RETHINKING OPACITY IN INTIMACY lessons from água viva

This article explores the epistemic dynamics of intimacy through a close reading of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva. Beginning with an illustration of intimacy as it emerges in the book, I then build on the hypothesis that intimacy–a relational mode often associated with sharing from the “innermost”–involves a desire by the self to know, or understand, both the other and itself. This dual yearning for knowledge makes intimacy a fertile ground for rethinking the epistemic relation between self and other. Reading the contradictions and tensions of the desire for knowledge in Água Viva, I demonstrate how the book can help us reimagine some of the hegemonic imaginaries regarding ways of knowing in intimacy. Building on feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray and Vrinda Dalmiya, I align my intervention with efforts to resist acts of grasping or reducing the other when it comes to knowing and relating intimately. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s theorization of opacity, I argue that Água Viva reimagines the epistemic relation in intimacy in ways that are less discovery- and transparency-oriented. Through a kaleidoscopic interplay of contradictions, the text offers a way of understanding intimacy that resists appropriation and embraces the shifting, unfixed nature of relational knowledge. While Lispector’s book proposes the idea of opacity as a condition for intimacy, it also makes us wonder: if we are trying to deal with the potential of epistemic violence in intimacy, what can come after the paradoxical and troubling yearning for both clarity and opacity? Água Viva, I suggest, invites us to address this question and speculate about alternative ways of knowing in intimacy.