Drawing a Line or Blurring the Contour Between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patočka

In The Passion According to G. H., Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) addresses the reader with an existential meditation on the enigmatic limit between a living being and an inanimate object. The protagonist G. H. is solicited by the raw fact that the life in her is constituted by neutral, inanimate textures and processes. The blood in her – when it pours out from a wound beyond her living body – is just a lifeless material substance. The life-constituting blood, when it departs the body, appears as a material in the category with all other material: “I had felt this astonishment before: it was the same one I had experienced when I saw my own blood outside of me, and I had marveled at it. Since the blood I was seeing outside of me, that blood I was drawn to with such wonder: it was mine.” In this chapter I will articulate how this revelation – that life is constituted by material processes beyond that which we conceive as living – can be understood, through a reading of Lispector’s novel, in the light of the philosophy of Jan Patočka and the phenomenological tradition as a whole.