“Beatific Horror, Wretched Bliss”: The Antenomian Gnosis of Susan Taubes and Clarice Lispector

Susan Taubes was often juxtaposed with thinkers of a similar Gnostic sensibility: Simone Weil, Martin Heidegger, and her husband, Jacob Taubes. There is, however, another figure who could be compared to Susan Taubes: Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian thinker-novelist of a Jewish East-European origin. In my essay, I attempt to show that they both share a peculiar, perhaps uniquely feminine, type of Gnosticism that reacts to “the exclusion of women.” The Gnostic narrative of the radically alienated self that feels thrown into existence and lacks a sense of meaningful initiation speaks to both of them as a natural idiom to describe the situation of a woman who was denied a proper place within the symbolic order of tradition, devised and controlled by men.