Says the writer Mónica Nepote that literary criticism is an anxious and deliberate quest to "give meaning to words, [to search] in their origin, their etymology, and their composition for a kind of possible structure" (Nepote 8). It would seem that, to do criticism, "one must have a thread and sew, make a worker's gesture," pulling out and braiding the edges and threads to find the path and the map (8). Under this premise, critical writing appears as a manual, almost textile act: "something that is threaded with patience, that is sewn with the body bent over the living matter of language." It would also seem that critical writing, in this attempt at order and control, does not require mastery, but only a tentative exploration. A thread that probes the living matter, a map that exists only in the movement that traces it (9).
Clarice Lispector's work shares this same impulse: language is not possessed, it is worked. Writing is operating on the vibration of the moment like someone sewing a resisting edge; for there is, in the living word, a tremor that cannot be fully captured. Agua Viva is precisely that sustained tremor, that attempt to follow the course of experience without stopping it, to capture the now knowing that it is already slipping away. Just as in Nepote''s gesture, in the voice that goes through Agua viva "there is an artisanal knowledge"—an awareness of the thread and the tension—but also a knowledge that the loss will be imminent because the word is always a fragment of something that will not finish being said (9).
Published in 1973, Agua viva emerges late in Clarice Lispector's work. It is true that, for critics, Lispector's literature has always been a difficult thread to weave, that her writing has broken free from narrative conventions to embrace, almost without concern, a hybrid territory between diary, prose poetry, metaphysical meditation, and stream of consciousness. The book is presented as a monologue through which an unnamed voice attempts to capture what it calls the instant-now, an absolute present that cannot be fully fixed. There is no plot in the traditional sense: no chain of actions, no fixed space, no characters. What there is is a narrator who is a painter, a writer, a creature in metamorphosis who, according to Sávio Roberto Fonseca de Freitas in his essay on the work, "attempts a type of writing that does not represent life, but rather produces it, suggesting that the essential lies before meaning and beyond form" (5).
This essay proposes reading Agua viva, from its inherent instability, as an exercise in writing, in which the work could function as a poetics of the self-other body in the very instant of the act of writing. To develop this reading, I rely on three theoretical frameworks: from Emmanuel Levinas, I take up the linguistic-literary dimension of his thought on alterity: the idea that the word is born in the direction of a nonexistent but constitutive "you" and that all discourse is founded on this enunciative asymmetry. From Roland Barthes, I recover the gesture of the zero degree, understood as an attempt to suspend the historical weight of language in order to allow the absolute present—the already-instant—to be inscribed in the text. And from Cristina Rivera Garza, I incorporate the notion of dispossessed writings, which destabilizes the figure of the narrating self and reveals writing as a territory that challenges the vision of the author as owner of the text. From this theoretical framework, the essay will analyze how Agua Viva transforms the act of writing into a laboratory where the self, the other, and the moment intertwine to constitute a complete poetics based on the unfathomable nature of the literary endeavor itself.
First, the act of writing in Agua viva is described as a surface in permanent tension between the search for an absolute present and the impossibility of capturing it. “I am a little afraid, afraid even of surrendering myself since the next instant is the unknown. Do I create the next instant? Or does it create itself? We create it together with our breathing (…) I live trying to capture the fourth dimension of the already-instant, which, being so fleeting, no longer exists because it has now become a new already-instant that also no longer exists” (Lispector 13). Emmanuel Levinas, in Totalidad e infinito, proposes that every word arises from exposure to an Other that cannot be defined: “the relationship with [being] is the relationship with an absolutely other being” (Levinas 72). From this premise, Levinas defines language as a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship: one always speaks to someone whose otherness exceeds the one who speaks. For him, this relationship occurs as an exposure: the subject speaks because they are addressed, even if the Other remains silent, invisible, or even imagined (Levinas 72). Language is neither domination nor representation, but an ethical relationship. One writes while being written by the other.
This ethical shift of Levinas becomes key to reading Agua viva, since the narrator constantly addresses a “you” and a “we” that never respond. This “you”—reader, lover, the present moment—functions as what Levinas calls an irreducible exteriority: it is never equal to the self, never captured (Levinas 73). Here, the “you” is not a recipient, but the origin of the enunciative gesture; the narrator does not invoke this figure to address someone specific, but to provide the word with the alterity it needs to exist. “The ethical dimension of the word implies that responding to the other is not a voluntary action but a demand that precedes conscious choice” (Levinas 73). Lispector’s discourse, therefore, is not a monologue: it is an act of exposure, of opening, a voice that acknowledges its vulnerability in every sentence, because it does not possess the Other, but allows itself to be affected by it. Thus, the absent you operates discursively as a linguistic resource that activates the verbal flow and allows the text to remain as living matter, in perpetual questioning of its own "is": "I came to write to you. That is to say: to be" (28), "And nobody is me. Nobody is you. This is loneliness (...) What I am writing to you is not to be read, it is to be" (29).
On the other hand, in Le degré zéro de l'écriture, Roland Barthes shifts the focus of reflection to a formal territory where writing becomes the center of analysis. Barthes reinscribes Levinas's question about the nature of language and its needs within the field of literary forms and gestures. If Levinas locates the origin of language in exposure to the Other, Barthes interrogates the act of writing itself: he conceives of writing as an attempt to suspend the historical, stylistic, and psychological marks that language carries, in order to allow the present of enunciation to appear in its purest state. Writing, he says, is the gesture by which the writer seeks to "escape from history" in order to approach "a word without memory" (Barthes 42). This escape does not imply erasing history, but rather bracketing it to open an interval where the word is not inscribed in a specific time, but is written in an "always present": about itself, as process and as event (42).
It is in this interval that what Barthes calls degree zero emerges: a state of neutrality in which language ceases to function as a representational vehicle and begins to exhibit itself as a process. At this level, writing does not speak of the present: it produces it. “Writing is the writer’s commitment to time,” and this commitment implies working with a language that, freed from its historical density, can reach a kind of tabula rasa, a zone where the sentence arises in the very instant of its appearance (Barthes 48). “It is not a matter of an ascetic style, but of a gesture that suspends tradition—inherited rhetoric, the weight of the literary code—to make room for the instant of enunciation” (Navas-Aparicio 10).
In Agua vivaLispector transforms that neutrality—that zero degree—into the very engine of her writing. There is an almost obsessive insistence in the narrator that writing concentrate the present moment, that the moment materialize through words. This insistence coincides with Barthes's gesture: writing as a laboratory of the present, as an attempt to fabricate time while acknowledging that time keeps moving forward. “I am before, I am almost, I am never, and I see words. What I say is pure present, and this book is a straight line in space, it is always current (…) Even if I say I lived or I will live, it is present because I say them now” (Lispector 18); “So writing is the skill of one who has the word as a hook: the word fishing for what is not a word. When that non-word—the subtext—bites the hook, something has been written” (20); “What is it that I will tell you?” I will tell you the moments (…) I am a concomitant being: I gather within myself past, present, and future time, the time that throbs in the ticking of clocks (…) I know what I am doing here: I count the moments that drip and are thick with blood” (21). From this perspective, both Barthes and Lispector conceive of writing as a gesture that does not represent the moment, but rather summons it. Its aesthetic power lies precisely in this impossibility: in continuing to write despite—or because of—a present that can never be fixed.
However, while Barthes's reflection on zero degree conceives of writing as a "gesture that suspends the historical density of language to open up an absolute verbal present" (Barthes 50), Cristina Rivera Garza, in "Los muertos indóciles" , shifts that gesture again, now toward a political and material dimension. She questions neutrality from another perspective: that of dismantling the self's ownership of the word. The author argues that all writing is a fabric of voices, archives, and remnants that circulate beyond the subject, so that the figure of the author-owner not only becomes untenable but irrelevant for understanding textual production. Rivera Garza proposes a shared materiality of language: writing is not purified at zero degree, but rather opens itself to the common. A "pure" writing will be one that engages with the concept of not belonging entirely to anyone and thus detaches itself from the figure of the author as owner of their text. This is what he calls "dispossessed writings" (Rivera Garza 28). Writing, here, is not affirming an identity but dissolving it: "Dispossession is not loss, but a method for deactivating the illusion of a self in control of its voice" (34). Writing then appears as a porous zone, traversed by other times, other bodies, and other materials.
This concept pertains in a particular way to the functioning of the self in Agua viva. Here the self is neither integrated nor affirmed; it slips away, fractures, and remakes itself. “Is my subject the instant? My life’s subject. I try to keep pace with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the instants that pass; I am fragmentary and the moments are precarious—I only commit myself to the life that is born with time and grows with it: only in the fracture of time is there room for me” (Lispector 14). Lispector’s voice seems closer to a process than to an identity. Rivera Garza would say that it is a writing that renounces ownership, that opens itself to the harshness of language. “I enter writing slowly (…) It is a tangled world of vine shoots, syllables, honeysuckle, colors, and words—the threshold of entry to the ancestral cavern that is the womb of the world. Words are not born from me, I am going to be born from them” (16). Dispossession operates as a textual regime: the word happens "through" the subject, not "from" him. (Fonseca de Freitas 6).
In Agua viva, this logic intensifies: writing is not about asserting oneself as an origin but about allowing oneself to be traversed by a verbal matter that exceeds any control of the self. The narrator does not produce the words; she hosts them, listens to them, lets them vibrate, and allows herself to be through them. “I call the grotto by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. And all that is me. All that has the weight of a dream. Then I am afraid of myself, for I know how to paint horror, I, who am an animal of resounding caverns, am in agony because I am word and also its echo” (Lispector 17).
The voice dissolves into the flow that constitutes it and becomes pure circulation, a porous space where the self becomes merely a point of transit. In this sense, the work emphasizes the central tenet of dispossessed writings: it transforms into a text that belongs to no one—that is not addressed to a specific "you," that is not situated in a specific time, and that is not written by a specific "I"—because its power lies precisely in that renunciation, in that surrender of control that allows language to become a site of experience.
To read Agua viva is to enter a space where the word does not represent: it produces instants. Writing emerges from a time that is not chronological but vibratory, from a body that does not function as identity, but as a surface of contact, from a self that does not assert itself as owner, but as channel. The text expands between flight and permanence, and from this tension it conceives of writing as an act that is experienced at the same time as it is lost; as a gesture that never stabilizes because its condition is, precisely, the instability of the instant (Fonseca de Freitas 6). Therefore, I describe Agua viva as a writing exercise that constitutes, at the same time, a poetics: a way of thinking about writing as a dilemma of the self-other body and of the instant-already of language.
To speak of poetics implies not conceiving of it as a repertoire of formal procedures, but as a way of thinking about writing from the experience that arises from the act of enunciation. Roman Jakobson defines poetics as the discipline concerned with the “message for its own sake,” the one that “introduces an emphasis on the formal organization of language, on its patterns of equivalence and its internal resonances” (Jakobson 220). That is to say, a poetics designates a sensibility that emerges from the act of writing, “the verbal function that makes the message an autonomous verbal object” (Jakobson 213). In this sense, to think Agua viva as a complete poetics involves reading the text not only as a narrative or a monologue, but as a laboratory/essay where writing reflects on its own functioning.
Agua viva is not merely a text about the flow of language; it is a treatise on a writing body. If we conceive of the work in this way, the poetics behind it imply that language is inseparable from the body, since writing occurs through a body that functions as a point of friction with the other—language and time—and is thus modified. Linguistic expression seeks to name that porous zone where identity dissolves and where the self opens itself to the exteriority that challenges it: “Now I’m serious, I’m not playing with words. I embody myself in the voluptuous and intelligible phrases that intertwine beyond words” (Lispector 33). Writing appears as a form of possible embodiment of the body, as a friction between surfaces: word and skin, sound and silence, nature and pulse.
Through this intersection of presence, openness, and dispossession, Agua Viva transforms the act of writing into a laboratory of relationships. The self does not look at itself: it seeks itself, loses itself, opens up, and reconfigures itself in the act of writing. The other neither presents itself nor explains itself: it functions as the outer boundary that allows the word to exist. Language does not represent the world: it creates a way of being in it. In this relationship, the poetics of the instant are produced; where writing is the attempt, as Julio Cortázar would say, to seize the unseizable. To sustain, through narration, the fleeting instant, the mutating body, the boundless you, and the ever-elusive other.
Works Cited
–Barthes, Roland. El grado cero de la escritura. Siglo XXI Editores, 2012.
–Freitas, Sávio Roberto Fonseca de e Inaldo da Rocha Aquino. «Água viva: A Metamorfose da escrita de Clarice Lispector.» Revista Cacto – Ciência, Arte, Comunicação em Transdisciplinaridade Online, vol. 1, no. 1, 2021, pp. 323–334. https://doi.org/10.31416/cacto.v1i1.275.
–Jakobson, Roman. «Lingüística y poética». Ensayos de lingüística general. Seix Barral, 2007.
–Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalidad e infinito, Sígueme, 1992.
–Lispector, Clarice. Agua viva. Tierra Firme,Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021.
–Navas-Aparicio, Aida y José Carlos Ibarra-Cuchillo. «El papel del escritor en el siglo XX según Barthes: lectura de El grado cero de la escritura.» Filosofia Unisinos, vol. 26, no. 1, 2025, DOI: 10.4013/fsu.2025.261.01.
–Rivera Garza, Cristina. Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación. Tusquets, 2013.
Mexico, 2004. She writes short stories, poetry, novels, and chronicles. She is the editorial director and columnist for Alkymia Zine magazine, and an editor at Editorial SB and Salto de Mata Ediciones.