Abstract

Following Lispector's own remark: "I want the thing in itself," and departing from the recurrence of ugly, poor, anonymous "things" in her fiction, the first goal of this dissertation is to look for the emergence of objects in all her works, as they incarnate an empty positional Being, in what Heidegger calls Ding. The second task this dissertation proposes is to displace the terms of Lispector's Brazilian criticism. For this purpose, two Brazilian literary critics are chosen: Antonio Candido and Benedito Nunes. Rather than focusing on Candido's criticism of Lispector per se, this thesis aims at critiquing through his work the notion of popular-national, a dominant perspective in the fundamentally nationalistic Brazilian criticism. At stake in both critics, however, is their common Hegelian inspiration which conceives of literary form as an adequate re-presentation of the real, not admitting of any remainder. To this discursive formulation, I oppose Lispector's own fictional solution, which supposes a "failure" of presentation as the only possible way of presenting the real, as a remainder to presentation. This "failed" real is precisely the thing. This "inadequacy" of the faculty of presentation, the "failed form," consistently thematized by Lispector, is studied in the context of the Kantian sublime, conceived here as a radical formulation of the question of difference. It is this differential strategy which is essentially other within Brazilian literature, characterized by the conciliatory logic of representation of difference in a unified form