A Forgotten Manuscript? M. Duras’ La Douleur

by | Vol 24 (1) 2006

“J’ai retrouvé ce journal dans deux cahiers des armoires bleues de Neauphle-le-Château. Je n’ai aucun souvenir de l’avoir écrit. Je sais que je l’ai fait, que c’est moi qui l’ai écrit, je reconnais mon écriture et le détail de ce que je raconte, […], mais je ne me vois pas écrivant ce Journal. […] Je ne sais plus rien” (Duras, 1985a: 12). With these words, Duras ensnares the reader. With remarkable clarity, she describes waiting for Robert Antelme. How are we to understand her forgetting of this manuscript? Are we dealing with a Freudian forgetting? Has Duras really forgotten that she wrote her pain? Is it a simple lapsus or can we learn something new about forgetfulness here? Does something like a true forgetting exist, and if so, how should we characterize Duras’ manuscript, forgotten, but nonetheless recognizable? With these questions as signposts, the author moves from Duras’ book La douleur (1985a) to Laure Adler’s biography of Duras.

Related articles

  • In Search for Nearly Forgotten

    The oedipus heralds the loss of the pre-symbolic identity of the subject, that is forced to live, to think and to talk in a common language. Unspoken, preverbal identity elements are abandoned. Poetry is perhaps a form of language that brings to mind these pre-oedipal hidden sentiments. In other words, the question is what are the traces of this mutilation and these losses? Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic, and also the work of Wilfred Bion, Lou-Andréas Salomé and Ingeborg…

  • Forgotten voids in the Gaze. On Melancholia

    The author reports on some structuring moments in the etiological history of melancholia from a metapsychological point of view. It is argued that this clinical picture tends to be too readily categorised as psychotic, leaving open the question of its psychic structure. Freud's findings from the article "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917e [1915]) are examined along with the work of M.-C. Lambotte (1993) and J. Hassoun (1995). Melancholia is described as suffering caused by a lack of symbolisation of object a,…

  • On mange tous dans la même gamelle

    Le quotidien, ce condensé d'espaces et de temps dans lequel je suis amené à faire, seul ou avec d'autres, implique une analyse permanente de l'institution qui organise le lieu dans lequel "ça se passe". Pour qu'il soit un support favorisant l'émergence de ce qui est autre à soi-même, il doit pouvoir être aseptisé des idéologies colportées par les instances politiques et économiques qui financent le fonctionnement de ce lieu et des bonnes intentions que chacun de ceux qui y travaillent…