After reading “Surfaciality”, “The Mirror Stage”, “The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman”, and learning about depersonalization, I want to know if the authors could have been suffering some level of depersonalization. Depersonalization is essentially a “detachment within the self, regarding one’s mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself”. I find some of the elements of the definition to be very evident in the author’s texts. Lispector basically wrote about a woman that, after staring at 3 mirror, is all of a sudden then being hit with an imagery crisis (not being contempt with knowing who she is). She sees herself in fragments, which was initially seen as, an intersection of breasts of several women. But of course, that kind of observation can not hold very much meaning if had she not tried to think and rationalize who she is, with respect to society’s standards. So, she went ahead and made meaningful assertions about herself, for example, she is a mother and a wife, as well having a “strong” social status (she escaped poverty and got married). Yet, even after “rationalizing” her “identity”, she still pities herself. She may be pitting herself not just because she didn’t reach her “true value” as a person (being a painter), but because she is starting to enter, what I would call a, “depersonalization” zone, where she has detached herself from our world , in order to pioneer and engage with a world that actually does reflect a human’s innermost thoughts and feelings.

Critchley’s text “Surfaciality”, not literally, addresses the depersonalizing feelings that overwhelmed Lispector’s character after viewing herself in 3 mirrors. He addresses the issues that comes with those feelings, as well as an “antidote” (literature, more specifically, poetry). The way Critchley describes those feelings are by calling them “a sickness of the eyes”, which is to say that our appearances are often being obscured by things we learn. To be able to remove these obscurities we would have to unlearn, and no better way to unlearn than to use poetry. It seems that he believes that poetry holds an absurd essence, and could therefore be used to de-familiarize (depersonalize) an ignorant understanding of ourselves. My question is how much absurdness do we fill ourselves to where we have completely unlearned any obscurities. Also if this is something that can only be achievable individually, that is to say that unlearning while listening to the poet “sing” would technically be an obscurity.