ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests that Duras's filmmaking operates upon the very juncture between the two: between the political and the intimate, between what Blanchot names Nancy's 'negative community' and Duras's 'community of lovers'. The concerns of Duras's cinema intersect in remarkable ways with Nancy's virtually contemporaneous work in the early 1980s, not only in The Inoperative Community but also in the 'Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political' set up with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in 1980. She shows that on-screen in Le Navire Night is far from superfluous and that a reconsideration of the relation between image and sound, beyond the terms of the vilification prescribed by Duras, may be fertile. The author suggests that India Song as a way of thinking the passive yet ungovernable positioning of Anne-Marie Stretter, the central female figure in the film. She describes India Song, as Duras traces the limits of communal fusion and incommensurability of sexual difference via the relationality of touch.
