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This subtle [[reading ]] of M. Duras's novel reveals the gravity of the concerns in Duras's works: [[desire]], [[suffering]], "the taciturn wedding of the empty [[life ]] and the indescribable [[object]]," the quest for a new ([[impossible]]?) [[ethics ]] of [[love]]. The style itself often shows how implicated [[Lacan ]] was in his reading, which led him to establish a connection that he found fascinating. between this mod�ern Marguerite and the Marguerite of the Heptameron: both are examples of an "[[active ]] and severe charity."

In his reading of [[Goethe]]'s Dichtung und Wahrheit (22), in the Seminaire sur la [[Lettre ]] volee (31), in Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et Ie desir (38), not to mention the pages on [[Hamlet ]] (41) or [[Claudel ]] (47), Lacan always managed 10 combine the care for the [[literary ]] [[text ]] with his interest in theorizing. Each of these readings seems to have given him the opportunity of an [[encounter]]. Here we find "[[being]]-[[three]]" [/'etre-a-troisJ, the [[gaze]], the dissymmetry be�tween the [[masculine ]] and the [[feminine]], Lot's "emptiness" and the [[division ]] of the [[subject ]] in J. Hold (the "[[narrative ]] [[voice]]"), the [[sublimation ]] in which "the [[practice ]] of the [[letter ]] converges with the use of the [[unconscious]]." Duras's text can indeed be read differently, but, as it is, Lacan's reading, caught between the ravishing and the desire to ravish in turn, allows us to see this text with an [[other]]'s eyes.

What relations [[exist ]] between a writer and an [[analyst]]? Lacan says of M. Duras, "she proves that she [[knows ]] what I teach without me." This state�ment might be more naive than obnoxious, and it might fit between [[Freud]]'s two positions: geniuses are everybody's masters on the one hand, and the writer has at his disposal an unknown [[knowledge ]] on the other. We discussed this issue in our general presentation. However, this novel is not foreign to what Lacan will say [[about ]] "nonknowledge" and feminine [[jouissance ]] in the [[seminar ]] [[Encore ]] (84), the jouissance of the very nonfulfillment of desire (Duras) or of something beyond what is called desire.