow the guidance of “an intelligent heart” rather than just the blind abstraction of the mind (A descoberta 215–216). The story about the mathematics professor is a parody of the notion of pure intelligence, abstracted from feeling, whose calculations hyperbolically struggle to understand a law that does not yet exist, for it can only be born from feeling.

14. “Dozens of poor people came to the place where Mineirinho’s body was found. No one could approach the body, since the police, as determined by the chief officer of the 23rd Precinct Agnaldo Amado, was violently pushing everybody aside. In general, the slum residents were upset about Mineirinho’s death, who they considered a Rio de Janeiro version of Robin Hood” (Diário Carioca, May 1st, 1962. Qtd. in Rosenbaun 170).

15. Lispector herself asserts in the interview just mentioned (1977) that it was not the fact of his death that shocked her and the public, but the additional gunshots that were not necessary to end his life. The chronicle implies this as well. As for the press, even in an article that claims to be horrified by the assassination, they object that the police abandoned the body to avoid taking responsibility for the murder, not so much the murder itself (“Polícia”).

16. To this day, police regularly kill young men and women in the favelas in Rio without losing their jobs—almost as if that was precisely their job. According to the Jovem Negro Vivo campaign, Brazil is the country with the highest murder rate in the world. Young people between ages 15 and 29 constitute more than half of the total lives lost to this violence; 77% of these murdered young people are Black. In 2015, 1 out of 5 murders were committed by the police. See “Jovem”. Marielle, presente. Agora e sempre.

17. For the question of who says “we” in declarations of independence and by virtue of what authority, see Derrida, “Declarations of Independence.” In this essay, Derrida discusses the religious nature of a proclaimed authority to declare, in the first-person plural, the independence of a modern state, as it happened in the US and many other countries founded on colonized land. In this essay by Lispector, that “we” is echoed in the first-person plural that proclaims the universality of the law in ways that too often fail to be universal.

18. “Essa justiça que vela meu sono, eu a repudio, humilhada por precisar dela. Enquanto isso durmo e falsamente me salvo. Nós, os sonsos essenciais. Para que minha casa funcione, exijo de mim como primeiro dever que eu seja sonsa, que eu não exerça a minha revolta e o meu amor, guardados” (112). (“That justice that watches over my sleep, I repudiate it, humiliated that I need it. Meanwhile I sleep and falsely save myself. We, the essential phonies. For my house to function, I demand of myself as my first duty that I be a phony, that I refrain from enacting my revolt and my love, both locked away.”)

19. How interesting it is to read these passages in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the term “essential workers” names many subjects who might be deemed politically inessential, as is unambiguously the case with the undocumented people working in agriculture, care, and the food industry. When it comes to the “we” of the declaration of independence mentioned in the previous note, these undocumented workers are excluded from this State, even though their ancestors were often in the lands in question before colonization.

Works Cited

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