Lispector’s Halo: Life Contemplating Itself in The Hour of the Star Daae Jung João Guimarães Keywords Clarice Lispector; psychoanalysis; Giorgio Agamben; self-contemplation; form-of- life It is well known that Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector is less interested in creating a narrative than in capturing “sensations” through her writing. As Benjamin Moser highlights in his biography of the author, this particular interest can even be traced back to her childhood. Young Lispector, who had already started writing her own stories, would send them to the children’s page of the Brazilian newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, only to get rejected every time. Recalling those days, Lispector later speculated about why her stories might have been rejected by the newspaper: “I kept sending and sending my stories, but they never published them, and I knew why. Because the others went like this: ‘Once upon a time, and so on and so forth.’ And mine were sensations” (qtd. in Moser 54 emphasis added). What interests Lispector as a writer are not grand events and actions or “sonorous facts,” but rather the ever so subtle “whispering” that takes place between facts. Such is her goal, she professes, through the mouthpiece of Rodrigo S.M., the narrator of her last novella The Hour of the Star: “The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me” (16). As we will show, the poverty of the story (and the richness) of The Hour of the Star has to do