James S. Williams
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Marguerite Duras was the most widely read living French author during her lifetime, but also the object both of adulation and denigration in her own country. While she enjoyed the loyal and public ...
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Marguerite Duras was the most widely read living French author during her lifetime, but also the object both of adulation and denigration in her own country. While she enjoyed the loyal and public support of friends, critics, and exegetes from Michelle Porte to Alain Vircondelet, Duras was also criticised by many for her alleged self-absorption and overexposure. Her literary style has been widely ridiculed, if not dismissed, in France. This book examines the acute polarisation in attitudes towards Duras around three themes: film, sex, and race. It looks at some of her films, her film criticism, and her engagement with photography, as well as gender and sexuality, intersexual relations, and sexual practices in her ouvre. It also investigates questions of racial difference, immigration, and the representation of the native Other in Duras's work, with a special emphasis on female identity and desire.Less
Marguerite Duras was the most widely read living French author during her lifetime, but also the object both of adulation and denigration in her own country. While she enjoyed the loyal and public support of friends, critics, and exegetes from Michelle Porte to Alain Vircondelet, Duras was also criticised by many for her alleged self-absorption and overexposure. Her literary style has been widely ridiculed, if not dismissed, in France. This book examines the acute polarisation in attitudes towards Duras around three themes: film, sex, and race. It looks at some of her films, her film criticism, and her engagement with photography, as well as gender and sexuality, intersexual relations, and sexual practices in her ouvre. It also investigates questions of racial difference, immigration, and the representation of the native Other in Duras's work, with a special emphasis on female identity and desire.
Michael Lucey
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226606187
- eISBN:
- 9780226606354
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226606354.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her ...
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This chapter proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. The chapter proposes that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared with Andréa to be a misfit one—one that can, to a degree, be recognized in practice, but that there is no easy way to represent or denote. Misfit sexualities exist mostly in context, in interaction; when represented or registered in writing, they often reside in the relations between texts and the interactive processes that produce them. To attempt to contextualize a work such as Malady of Death in this way involves attempting to reconstruct something of the social world (mainly a part of “literary” Paris from the 1950s through the 80s) in which the work intervened, and attempting to understand the particular cultural concepts for understanding the various ideologies and practices of sexuality it invoked, and in which it was implicated.Less
This chapter proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. The chapter proposes that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared with Andréa to be a misfit one—one that can, to a degree, be recognized in practice, but that there is no easy way to represent or denote. Misfit sexualities exist mostly in context, in interaction; when represented or registered in writing, they often reside in the relations between texts and the interactive processes that produce them. To attempt to contextualize a work such as Malady of Death in this way involves attempting to reconstruct something of the social world (mainly a part of “literary” Paris from the 1950s through the 80s) in which the work intervened, and attempting to understand the particular cultural concepts for understanding the various ideologies and practices of sexuality it invoked, and in which it was implicated.
Martin Crowley
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
As a writer, Marguerite Duras developed a reputation as a staunch advocate of the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression due to race. This is evident in her constant ...
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As a writer, Marguerite Duras developed a reputation as a staunch advocate of the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression due to race. This is evident in her constant alignments with racially marginalised groups, her denunciations of the Front National during the 1980s, and her vision of France as a country friendly to immigrants and immigration. This chapter examines the place of racial and linguistic identity in Duras's later novels. It first considers immigrant identity and textual solidarity with this identity before turning to the presence of a kind of linguistic pluralism in the texts, and then offers a close reading of the problematic of translation in the 1987 text Emily L..Less
As a writer, Marguerite Duras developed a reputation as a staunch advocate of the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression due to race. This is evident in her constant alignments with racially marginalised groups, her denunciations of the Front National during the 1980s, and her vision of France as a country friendly to immigrants and immigration. This chapter examines the place of racial and linguistic identity in Duras's later novels. It first considers immigrant identity and textual solidarity with this identity before turning to the presence of a kind of linguistic pluralism in the texts, and then offers a close reading of the problematic of translation in the 1987 text Emily L..
Catherine Rodgers
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines Marguerite Duras's 1980 article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, a somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism in which she offers a critique of Charles Laughton's ...
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This chapter examines Marguerite Duras's 1980 article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, a somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism in which she offers a critique of Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter and commits a number of factual inaccuracies in the process. Moreover, Duras appears to be wholly unconcerned with the art of the film or its startling images, reminiscent of Molyan Mills's critique. Her analysis, saddled with factual mistakes, blind spots, and apparent disdain both for its biblical inspiration and its context, results in a singular falsification of The Night of the Hunter. Through her article, Duras effectively creates her own film out of Laughton's work.Less
This chapter examines Marguerite Duras's 1980 article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, a somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism in which she offers a critique of Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter and commits a number of factual inaccuracies in the process. Moreover, Duras appears to be wholly unconcerned with the art of the film or its startling images, reminiscent of Molyan Mills's critique. Her analysis, saddled with factual mistakes, blind spots, and apparent disdain both for its biblical inspiration and its context, results in a singular falsification of The Night of the Hunter. Through her article, Duras effectively creates her own film out of Laughton's work.
Owen Heathcote
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Actual violence has been linked to its representations via two forms. First is the violence of art itself, the ‘violence of beauty’. Second is the violence that appears to intensify due to its ...
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Actual violence has been linked to its representations via two forms. First is the violence of art itself, the ‘violence of beauty’. Second is the violence that appears to intensify due to its representations. These two forms of representational violence – the violence endemic to representation and the violence promoted by representation – present a challenge to traditional perceptions of art. The representation of violence has two principal aspects that are relevant to Marguerite Duras's film and book Nathalie Granger: the violence of children and the importance of representation itself to the way the violence is perceived and treated. This chapter explores the relations between children, violence, and representation in Nathalie Granger, focusing in particular on what it can teach us about violence and about dealing with violence.Less
Actual violence has been linked to its representations via two forms. First is the violence of art itself, the ‘violence of beauty’. Second is the violence that appears to intensify due to its representations. These two forms of representational violence – the violence endemic to representation and the violence promoted by representation – present a challenge to traditional perceptions of art. The representation of violence has two principal aspects that are relevant to Marguerite Duras's film and book Nathalie Granger: the violence of children and the importance of representation itself to the way the violence is perceived and treated. This chapter explores the relations between children, violence, and representation in Nathalie Granger, focusing in particular on what it can teach us about violence and about dealing with violence.
Renate Günther
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a ...
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Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.Less
Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.
Michael Rothberg
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195326222
- eISBN:
- 9780199944064
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326222.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
Marguerite Duras's “Les Deux Ghettos” employs an aesthetic of juxtaposition: taking the form of two interconnected interviews, it brings together memory of the Holocaust and recent developments in ...
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Marguerite Duras's “Les Deux Ghettos” employs an aesthetic of juxtaposition: taking the form of two interconnected interviews, it brings together memory of the Holocaust and recent developments in the ongoing struggle between France and the Algerian independence movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Duras's article approaches the massacre in roundabout fashion, through a historical analogy between Nazi policy and the context of Fifth Republic France. His article might be said to illustrate one of the central arguments of Jeffrey Alexander's chapter. Sometime around 1961, the Nazi genocide of European Jews went from being perceived as a terrible wartime atrocity with limited implications to being an event uniquely suited to illuminating historical evil wherever it cropped up. Thus, Alexander would most likely see in “Les Deux Ghettos” an exemplification of moral universality.Less
Marguerite Duras's “Les Deux Ghettos” employs an aesthetic of juxtaposition: taking the form of two interconnected interviews, it brings together memory of the Holocaust and recent developments in the ongoing struggle between France and the Algerian independence movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Duras's article approaches the massacre in roundabout fashion, through a historical analogy between Nazi policy and the context of Fifth Republic France. His article might be said to illustrate one of the central arguments of Jeffrey Alexander's chapter. Sometime around 1961, the Nazi genocide of European Jews went from being perceived as a terrible wartime atrocity with limited implications to being an event uniquely suited to illuminating historical evil wherever it cropped up. Thus, Alexander would most likely see in “Les Deux Ghettos” an exemplification of moral universality.
Wendy Everett
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter explores how music is intimately related to the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by discussing her films vis-à-vis the concept of fugue, looks at ways in ...
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This chapter explores how music is intimately related to the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by discussing her films vis-à-vis the concept of fugue, looks at ways in which they relate to the wider modernist context, and offers a new perspective from which to view her ouvre. Duras's cinema can also be discussed in the context of musical simile; Alain Vircondelet, for example, compares her films' composition to that of a piece of music. Duras's love of music is not only reflected in the titles of her films and in the complex and repeated references to music that they contain, but also emerges in the fundamental role accorded to music within the soundtrack.Less
This chapter explores how music is intimately related to the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by discussing her films vis-à-vis the concept of fugue, looks at ways in which they relate to the wider modernist context, and offers a new perspective from which to view her ouvre. Duras's cinema can also be discussed in the context of musical simile; Alain Vircondelet, for example, compares her films' composition to that of a piece of music. Duras's love of music is not only reflected in the titles of her films and in the complex and repeated references to music that they contain, but also emerges in the fundamental role accorded to music within the soundtrack.
James Creech
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In France, homosexuality has not received the credit it deserves as an important element in literature and its production. Marguerite Duras showcases in her work the homophobic potential that lies ...
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In France, homosexuality has not received the credit it deserves as an important element in literature and its production. Marguerite Duras showcases in her work the homophobic potential that lies within postmodern versions of French universalism. This chapter examines her attitudes towards Roland Barthes, a gay man. In his review of Edmund White's biography of Marcel Proust, Peter Ackroyd offers a classic example of critical legerdemain that is lethal for gay authors and which relates to the anti-homosexual tactics of Duras. Barthes never alluded to his sexuality, either personally or explicitly, in his published writings. Duras had a few things to say about différence and about Barthes. In La maladie de la mort, a narrator tells of an encounter between a homosexual man and a straight woman in the typical Durassian manner.Less
In France, homosexuality has not received the credit it deserves as an important element in literature and its production. Marguerite Duras showcases in her work the homophobic potential that lies within postmodern versions of French universalism. This chapter examines her attitudes towards Roland Barthes, a gay man. In his review of Edmund White's biography of Marcel Proust, Peter Ackroyd offers a classic example of critical legerdemain that is lethal for gay authors and which relates to the anti-homosexual tactics of Duras. Barthes never alluded to his sexuality, either personally or explicitly, in his published writings. Duras had a few things to say about différence and about Barthes. In La maladie de la mort, a narrator tells of an encounter between a homosexual man and a straight woman in the typical Durassian manner.
Marie-Paule Ha
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Marguerite Duras's Asian novels are structured by a colonial narrative space, which has been the subject of numerous studies that probe Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. This ...
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Marguerite Duras's Asian novels are structured by a colonial narrative space, which has been the subject of numerous studies that probe Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. This chapter examines the colonial problematic in Duras's Asian ouvre by revisioning her women characters within the framework of colonial gender politics. It first looks at the roles of white women and their native counterparts as articulated in the colonial discourse of the Third Republic, and then analyses the extent to which Duras draws on colonial narrative stereotypes in her representation of both white and native women as two diametrically opposed groups. The chapter also discusses the narrative of ‘the white women's burden’ and ‘the myth of the destructive female’, along with the importance of colonial Indochina in Duras's work and life. It concludes by showing how the colonial gender politics that underlies Duras's portrayal of women in her Asian texts is itself disarticulated by the liminal positionality of some of her female protagonists.Less
Marguerite Duras's Asian novels are structured by a colonial narrative space, which has been the subject of numerous studies that probe Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. This chapter examines the colonial problematic in Duras's Asian ouvre by revisioning her women characters within the framework of colonial gender politics. It first looks at the roles of white women and their native counterparts as articulated in the colonial discourse of the Third Republic, and then analyses the extent to which Duras draws on colonial narrative stereotypes in her representation of both white and native women as two diametrically opposed groups. The chapter also discusses the narrative of ‘the white women's burden’ and ‘the myth of the destructive female’, along with the importance of colonial Indochina in Duras's work and life. It concludes by showing how the colonial gender politics that underlies Duras's portrayal of women in her Asian texts is itself disarticulated by the liminal positionality of some of her female protagonists.
Kate Ince
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
One of the texts widely held to make up the ‘corpus’ of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical writings is L'amant de la Chine du Nord, whose composition was bound up with Jean-Jacques Annaud's ...
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One of the texts widely held to make up the ‘corpus’ of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical writings is L'amant de la Chine du Nord, whose composition was bound up with Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of L'amant, another Duras autobiography, for the cinema. This chapter explores relationships between women, along with the representation of myth, race, and colour in L'amant de la Chine du Nord, and considers how colonialism and postcolonialism structure race relations, with a particular focus on ‘whiteness’. It also examines the relevance of Richard Dyer's writing on whiteness to Duras as well as the mythification of sexuality in L'amant de la Chine du Nord.Less
One of the texts widely held to make up the ‘corpus’ of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical writings is L'amant de la Chine du Nord, whose composition was bound up with Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of L'amant, another Duras autobiography, for the cinema. This chapter explores relationships between women, along with the representation of myth, race, and colour in L'amant de la Chine du Nord, and considers how colonialism and postcolonialism structure race relations, with a particular focus on ‘whiteness’. It also examines the relevance of Richard Dyer's writing on whiteness to Duras as well as the mythification of sexuality in L'amant de la Chine du Nord.
James S. Williams (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313943
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The extraordinary range, complexity, and power of Marguerite Duras – novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist – has been justly recognised. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has ...
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The extraordinary range, complexity, and power of Marguerite Duras – novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist – has been justly recognised. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has been an increasing tendency to consecrate her work, particularly by those critics who approach it primarily in biographical terms. The British and American specialists featured in this interdisciplinary collection aim to resurrect the Duras corpus in all its forms by submitting it theoretically to three main areas of enquiry. By establishing how far Duras's work questions and redefines the parameters of literary and cinematic form, as well as the categories of race and ethnicity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, fantasy and violence, the contributors to this book revision Duras's work in the widest sense of the term.Less
The extraordinary range, complexity, and power of Marguerite Duras – novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist – has been justly recognised. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has been an increasing tendency to consecrate her work, particularly by those critics who approach it primarily in biographical terms. The British and American specialists featured in this interdisciplinary collection aim to resurrect the Duras corpus in all its forms by submitting it theoretically to three main areas of enquiry. By establishing how far Duras's work questions and redefines the parameters of literary and cinematic form, as well as the categories of race and ethnicity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, fantasy and violence, the contributors to this book revision Duras's work in the widest sense of the term.
Gill Houghton
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter, which offers a reading of Marguerite Duras's film India Song and the book of photographs La mer écrite, views India Song as a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed like the ...
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This chapter, which offers a reading of Marguerite Duras's film India Song and the book of photographs La mer écrite, views India Song as a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed like the vampire, and considers its first frame as mist, from which the vampire emerges directly. The film also produces specific co-ordinates in space that become both subject and object within the image. Darkness, a connecting thread in Duras's films, enshrouds India Song and seems to create a space for death and desire. On the other hand, La mer écrite implies clues, fragments, and parts of events with no fixed linear time, and is characterised by a temporality and open space of looking in both image and text. The chapter highlights the relation between narcissism and vampirism in India Song.Less
This chapter, which offers a reading of Marguerite Duras's film India Song and the book of photographs La mer écrite, views India Song as a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed like the vampire, and considers its first frame as mist, from which the vampire emerges directly. The film also produces specific co-ordinates in space that become both subject and object within the image. Darkness, a connecting thread in Duras's films, enshrouds India Song and seems to create a space for death and desire. On the other hand, La mer écrite implies clues, fragments, and parts of events with no fixed linear time, and is characterised by a temporality and open space of looking in both image and text. The chapter highlights the relation between narcissism and vampirism in India Song.
Alex Hughes
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines the roles of photography, photographic invention, and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel L'amant, which features a récit that derives its impetus from a ...
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This chapter examines the roles of photography, photographic invention, and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel L'amant, which features a récit that derives its impetus from a verbalised, fantasised image, a ‘fantasme de photographie’. This phantasmatic, verbalised self-image conforms to the ‘fetish = pocket phallus’ paradigm mentioned by Christian Metz in his essay entitled ‘Photography and Fetish’. Viewed through Freudian psychoanalysis, the photo-images associated with the narrator's mother in L'amant seem to symbolise a (refused) maternal ‘castration’ or failed female phallicity. In other words, they can be interpreted as symbols for a maternal Lack that arises every time the mother suffers from (de)privation, whether of money, sanity, authority, or, most especially, jouissance.Less
This chapter examines the roles of photography, photographic invention, and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel L'amant, which features a récit that derives its impetus from a verbalised, fantasised image, a ‘fantasme de photographie’. This phantasmatic, verbalised self-image conforms to the ‘fetish = pocket phallus’ paradigm mentioned by Christian Metz in his essay entitled ‘Photography and Fetish’. Viewed through Freudian psychoanalysis, the photo-images associated with the narrator's mother in L'amant seem to symbolise a (refused) maternal ‘castration’ or failed female phallicity. In other words, they can be interpreted as symbols for a maternal Lack that arises every time the mother suffers from (de)privation, whether of money, sanity, authority, or, most especially, jouissance.
Paul Allen Miller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199640201
- eISBN:
- 9780191811470
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640201.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of ...
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This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of movements through which gender, philosophy, and the erotic have pursued their minutely choreographed dance from the dawn of the philosophical tradition to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. This introduction, after an initial excursus that sketches the basic problematic, looks at: Simone de Beauvoir, for whom antiquity yields a moment of sublime transcendence analogous to the concepts of woman and liberté ; Hélène Cixous, who coined the term écriture féminine; and Marguerite Duras, whose novels and films elaborate a uniquely feminine style that looks forward to the textual practices of Cixous and Irigaray.Less
This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of movements through which gender, philosophy, and the erotic have pursued their minutely choreographed dance from the dawn of the philosophical tradition to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. This introduction, after an initial excursus that sketches the basic problematic, looks at: Simone de Beauvoir, for whom antiquity yields a moment of sublime transcendence analogous to the concepts of woman and liberté ; Hélène Cixous, who coined the term écriture féminine; and Marguerite Duras, whose novels and films elaborate a uniquely feminine style that looks forward to the textual practices of Cixous and Irigaray.
Christophe Bident
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281763
- eISBN:
- 9780823284825
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281763.003.0062
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter explores Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. It unpacks that work’s accounts of his (political and philosophical) friendships with Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras.
This chapter explores Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. It unpacks that work’s accounts of his (political and philosophical) friendships with Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras.
John Paul Ricco
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226717777
- eISBN:
- 9780226113371
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226113371.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. ...
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This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. All three works are discussed in terms of their presentation of the scene of naked sharing of bodies and the inappropriable finitude that is impossibly shared between them, right up to death. The bed scenes in the Duras and Breillat are in turn compared with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson as analysed by Sarah Kofman, and to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ photographic image of an unmade bed. By providing visual evidence of two bodies having been in the bed but that are no longer present, Gonzalez-Torres's image is an emblematic image for the entire book and its study of the retreat of bodies as retracing the scene of the decision between us as already-unmade and as erotic and funereal, at once.Less
This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. All three works are discussed in terms of their presentation of the scene of naked sharing of bodies and the inappropriable finitude that is impossibly shared between them, right up to death. The bed scenes in the Duras and Breillat are in turn compared with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson as analysed by Sarah Kofman, and to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ photographic image of an unmade bed. By providing visual evidence of two bodies having been in the bed but that are no longer present, Gonzalez-Torres's image is an emblematic image for the entire book and its study of the retreat of bodies as retracing the scene of the decision between us as already-unmade and as erotic and funereal, at once.
Nadine Boljkovac
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748646449
- eISBN:
- 9780748689248
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646449.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
‘From Depths and Ashes’ focuses upon ‘virtual series’ that exist in relation to the actual and that are revealed through a woman and man, a coupling that invokes the doubling of virtual-actual time, ...
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‘From Depths and Ashes’ focuses upon ‘virtual series’ that exist in relation to the actual and that are revealed through a woman and man, a coupling that invokes the doubling of virtual-actual time, life and death. Through an exploration of affirmative life forces and intensities in relation to events shameful and intolerable, this chapter maintains that film can expose a confrontation with identity, time and death. By way of a becoming-imperceptible or apersonal becoming through a shattering of transcendent illusions, a transformation that realises a woman’s counter-actualisation or creative replaying of her wounds, the chapter argues through Deleuze’s examinations of depth and surface that Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour releases intensities which are expressed through the film’s own ‘depths’ of bodies and ‘singular surfaces’ of skins. This chapter continues to explore relations between actual, tangible individuals as it also examines the violent and destructive mixtures of bodies that effect the sensations and affects that comprise and potentially fracture a human ‘self’. Finally, the chapter contends that Resnais’s art reveals means for moving beyond personal dimensions towards an impersonal, ‘pure’ evocation of affect and association.Less
‘From Depths and Ashes’ focuses upon ‘virtual series’ that exist in relation to the actual and that are revealed through a woman and man, a coupling that invokes the doubling of virtual-actual time, life and death. Through an exploration of affirmative life forces and intensities in relation to events shameful and intolerable, this chapter maintains that film can expose a confrontation with identity, time and death. By way of a becoming-imperceptible or apersonal becoming through a shattering of transcendent illusions, a transformation that realises a woman’s counter-actualisation or creative replaying of her wounds, the chapter argues through Deleuze’s examinations of depth and surface that Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour releases intensities which are expressed through the film’s own ‘depths’ of bodies and ‘singular surfaces’ of skins. This chapter continues to explore relations between actual, tangible individuals as it also examines the violent and destructive mixtures of bodies that effect the sensations and affects that comprise and potentially fracture a human ‘self’. Finally, the chapter contends that Resnais’s art reveals means for moving beyond personal dimensions towards an impersonal, ‘pure’ evocation of affect and association.
Linnell Secomb
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623679
- eISBN:
- 9780748671854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623679.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the ...
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This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the significance of erotic love for the subject and ultimately for inter-human relations. His description of erotic love indicates an interlacing of egoistic pleasure and selfless engagement with the other in the sexual relation. In Alain Resnais' and Duras' film, Hiroshima, mon amour, it is the experience of passionate, obsessional, devoted love for a particular other that grounds and informs the selfless ethical love of every other. It has become clear that the feminine other of the erotic relation (in Time and the Other) offers a model or a prototype for the alterity of the other of the ethical relation (in Totality and Infinity).Less
This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the significance of erotic love for the subject and ultimately for inter-human relations. His description of erotic love indicates an interlacing of egoistic pleasure and selfless engagement with the other in the sexual relation. In Alain Resnais' and Duras' film, Hiroshima, mon amour, it is the experience of passionate, obsessional, devoted love for a particular other that grounds and informs the selfless ethical love of every other. It has become clear that the feminine other of the erotic relation (in Time and the Other) offers a model or a prototype for the alterity of the other of the ethical relation (in Totality and Infinity).
John Paul Ricco
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226717777
- eISBN:
- 9780226113371
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226113371.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Based upon his reading of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on sense, aesthetics and ethics, in this book John Paul Ricco argues that separation is the archi-spatiality or ...
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Based upon his reading of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on sense, aesthetics and ethics, in this book John Paul Ricco argues that separation is the archi-spatiality or spaciousness of existence; that aesthetics is the technique and praxis for sustaining a standing in this groundless ground; and that the ethical is the decision of this stance, and of partaking and sharing in this scene of separated spacing with other people and things. By discussing various works of modern and contemporary art, literature and philosophy including Robert Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piles and paper stacks, Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death, and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Ricco theorizes various ways in which shared-separation—as the source and sense of existence—is aesthetically presented and sustained as the scene of ethical decision between us. In its three-part division, the book begins with anonymous scenes of drawing and erasing, intrusion and encounter (Part One: “Name No One”), then moves to what are theorized as “naked images” and scenes staged by outstretched and extended bodies in their shared naked exposure to the outside and non-knowledge (Part Two: “Naked”), and then to scenes of exposure to the anteriority of loss, withdrawal and retreat in photography, and amongst the offering of and partaking in, the infinite expenditure of readymade things (Part Three: “Neutral and Unbecoming”).Less
Based upon his reading of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on sense, aesthetics and ethics, in this book John Paul Ricco argues that separation is the archi-spatiality or spaciousness of existence; that aesthetics is the technique and praxis for sustaining a standing in this groundless ground; and that the ethical is the decision of this stance, and of partaking and sharing in this scene of separated spacing with other people and things. By discussing various works of modern and contemporary art, literature and philosophy including Robert Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piles and paper stacks, Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death, and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Ricco theorizes various ways in which shared-separation—as the source and sense of existence—is aesthetically presented and sustained as the scene of ethical decision between us. In its three-part division, the book begins with anonymous scenes of drawing and erasing, intrusion and encounter (Part One: “Name No One”), then moves to what are theorized as “naked images” and scenes staged by outstretched and extended bodies in their shared naked exposure to the outside and non-knowledge (Part Two: “Naked”), and then to scenes of exposure to the anteriority of loss, withdrawal and retreat in photography, and amongst the offering of and partaking in, the infinite expenditure of readymade things (Part Three: “Neutral and Unbecoming”).
