A breath at the edge of Earth: The limits of language and subjectivity in Vergilio Ferreira and Clarice Lispector

This is a comparative study between Portuguese writer Vergilio Ferreira and Brazilian Clarice Lispector. Both authors are located in a liminal place between literature and philosophy, where the symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and language is intensely dramatized. Ferreira and Lispector witness the impossibility of a unitary subject. They posit identity as a contingent factor, always in the process of constituting itself, at the same time as it inhabits an unstable terrain of difference vis-a-vis the other.This view of subjectivity by Lispector and Ferreira is part of a vaster reconfiguration of culture taking place for decades in the West. In fact, this major epistemological turn is an effect of the critique of the relationship between subjectivity and language. In my analysis of Lispector and Ferreira I explore the following underlying questions: Can the subject achieve a plenitude of being? Is it representable through language? What is truth in an era beyond total ideologies? What are the cultural implications of these questions?;This dissertation is also the staging of an encounter between Vergilio Ferreira, Clarice Lispector and key intellectual figures that have reflected on the limits of language and subjectivity since the turn of the century: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Derrida. However, I do not subsume their cultural projects under the philosophical weight of these widely known thinkers. Lispector and Ferreira circulate in an exterior plane vis-a-vis these thinkers--nurturing themselves from their ideas or rejecting them according to their own discursive frameworks. I am ultimately creating a polyphony of voices where Vergilio Ferreira and Clarice Lispector reveal the uniqueness of their respective artistic-philosophical enterprises.