Marguerite Duras is France's best-known and most controversial contemporary woman writer. Duras' influence extends from her early novels of the 1950's to her radically innovative experimental autobiographical text of the 1980's _The Lover_ Leslie Hill's book throws new light on Duras' relationship to feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, literature, film, politics, and the media. Feted by Kristeva, and Laca who claimed her as almost his other self, Duras is revealed to be a profoundly transgressive thinker and artist. It will be a (...) must for all concerned with contemporary writing, writing by women, recent European cinema, film and literature. (shrink)

Marguerite Duras is France's best-known and most controversial contemporary woman writer. Duras' influence extends from her early novels of the 1950's to her radically innovative experimental autobiographical text of the 1980's The Lover Leslie Hill's book throws new light on Duras' relationship to feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, literature, film, politics, and the media. Feted by Kristeva, and Laca who claimed her as almost his other self, Duras is revealed to be a profoundly transgressive thinker and artist. It will be a (...) must for all concerned with contemporary writing, writing by women, recent European cinema, film and literature. (shrink)

Dans sa lecture de l'Hommage de Lacan à Marguerite Duras pour Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Erik Porge met en évidence, cinquante ans après, l'actualité de ce texte où Lacan lie la problématique de la sublimation à celle d'une fiction clinique faisant cas. Il montre en effet que la transmission de la clinique de l'analyste participe de la dynamique de la sublimation de celui-ci. La topologie du fantasme, avec laquelle cette folie féminine - qui s'inscrit dans la suite (...) de Marguerite Anzieu (cas Aimée) et des soeurs Papin - est abordée, ouvre le lecteur à une dynamique transférentielle et de sublimation par son articulation à la pulsion. En même temps que Lacan parle de la sublimation, il est ravi par le texte et fait acte de sublimation dans l'écriture de son Hommage, en nouant l'objet de sa propre pulsion au Ravissement de Lol V. Stein et à Marguerite Duras elle-même. Dans un mouvement de retour sur sa lecture de ce texte, Lacan élève la lettre à la dignité de la Chose (définition de la sublimation) ; le style devient condition d'accès au cas et fait lui-même cas. (shrink)

En La communauté inavouable (1983), se ocupa Blanchot expresamente de pensar la comunidad de quienes no tienen comunidad, cuestión que había asomado ya en Le livre á venir (1959) y en L'entretien infini (1969). La presente conferencia se refiere a estos antecedentes. En la primera parte; sobre el relato de Duras El square (1956) y el ensayo de Blanchot que lo medita, El dolor del diálogo, indica la relación "ética" entre la conversación y la desgracia. La segunda parte, entre otros, (...) caracteriza el tiempo en que se da la rareza de la conversación, así como las experiencias que permiten al pensamiento no anteponerse a la desgracia pero tampoco abandonarse a la ausencia de pensamiento. La tercera parte lee los escritos Lo indestructible, La relación del tercer género, etcétera, para caracterizar los diferentes "niveles" de la desgracia en dirección a la posibilidad o a la imposibilidad de conversar. La cuarta y última parte vuelve sobre la primera con el propósito de precisar la comunidad de los que no tienen nada en común salvo su separación -diferente en cada uno- del mundo: la comunidad de la desgracia. (shrink)

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial (...) society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies. (shrink)

Trois auteurs dramatiques, Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) dans Au Grand Guignol, Paul Claudel (1868-1955) dans Le Soulier de Satin, et Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) dans Savannah Bay, nous placent au cœur même du processus de la représentation théâtrale, fait d’imprévus, d’incertitudes et d’accidents. Cette écriture rend sensible un temps dynamique, vivant et jaillissant, qui n’est pas sans rappeler la conception bergsonienne du temps comme « création continue d’imprévisible nouveauté ». Ces œuvres, dans leur mouvement de dépassement du caractère construit et fini (...) du texte de théâtre, et dans leur questionnement sur la part de risque que comporte l’acte de jouer, peuvent aussi être mises en relation avec la performance. (shrink)

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly (...) set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can ‘let go’ and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras’ work questions this process of ‘letting go’ and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras’ work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure Maurice Blanchot's pairing of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Unavowable Community, and reads India Song, a film by Duras, through Nancy's work on community. Just as Nancy articulates a thinking of community in terms of touch, so Duras develops her own filmic vocabulary of touch to examine questions of being-with, exposure, love and sacrifice against the background of a negative model of community. The article argues that the figure of (...) touch in India Song, both between bodies onscreen and between viewer and film, becomes central to the film's engagement with issues of community, finitude and the political. (shrink)

Czech translation of Marguerite Léna’s Choisir l’ Europe: Constantin Sigov et la dignité humaine.

Envy and resentment are generally thought to be unpleasant and unethical emotions which ought to be condemned. I argue that both envy and resentment, in some important forms, are moral emotions connected with concern for justice, understood in terms of desert and entitlement. They enable us to recognise injustice, work as a spur to acting against it and connect us to others. Thus, we should accept these emotions as part of the ethical life.

lntroduction Imaginary and Images M philosophical imaginary refers to both the capacity to imagine and the stock of images philosophers use. ...

The prospect of organic unified knowledge challenges the increasing fragmentation of scientific disciplines which have become narrowly specialized with the accelerating rate of discoveries and the shaky status of many inductively obtained theories. Yet proof checkers which can control the logical correctness of reasoning offer the possibility of developing an integrative, deductive approach encompassing many branches of science within the same framework. The Principia Humanistica, developed by Krzysztof de Werszowec Rey, constitute such an attempt to apply the Mizar system of (...) verification to the human and related sciences as well as theology. Mizar is based on set theory whose terms may define the individual, value choices, the human person, culture, and religion. This essay explores the Mizar framework, including the definition of valuation and religion. It seeks to show the possibilities opened by such an integrated multidisciplinary approach for the study of free will, the definition of courage, and convergence towards unification with God. (shrink)

Observación panorámica inductiva del Derecho. Movimiento descendente pausado -- Mirada deductiva del Derecho. Movimiento ascendente alegre -- Cuidar el Derecho. Mi iusteoría. Movimiento apasionado.

Iris Marion Young argues we cannot understand others' experiences by imagining ourselves in their place or in terms of symmetrical reciprocity (1997a). For Young, reciprocity expresses moral respect and asymmetry arises from people's greatly varying life histories and social positions. La Caze argues there are problems with Young's articulation of asymmetrical reciprocity in terms of wonder and the gift. By discussing friendship and political representation, she shows how taking self-respect into account complicates asymmetrical reciprocity.

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant's view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on respect, is essential to ethics.

This work examines Aristotle's discussions of definition in his logical works and the Metaphysics, and argues for the importance of definitions of simple ...

In a reading of René Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, Luce Irigaray explores the possibility that wonder, first of all passions, can provide the basis for an ethics of sexual difference because it is prior to judgment, and thus nonhierarchical. For Descartes, the passion of generosity gives the key to ethics. I argue that wonder should be extended to other differences and should be combined with generosity to form the basis of an ethics.