When legality produces abandonment and governs bare life in A Hora da Estrela, by Clarice Lispector

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel A Hora da Estrela by Clarice Lispector, based on the hypothesis that the work formally articulates a mode of normalized injustice, understood as an injustice that does not appear as an exceptional failure of the social or legal order, but rather as a regular effect of its functioning. The analysis starts from the premise that the precariousness of Macabéa’s life does not result from a deviation or an extraordinary suspension of the norm, but is produced within a legal and political framework that remains formally intact. The central objective of the study is to demonstrate how this injustice operates simultaneously on political, ontological, and formal levels, articulating social abandonment, exclusion from the common world, and narrative sovereignty. Methodologically, the article develops a critical and interpretative reading that combines an immanent analysis of the novel with interdisciplinary theoretical reflection. It mobilizes Walter Benjamin’s conception of the state of exception and the conservative violence of law, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life and sovereignty, Hannah Arendt’s distinction between biological necessity and participation in the common world, Gérard Genette’s narratological framework, and Jacques Derrida’s reflections on decision, performativity, and founding acts. The analysis shows that the novel does not denounce a specific abuse of power, but rather exposes a historical structure in which certain lives are systematically kept outside politics, memory, and justice. It concludes that A Hora da Estrela transforms narrative form itself into a critical space, rendering legible an injustice that has ceased to be the exception and has become the rule.