ABSTRACT
Marguerite Duras’ writing is constituted by a paradox. Throughout her work, which to a large extent is autobiographical, a prerequisite seems to be the impossibility of telling her story, the story of her life. In our own time, when the subject’s intimacy is exposed and made public by new media practices, it is rather astonishing to return to Duras’ literary work and its undermining of the confessional imperative that has been dominating Western subjectivities for centuries.1 In the following I will try to relate the negative affirmation, the “story of my life doesn’t exist”, to a fundamental necessity of writing that is also articulated throughout Duras’ work. One of the main points is that her writing demonstrates that the borderlines of subjectivity are delineated by an impossibility of representation that tends to be foreclosed in aesthetics in recent years.2 In other words, I will argue that the relation between the impossibility to tell the story of her life and the necessity to keep on writing is a very good illustration of a more general impossibility.
