Cruel Optimism in Suburban Change

Politics of Affect in Clarice Lispector’s A cidade sitiada

Abstract

This article focuses on the Lispector’s novel, A cidade sitiada, at the micropolitical level and discusses how the author represents environment and mood, and the individual’s location in an assemblage of material conditions such as the process of modernization and the involvement in the ephemeral social grouping. By analyzing the politics of affect manifested in the circulation of collective optimism, the production of shared promises and desires, and the individual’s homogenised gesture of affirming the institutional context, the article examines the subject’s never-ending process of emerging out of the preindividual and becoming conscious, which can be seen in the temporary crystallizations of the environment. Through the juxtaposition between the individual’s material entanglement in the evolving geographical space and their condition of being interlocked in the contingent collective ambience, Lispector theorizes the materiality of affect that resists the discrimination between social relations and the meshwork of nonhuman objects.