Hommage fait a Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de Lol V. Stein
1965 (9 pp.)-HOMMAGE FAIT A MARGUERITE DURAS DU RAVISSEMENT DE LOL V. STEIN (AN HOMAGE PAID TO MARGUERITE DURAS FOR THE RAVISHING OF LOL V. STEIN)-1965
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. 62
