Duras is someone I discovered in my early twenties who, as I’m now in the mid-stages of completing a PhD on her work (alongside that of Paul Celan), one of the writers I read most frequently. This short, intense work opens with a direct sexual address in the second person.
“You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.”
The personal and anonymous are united from the outset. The text hovers, like that of another book later on this list (one that Duras translated and staged) with the presence of death in life, of a life that does nothing but die while it is living, living in the grip of its inevitability. In the meantime, we dance around the bed. In Duras, the locus of desire as a dissolving infinity is too often used to psychoanalyse away the philosophical and political commitments of her work, transmute them into inwardness. Rather, the logic of desire always operates in the shadow of historical obliteration: commodified, genocidal, colonial. Through this framework Duras continually tries to give us a new experience of time. Thank you for coming to my viva.
La maladie de la mort, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit 1982; English translation published by Grove Atlantic, 1986
A Personal Anthology 