Clarice Lispector and the Writing of Nobody

Abstract

This work approaches the issue of authorship, an already classic topic in literature theory, by using some elaborations by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot. All of them contributed to deconstruct the notion of author as the one who had authority over the work. Starting by asking “who writes?” and going through the question “what does it matter who writes?”, the article proposes to examine the statement “nobody writes”, considering the subject’s decline in the writing process. Along this path, the double valence of the term “nobody”, in which the positive and negative functions can alternate, as occurs, for instance, in Homer’s Odyssey. In the end, some passages from Clarice Lispector’s work are collected to suggest the presence of a writing of nobody.