The Hour of the Star

To think is to confine yourself to a 

single thought that one day stands 

still like a star in the world's sky.

And what is this single thought? 

Arguably, it's the thought of death: death is the single thought of philosophy. And it's the single thought also of Clarice Lispector's great work, A hora da estrela, to which this Heideggerian verse could very fittingly serve as an epigraph. 

The hour of the star is the hour of death. And although Macabéa doesn't choose death (she certainly never contemplates suicide), death nevertheless chooses her and is present throughout the story. When she is killed at the end of the novel, it is something towards which she and we, as readers, are long prepared.

The Hour of the Star also happens to be Lispector's final work; published in 1977, the year of her death. It is thus a profound meditation upon her own mortality and that plunge into the void which is death. It is not easy to think death honestly and courageously; to make of death something uniquely one's own rather than belonging to the world of biological fact and universal extinction. 

'Everything in the world began with a yes', says the narrator of the work. That is to say, with an affirmation. And that includes death. For the same promiscuity of molecules which gave rise to life also gives birth to death and knowing how to die means also knowing how to live. If you have never lived, then you can never truly die: merely break down like a machine. Thus it isn't nihilism to affirm our own mortality, but, on the contrary, an anti-nihilism; the active negation of the idealism which would deny life and refuse death. 

Macabéa is representative of the millions of young girls to be found like her living in poverty, working a dead-end job, unwashed, uneducated and uncared for. But she is also a singular creature and, in death, she paradoxically comes into her own being at last; she is the star whose hour has arrived.

She might be empty-headed, but she has a strong inner-life and, without knowing it, Macabéa spends most of her time meditating on nothingness whilst listening to Radio Clock count away the minutes. Almost, she might be said to embody the fatal secret of the void; she is a black hole, hardly existing in human terms, as well as a tiny sun.

And so, when lying by the roadside with her eyes turned towards the gutter and the blades of grass that grow near the drain down which her blood trickles away, Macabéa thinks to herself: 'Today is the dawn of my existence: I am born.'

People gather around and whilst they do nothing to help the poor girl, they are finally obliged to acknowledge her presence in the world. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of one in Dickens, much loved by Deleuze, wherein someone held in contempt by society is found on the verge of death; for a brief moment their life takes on singular import.

"As she lay there, she felt the warmth of supreme happiness ... There was even a suggestion of sensuality ... Macabéa's expression betrayed a grimace of desire", writes Lispector, thereby overtly eroticizing the moment of death. For in death, Macabéa surrenders not just her life, but her virginity. Death fucks her into full being as well as non-being and it is an experience she finds "as pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling and penetrating as love".

She manages to speak one final sentence. In a clear and distinct voice, Macabéa says: As for the future. It is not understood by any of the onlookers present. But we know, of course, as readers of Heidegger, precisely what this means.

[Note: quotations taken from The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcenet Press, 1992.]