The Form of the Improper

Clarice Lispector and the Rhetoric of Precarity

Abstract

In her novel The Hour of the Star, from 1977, Brazilian author Clarice Lispector transformed the cultural figurations of poverty that shaped modern Brazilian cultures since the 1930s. In doing so, she opened the possibility for the emergence of a new figure: that of the precarious, thus anticipating aesthetic forms that will model Latin American cultural imaginaries in the decades to come. Two coordinates define this new figuration of precarity: proximity and non-anthropocentrism. Precarity thus emerges as a new organization of the sensible that, far from a mere rhetoric of expropriation, demarcates a terrain of contestation and ambivalence.