Marguerite Duras: from the death wish to the death of desire

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how the concepts of desire and body change in Marguerite Duras’s late style. It is in particular Moderato cantabile of 1958 that marks a turning point both in her style and in the way she investigates the concepts of desire and love – which are then crucial concerns in her overall work –. The fusion of Eros and Thanatos achieves here its more remarkable illustration. A further change in Duras’s writing can be found in Testi segreti of the 1980s: we want to discuss how the idea of love changes constantly, being now characterized by the absence of desire, and how writing itself becomes more and more rarefied, by reflecting in a certain way the asymmetry between sexes, or, to pick up Jacques Lacan’s well-known dictum, the inexistence of the sexual relationship.