Johanna Nuber (Halle) on “Writing from out of death – Reading Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetics of the corpse through the lens of grace & decreation”

Death is everywhere in the oeuvre of Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik – as theme or topic, as a protective force from the threatening silence of self-inflicted oppression, as a means of acknowledging the precarious nature of the poet’s effort, and, eventually, as the flickering presence of suicidal thoughts. Simone Weil’s thoughts about decreation and her non-linear understanding of death help us gain traction of the specific relations between text and death, the body and the world, and the ineffable and that which resists in Pizarnik’s poetry instead of reading her suicide (s) literally as the ultimate signified of a coherent and death-prone poetic project. Rather as instance of writing towards death as inescapable destiny, Pizarnik’s words gracefully radiate out of death as poetic (de)creations beyond the constraints of meaning and social determination.