Obegripligheten: En studie av det problematiska subjektet i E T A Hoffmanns Sandmannen och Clarice Lispectors Passionen enligt G.H.

Författare

Viola Bao

Summary, in Swedish

Autonomy, agency and freedom has been central concepts in the traditional Western understanding of subjectivity. The myth about the self-contained subject with the inherent capacity of self-fullfilment as long as it only frees itself from external practical constraints and internal self-destructive thoughts is still highly present in our modern society. Even the feminist and post-colonial movements of our time have in many aspects constructed their ideals on the same ideas of liberation – a liberation from an oppression which implicitly postulates the idea of the essentially autonomous subject. I want to show, through a reading of the short story The Sandman [Der Sandmannen] (1815) by E T A Hoffmann and the novel The passion according to G.H. [A paixão segundo G.H.] (1964) by Clarice Lispector, two examples of how literature is capable of undermining our traditional understandings of subjectivity, representation and identity – and open up to a new and more infinite view of human subjectivity.

This essay focuses on how the incomprehensibility – blindness, muteness and silence – as the negation of expression and representation, is able to expose the ontology or discourse which regulates our production of meaning. The essay specially focuses on how the ceaselessly renewed desire, being an experience constituted both by the biological body and culturally mediated conceptions – hence reconciling body and soul, nature and culture – can show a way out of the hegemonic. Theorists that used include Jaques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Sigmund Freud, Martin Hägglund and Elizabeth Grosz.

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