“Duras and Platonic Love: The Erotics of Substitution.”

D r nd Pl t n L v : Th r t f b t t t n

Paul Allen Miller

The Comparatist, Volume 37, May 2013, pp. 83-104 (Article)

P bl h d b Th n v r t f N rth r l n PrDOI: 10.1353/com.2013.0016

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Paul alleN miller

Duras and Platonic LoveThe Erotics of Substitution

Diotima: Indeed since Eros is always [the desire of the good], would Eros be the name of the zeal and the intensity of those pursuing the good in a certain manner? What does this activity happen to be? Can you say?

SocrateS: But, Diotima, I would not be in awe of your wisdom and would not put myself to school with you, if I understood these things.

Diotima: Well, I’ll tell you, then. For Eros is the desire to give birth in beauty, both in body and soul.

SocrateS: What you are saying, I replied, demands skill in prophecy (manteias), and I don’t understand.

(Symposium 206b1–8)

When it rained those around her knew that Lol watched for brief breaks in the clouds from behind her bedroom windows. I believe that she must have found there, in the monotony of the rain, that elsewhere—uniform,

pale, and sublime—more beloved by her soul than any other moment in her present life, the elsewhere that she had sought since her return to S. Tahla.

(Duras, Le ravissement 49)

Marguerite Duras is a novelist of erotic obsession. Love in her work is seldom ideal-ized, often a compulsion, closely associated with death and mourning. From the opening shot of Hiroshima Mon Amour, where the intertwined limbs of lovers re-call twisted corpses, to Moderato Cantabile, where Anne Desbarèsdes and Chauvin reconstruct the murder of a young woman by her presumed lover, to the mournful, often wordless eroticism of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein and Le vice- consul, all the way to the young girl prostituted by her mother in L’amant, Eros is a constant theme in Duras and one seemingly far away from the ideal realm of spiritual love to which the name Platonic is given. Certainly, Duras would have scoffed at the label Plato-nist. He is her antagonist.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine two writers who have more powerfully written about erotic attraction than Plato and Duras. This paper will argue that, de-spite the obvious dissimilarities of gender, genre, time, and erotic orientation, these

84 The comParaTiST 37 : 2013

writers’ depictions of Eros have more in common than is generally believed. First, the Symposium, Plato’s main dialogue concerning Eros, is a good deal less “Pla-tonic” than it seems. While there is a tradition of reading that puts special emphasis on its idealist elements, and that tradition was well ensconced in France at the time Duras began writing, the text itself is more equivocal. Second, Duras, like Plato, posits the erotic as a realm of transcendence, although as we shall see, she does so from a self- consciously feminine point of view. Each sees the erotic as a vehicle of passage beyond the confines of the immediate, as a moment that points beyond the transactions, substitutions, and exchanges that make up daily life, and indeed beyond what Freud would call the “pleasure principle.” But third, for each of them that moment of transcendence is always provisional at best. It never completely leaves behind the compromises of the immediate. In Diotima’s sublime speech from the Symposium, the ideal of beauty is only perceptible through the flesh and blood encounter with the beautiful boy, while a drunken Alcibiades propped up by flute girls constitutes its coda. Likewise, the Durassian moment of erotic transcen-dence, when the banalities of what seems a shoddy and compromised existence are shunted aside by the power of desire, is never separable from that which it seeks to escape: even in Hiroshima, Elle can never elude her collaborationist past; the Vice Consul must return from his erotically charged trip to the Ganges Delta to learn his fate after randomly firing on the lepers of Lahore; in the end, Lol V. Stein re-sumes her position outside the hotel where Jacques Hold and Tatiana Karl stage their erotic rendezvous. Perhaps, Plato and Duras have more in common than we might think.

In a more extended sense, however, what we shall argue is that the arc stretching from the Symposium to Duras describes a fundamental structure of desire as it is understood in the West. Eros is not just the drive for orgasmic pleasure (which re-quires no other). It is not simply what Lacan would variously call la jouissance phal-lique, la jouissance de l’organe, or la jouissance de l’idiote (Séminaire XX 13, 71, 75; cf. Julien 210). It is a moment, which depends on the simultaneous presence and yet lack of the other, in which the movement toward the possession of the other is also a movement beyond both the other and the self, a moment of transcendence (Love, bliss, the ideal, happiness, eudaimonia).1 But in so far as the other can never be pos-sessed without being annihilated in its status as other, at which point both desire and transcendence would cease to be in a simultaneous moment of plenitude and extinction, Eros in its most fundamental nature in Plato and Duras is predicated on its nonfulfillment, on the other’s refusal of the same, even as it always contains the possibility of going beyond the limits of the same and hence the transforma-tion of the subject by the other. What we see in Duras’s Platonic love is precisely one staging of this fundamental paradox.

Duras and Platonic Love 85

PlaTo aND PlaToNiSmS

We know next to nothing of Duras’s actual reading of Plato. No doubt it was very much in line with the traditional academic reading of the time, represented by such luminaries as Robin (“Notice” lxxxv; “Théorie Platonicienne”), Rivaud (35–36), Fes-tugière (210, 226–27), and to a certain extent Goldschmidt (78–89, but cf. 82–83).2 According to this traditional view, Plato is the author of a strict philosophical idealism that posits two worlds, one impermanent and ephemeral, which is com-monly known as real; the other permanent, and immaterial, which is commonly known as ideal. The degree of interaction or “participation” between these two worlds, according to this account, remains mysterious at best. Yet the fact is, Plato never makes a direct doctrinal statement to this effect. On only the most obvious level, Plato never speaks in any of his dialogues and is only said to be present in one (the Apology): as such, the claim that any statement in a given dialogue is an un-mediated representation of Platonic doctrine is inherently problematic (Gadamer 2, 10–11; Blondell 42; Castel- Bouchouchi 186–87). In fact, this traditional reading is an abstraction from the manifest complexity of the Platonic text, which is always qualified by numerous quotation marks, various asides, subtle ironies, clear hyper-boles, and outright fictions (Koyré 18; Wolff 241–42; Hunter 22–27). This kind of ab-straction, however, is certainly not just a modern phenomenon. It is first exempli-fied by Aristotle in Metaphysics 1 and is what became known as “Platonism.” As inflected by Catholic tradition, this reading of Plato has long played a central role in French philosophy (Derrida, Khôra 81–83; Zuckert 235; Gifford 18).

For most writers of the modern period in France, Plato is, unsurprisingly, a Platonist. He is a source of ideas, some salutary, some not. Writers such as Beau-voir, Sartre, Camus, and others, though they know Plato well and reference him, do not read the Platonic text. They do not subject it to a close and detailed scrutiny. For French modernists of the thirties, forties, and fifties, antiquity functioned pri-marily either as an allegory of the present or as a lost origin to be recovered (Miller, Postmodern, chapter 1). This would change over time. The Platonic texts, for post-modern authors, often become a means of interrogating the present and are sub-jected to a rigorous scrutiny. Typical are the readings offered by Lacan (Séminaire VIII), Irigaray (Speculum), Derrida (La Dissemination, La Carte postale), and Fou-cault. They follow an alternative hermeneutic tradition, which traces its roots back to Nietzsche and Dilthey, and which fundamentally calls into question the rigid two- worlds distinction (Hampton 92; Zuckert 73), as in fact does Plato’s text. In-deed, when we look to the passage from Plato’s Symposium cited above, we find that it not only instantiates but also deeply problematizes a host of binary oppositions. Rather than declare the mere primacy of the one and transcendent, it equally iden-tifies the many and the claims of the immediate. The world of phallic totality, what


Irigaray identifies as the hegemony of the same (Speculum 27, 168–69, 285, 306, 431, 440; cf. Braidotti 121; Jones 56–57), is consistently undermined by a feminized plu-rality.

First, the initial and authoritative speaker is Diotima, a prophetess or holy woman (mantis) from Mantinea.3 As the teacher of Socrates, she both invokes and subverts the rigid gender hierarchies of Greek society. She is the only female speaker in an entire dialogue, which is devoted to speeches in praise of Erōs or “Desire” generally, but which, with the exception of Aristophanes’s comic speech, is almost entirely devoted to male homoeroticism. Indeed, she is one of only two female speakers in the entire Platonic corpus.4

Of course, in reality, Diotima never does speak. Her encounter with Socrates is narrated by him and that narrative becomes his speech in praise of Erōs. At the same time, however, this speech is never presented as his own (let alone as Plato’s), but only as a repetition of what he received from the other (Hunter 82). Thus, the realm of the same, on one level, encounters and defines itself in relation to the other: Socrates appropriates the speech of Diotima. On another level, the same challenges its own self- definition through that encounter, even as it also appropri-ates the other for the same (but a same that is perhaps now different as a result of this encounter): Socrates has no original speech, only the voice of Diotima (Gifford 14–15).

This complex double dynamic of same and other, subject and object, male and female continues throughout the passage. Thus Socrates’ encounter with Diotima is a function of Desire (Erōs) or more precisely of her teaching him the matters concerned with desire (ta erōtika, 201d5), and it is the nature of Desire as an ac-tivity that the passage seeks to delimit. Erōs is first defined as the pursuit of the good (to agathon, 206a8). Moreover, as Socrates had already established in his ques-tioning of the poet Agathon (200a1–201e9), immediately before the introduction of Diotima, desire is always the desire of something. It requires an object. It is a pur-suit of that which the self does not have and, insofar as the self pursues it, the object must be perceived as good, and the truest desire would, then, be the desire of “the good,” or equally as the pun implies and Alcibiades later makes clear, of “Agathon” (213c5; Hunter 87). In sum, then, our desire is a sign of lack. The self or the subject that defines itself in opposition to the other or to the object of erotic desire is also the self that is radically incomplete without the other—as Aristophanes’ speech makes clear—an object which both defines the subject and exceeds it. That other is simultaneously a rarefied ideal, “the good,” and an immediately present erotic ob-ject—Agathon, the most beautiful man in the room (kallistos, 213c5), whose very irredeemable materiality is signified by the excess in language that constitutes the pun. Though the ideal may be privileged over the real within Diotima’s speech, it is never completely dissociable from its material counterpart, and, moreover, it is not


Diotima (ventriloquized by Socrates) who has the last word on the subject, but the drunken and very material Alcibiades.

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the question posed by Diotima is: what do we call this pursuit of the good, a good that is lacking in us and thereby exceeds our compass and yet also somehow completes and changes us? How do we define the activity that characterizes this desire? Socrates, in fact, cannot answer, but rather says it is precisely because he is in awe of Diotima’s wisdom concerning matters such as these that he has put himself under her tutelage. Diotima replies that the nature of this activity, which is called desire and is concerned with the pur-suit of the good, is the process of “giving birth in beauty.” It is a stunning answer, for the pursuit of the good, which is the essence of the “love” for wisdom as de-fined in the Symposium (cf., Kenney)—that is, philosophia, an activity that was an almost exclusively male pursuit in ancient Greece—is said to be best characterized by the act of giving birth in beauty (tokos en kalōi). Thus the initial gender inver-sion, which placed Socrates in a subordinate position to Diotima, who served as his praeceptor amoris, becomes extended and generalized so that Love, including the love of wisdom, comes to be seen as a form of pregnancy and labor that takes place within the sphere of beauty, that is to say within the sphere of both physical and spiritual attraction. Hence sexuality and the pursuit of the good in all its forms, including philosophy, are seen to function as subspecies of one of the most basic human activities and one that absolutely separates women from men: childbirth (Brisson 31n3).

This is a puzzling reply and one that takes us far from common sense and normal human experience.5 It is no wonder that Socrates responds by saying only a prophet such as the Mantinean Diotima (mantis/Mantinikēs) could explain it. There are two levels of conflation here. The first is between sexuality per se and giving birth. Desire is defined as the activity that occurs when one being is attracted to another through beauty to produce offspring (206c; Dover ad loc; Halperin 280; Hunter 88). The second is between masculinity and the soul (psuchē) and femi-ninity and the body (sōma), since men can only give birth to ideas, whereas women in Greek society normally give birth to children. Thus Socrates in recounting the teaching of Diotima as his speech in praise of Erōs projects a masculine conception of desire onto the feminine and then reappropriates it (Halperin 285–91). Yet what comes back is not quite the same as what left, because it has passed through this moment of projection onto and encounter with the other (Gifford 12). The mascu-line same has redefined itself through its contact with and metaphorical appropria-tion of the other; or in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, “Woman, who condemns man to finitude also allows him to transcend his own limits” (Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol 1 242).

There are, then, two types of transcendence in play in these passages: the one


metonymic and horizontal, the other metaphoric and vertical (cf. Gifford 88, 214–15). There is the horizontal transcendence that lies at the heart of the Sartrean exis-tentialist notion of liberté (L’être 496–99). It is not the passage from one level of being to another. It is not the elevation of the soul from its earthly clime to the rare-fied realms of the spiritual and the celestial, but it is dépassement: the act of moving beyond limits, of going beyond the given through a moment of negation or onto-logical lack.6 This represents less a metaphoric elevation than a shift or displace-ment, as the subject in its encounter with the other moves beyond the limits that had heretofore determined its existence.

In the Symposium, we in fact have both horizontal and vertical forms of tran-scendence. On the one hand, there is the well- known scala amoris, the move from single and contingent images of beauty to higher and higher degrees of ideality as the initiated lover seeks to give birth in and to a beauty which more and more ap-proximates that which has the highest degree of being, beauty, and hence perma-nence, the good in itself, to agathon. This is an ascent with which anyone who has read the Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s sonnets, or any in the vast array of Neoplatonic love poets from the Middle Ages to the Romantics is familiar (Gifford 12). Yet, side by side with this vertical metaphoric transcendence, in which one form of beauty comes to substitute for another in an ascending scale of being, the Symposium also contains a second equally important series of horizontal or metonymic displace-ments such as that between subject and object, lover and beloved, Socrates and Diotima, man and woman. Moreover, this second series of dépassements does not simply exist in a parallel fashion within the text of Plato. They are not simple stage décor that can be swept away when we get to the serious ontological argument about Erōs, to agathon, and to kalon (beauty). Rather they condition the very pos-sibility of conceiving of this vertical ascension. Without the moments of attraction, exchange, and, ultimately, substitution, the movement that leads to the subsequent ascent is without meaning.

The profound interrelation between these two forms of transcendence, though, is not just found in Plato but, as we shall see directly, it is what is in question in the passage cited above from Duras. Moreover, if the Platonic ascent is found to de-pend on a horizontal movement, and a Durassian privileging of the concrete im-mediacy of the erotic over masculinist theoretical reflection conceals a desire, even a will, for a Platonic ascent, then we shall in the end be forced to call into ques-tion the possibility of privileging the horizontal dépassement of the given in any situation.

Duras, of course, is utterly unconcerned with Plato or Platonism (Anderson 10–11). Although only a few years younger than Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Yourcenar, she is associated with the nouveau roman and postmodern feminism (Anderson 8–9). She rejects both Yourcenar’s classicism and Beauvoir’s existen-


tialism (Duras and Gauthier, 142–43), yet the structure of what is posited in the quotation given at the beginning of this article cannot escape a strong structural resemblance to the problematic of transcendence just outlined—and hence to the history of Platonism.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein is generally considered, after Moderato Cantabile, one of the clearest and most definitive statements of Duras’s mature style (Duras and Gautier 15; Gifford 216). It is this style and the novels of this period that link her most firmly to the feminism of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva (cf. Gautier 9). In it, her later lover, Jacques Hold, recounts the story of Lola Valerie Stein’s abandonment by her fiancé Michael Richardson and her subsequent per-ceived madness. In fact, the story is a good deal less definite than this reconstruc-tion would lead the reader to believe. Almost every narrative fact is called into question by an alternative point of view or qualified by Duras’s elliptical and lacu-nose style (cf. Le ravissement 12). Indeed, the narrative of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein presents a kind of mirror image to that of Diotima (cf. Gifford 228). Where there we have a woman ostensibly taking the place of a male speaker (Socrates) who is in fact recounting her words, so that there is a game of double inversion and appropriation, in Le ravissement the story of Lol V. Stein is told by a man who ad-mits to not knowing all the facts and to at times inventing them, yet he himself is a stand- in, if not a wholly reliable one, for the narrative voice of the novelist, Mar-guerite Duras.

Erōs, or desire, is clearly the chief narrative driver of all the characters in the novel. At times, it is portrayed as an irresistible force that seems to take hold of the characters and drives them to actions that they either do not understand or that they recognize to be self- destructive (cf. Gifford 223). It is in this context that the passage under examination comes to our attention. Lol V. Stein in the house of her husband, Jean Bedford, who in the wake of her “madness” treats her as a combi-nation convalescent and sexual slave, is said to withdraw to the bedroom during rainstorms. There, staring out the windows, a transparent barrier that nonetheless firmly marks her containment, she watches for momentary breaks in the clouds, searching for an “elsewhere,” a “sublime” moment of transcendence. On one level, this “elsewhere” is simply an escape from her situation, from the automatized world and the affectless subjectivity in which she is locked. It represents a horizontal dé-passement of barriers and an erotic drive toward “water, earth, night . . . Nothing-ness . . . Totality” (Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol 1 242). Thus, when later in the novel Lol is asked to define what she means by happiness, she replies in language that directly recalls the light imagery of our first passage:

There was an instant when the sun had disappeared. There was a moment of stronger light, I don’t know why, just for a minute. I did not see the sea directly.


I saw it in front of me in a mirror on the wall. I felt a strong temptation to go there, to go see. (175)

Happiness for Lol V. Stein is the escape to an elsewhere dimly perceived as reflected light. On another level, the whole situation is clearly metaphorical: the elsewhere is the light that shines from the heavens through the clouds, a sublime moment of elevation from the somber, monotonous nature of her current existence, a moment which she views from the bedroom, the site of her erotic life with Jean Bedford.

What we see in these passages, then, is the way in which even a text that sees itself at the furthest extreme from a Platonic discourse of masculine and philo-sophical transcendence almost involuntarily recapitulates many of its most basic tropes. Or as Simone de Beauvoir observes at the beginning of her chapter in Le deuxième sexe on female mystiques like Theresa d’Avila and Angela di Foligno, many of whom Duras herself also read (Gifford 226):

Human love and divine love become intermingled, not because the latter is a sublimation of the former, but because the first is also a movement toward the transcendent, toward the absolute. It is a question of the woman who is in love saving her contingent existence by uniting with the All incarnated in a sovereign person. (Le deuxième sexe, vol 2 508)

Diotima could not have said it better herself (cf. Festugière 332).7 Such mystical loves are not only “platoniques,” but also, frequently, “platoniciens” (Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol 2 510–11).

marGueriTe DuraS: wriTiNG aND The femiNiNeIt is not impossible that if words that are full and in their proper place have for all time been used, aligned, and built up by men, women would be able

to appear like that wild grass, a little on the sparse side at the beginning, which starts to grow in the interstices of the old stone and—why not?—ends

loosening the pieces of cement, however heavy they are—with the force of that which has long been held in.

(Gautier 8)

There would be a writing of the unwritten. One day, it will come. A brief writing, a writing of single words. Of words without any sustaining

grammar. Off the track. And immediately left.(Duras, “Ecrire” 86)

Marguerite Duras is no classicist. She does have one brief, incantatory text on Rome (“Rome”), and she learned the basics of the French Classical tradition, including Latin, while in her lycée in French Indochina, where she received the baccalaureate


in philosophy (Adler 76–77), but the ancient world is not her primary concern. Duras pioneers a style of writing, and later of filmmaking, which has been labeled feminist, and which self- consciously calls into question the traditional dominance of the masculine subject. It is a precisely interstitial style, that points strongly there-fore to that moment of the gap, the space, or the lacuna. At the same time, as we have already suggested, Duras’s texts in their very style and subject matter privilege the erotic sublime, which while neither platonique nor platonicien in the traditional sense, nonetheless recall the structure of Platonic erotic transcendence. They also remarkably parallel Lacan’s reading of the Symposium (1960–61) in his seminar, which was occurring at the same time she was writing much of the most impor-tant work of her first mature style (1959–66).8 Yet, Duras pioneered an approach to erotic transcendence that is specifically feminist.

What does that mean? It does not mean a search for equality. For Duras, being a free woman meant neither becoming a “man” nor withdrawing into a self- enclosed feminine community but rather living her feminine difference openly and mili-tantly (Duras and Gautier 149, 161–62). On the first level, as a writer, this calls for the creation of a language that organizes itself around different principles than that of masculinist discourse. Rather than a search for a style of completion, totaliza-tion, or adequacy to the subject matter, Duras’s mature writing is organized around lacks, blanks, the difference of interstitial space (Gautier 8–10; Duras and Gau-tier 11–15). Writing, rather than being the classical mimesis of a previously existing reality, whether logical or actual, or a Heideggerian moment of unveiling, becomes the exploration of an inner darkness: “It is the unknown that one carries in oneself: in writing, that’s what is attained. It’s that or nothing” (“Ecrire” 64). The true author is not the centered subject as master craftsman, the producer of charming, correct, or magisterial works, but a moment of “night” or “silence” that gives rise to works of surpassing fascination and strangeness. This moment of absence brings forth books that “incrust” themselves in our mental and spiritual lives and that in their very silences delimit a space or topos that comes to serve as “the common place of all thought” (Duras, “Ecrire” 41–42). Woman, on this view, is not the wielder of a totalizing phallic discourse, but precisely the indication of the limits of the attempt at totalization, the sign of its failure. She is the pas- toute (Lacan, Séminaire XI 68–69, 94; Irigaray, “Cosi” 87–88); Durassian style aims at precisely this space between, the moment when the project of mastery falls short, and a beyond is therefore in-dicated (Shepherdson 140–41).

Writing in this sense is the attainment of a determinate unknown, an intimate Other, sprung from night, that becomes a locus wherein thought takes place. It carries with it two corollaries. First, such a writing radically calls into question the integrity of the masculine sovereign subject from Descartes to Sartre (Duras and Gautier 142–45). Rather than exist as a self- contained whole, that subject is to be


“lézardé”: an intensely visual image that refers to the action of producing crev-ices in a wall into which lizards crawl. The subject becomes penetrated, leaky, but strangely alive. Writing becomes a vital process that does not say things about the world but rather opens the world to that which is beyond the conventionally de-marcated space of meaning, to that which has been excluded from the realm of sense, and to that which inspires the fear of nonsense: the place of a thought which is radically new (Duras and Gautier 17; Duras, “Ecrire” 44).

Such writing produces a meaning that is not present, but to come. A writing whose sense has yet to be deciphered:

Around us, everything writes, it’s that you must come to perceive, everything writes, the fly, it, it writes, on the walls, it has written a lot in the light of the great hall, refracted by the light of the pond. . . . One day, perhaps, in the course of centuries to come, we will read this writing, it too will be deciphered and trans-lated. And the immensity of an unreadable poem would be deployed in the sky. (Duras, “Ecrire” 55)

This quotation from “Ecrire” recalls a famous passage in Robbe- Grillet’s La jalousie: the various evocations of the millipede and its crushing at the hands of Franck (1957). It is a motif that returns obsessively throughout the novel. Sometimes, we simply see the stain on the wall. Sometimes, we focus on the movements of the beast, sometimes, on the moment it is crushed. But each time it leaves a mark, and each time that mark builds a layer of association, even as what precisely those asso-ciations add up to is never stated. Robbe- Grillet’s millipede on the wall, like Duras’s fly, is an evocation of both writing and its ultimate undecipherability (cf. Gallon). The fly, like the millipede, focuses precisely on the moment when the trace or mark begins to become the letter, when the thing in itself in its irreducible immanence yields to an incipient self- transcendence, to a pointing beyond the mere presence of itself: a moment of difference.

The importance of Duras’s alluding to this famous image should be underlined. Robbe- Grillet is widely considered the founder and chief theoretician of the nou-veau roman, a form of writing centered on a loose collection of writers, among which Duras is often included. The nouveau roman, in Robbe- Grillet’s formulation, set outs to break from the genre’s humanistic tradition of psychologization and moralization in favor of a description of a world of pure things and their surfaces (Robbe- Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman 20–21, 26–27; Cismaru 18).

He advocates a style shorn of metaphor and psychological depth. His ideal nar-rator is to use a language cleansed of any secret commerce between “man” (l’homme) and the world of things he inhabits. The village is not “lonely”; the mountain is not “majestic”; nor does the bare root of Sartre’s famous chestnut tree speak to our iso-lation in a world without meaning. These things simply are, and they are to be de-


scribed with the greatest precision possible as so many surfaces, devoid of signifi-cation and devoid of pathos (Pour un nouveau roman 60–66). Humans are actors in a world without significance that language constantly threatens to trick, seduce, snare into the illusion either of a metaphysical order or the tragedy of its lack. That order and any nostalgia for it must be steadfastly refused, since its lack, according to Robbe- Grillet, is the condition of man’s liberté,9 which is defined as a simple void of determination (64). All notions of interiority must be refused as well, since “the idea of interiority always leads to that of transcendence [dépassement]” (65). There can be no separation between inside and outside, between consciousness and its other, that does not, according to Robbe- Grillet, include the possibility of being felt as a form of suffering that is elevated into a “sublime necessity” (68).

For Robbe- Grillet the track of the millipede is constantly on the verge of signi-fication in its very repetition. The stain its crushed body leaves on the wall reminds the narrator of a “question mark,” but that incipient signification must be refused: “The best solution consists then in using an eraser, a very hard fine- grained eraser, which would wear away little by little the stained surface, the typewriter eraser, for example”10 (La jalousie 130). The mark—that would become a trace that would be-come a letter—must be brutally extirpated, lest it beckon to us as a moment of sub-lime transcendence. Thus Franck, the possible lover of A. . . in La jalousie, “without saying a word, gets up, takes his napkin; he rolls it into a ball, while approaching on tiptoe, crushes the beast against the wall. Then with his foot, he crushes the beast on the floor of the room” (165–66). The stain that interrogates, the vermin that writes, must be wiped away, even as it necessarily leaves the trace of its absence.

Where the millipede signifies the reduction of writing in Robbe- Grillet to the barest of material practices, Duras’s fly points in a very different direction. The fly on the wall is not crushed leaving only a stain of interrogation, rather it writes an indecipherable poem, a promise of meaning “to come,” in the traces it leaves on the wall and through the air. That poem, while unreadable, carries within it a pledge of the possibility of meaning, a vast text to be rolled out across the sky. Thus, where Robbe- Grillet articulates the transformation of the trace into the letter as a process to be refused, or at least contained, and thus produces texts that endlessly reiterate with small variations the description of the same surfaces, Duras articulates the transformation of the trace as a process yet to come, never quite fulfilled, yet end-lessly beckoning: a form of desire.

Her writing, particularly in her mature works, enacts this process: it is often fragmentary, often narrated from a self- consciously incomplete or compromised perspective, often without the closure of a traditional Aristotelian plot (Gifford 216; Dow 65–66). In Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, the narrator self- consciously admits that he recounts a mixture of what Tatiana Karl has told him and his own invention: “I no longer believe anything Tatiana said, I am convinced of nothing” (Le ravisse-


ment 12). Yet, at the same time, Duras’s writing constantly suggests the possibility of a larger perspective, of directional movement, if never of teleology (Duras and Gautier 15–16, 126–27). For while Robbe- Grillet is right, a world of predetermined meanings, of meanings that exist in things before we arrive—even if that meaning is only the “absurd” or the lack of meaning—denies any consequential concept of freedom, and hence any possibility of ethical or political choice. Nonetheless, it is also the case that a world of pure positivity, of absolute surface, without any sort of articulated gap, without any sort of negation, renders not only freedom but also change itself impossible.11

Freedom, then, and the possibility of meaningful action, depends precisely on a kind of determined indeterminacy, an articulated gap that makes a trajectory of meaning, but never its final arrival, possible. This gap is precisely the moment of negation that desire (Erōs), as the simultaneous presence of resource (poros) and lack (penia) in the Symposium describes (203a8–204c6). It is also why sophia or wisdom can never be something humans possess. The plenitude of wisdom, the totalization of meaning, is the negation of the human. Only the gods possess sophia; humans possess philosophia, the love of wisdom (204a- 2): the promise of a meaning to come, like “the immensity of an unreadable poem . . . deployed across the sky,” a promise which must also be infinitely deferred. Its arrival would be its end. Rather it exists precisely in its directionality, its arcing across a gap that it can never bridge: as both a trace and a sublime necessity.

For Duras, like Plato, one of the privileged points of access to this moment of transcendence or dépassement is precisely in the erotic. In Dix heures et demie du soir en été (1960), the alcoholic Maria stands on a balcony, where she can see Rodrigo Paestra, huddled motionless behind a chimney on the roof of a building in a small Spanish town in the rain. He has killed his wife and her lover and is now hiding from the police. At this precise moment, her husband is preparing to make love to their traveling companion, Claire, on another balcony within sight of Maria. The novel makes no attempt to directly link these two moments. One is not the metaphor of the other. Rather there is a metonymic slide between the two actions as love and death become indissolubly associated with one another, but never pre-cisely identified. Love is at once a moment of the fulfillment of desire and of abso-lute lack, a rapture and a ravishing (Gifford 220):

And there is the rain. And again its ineffable odor, the dark odor of streets of clay. On the still form of Rodrigo Paestra, still from pain, still from love, the rain falls just as on the fields.

Where have they been able to find a place to be together this evening, in this hotel? Where will he lift that light skirt of hers, this very evening? How beautiful


she is. How beautiful you are, God but you are. Their forms have disappeared completely from this balcony with the rain. (Duras, Dix Heures 50–51)

Later, after helping Rodrigo escape and returning with her husband, daughter, and their traveling companion to the field outside of town where she left him, they find his body. He had committed suicide: “How to name this time that opens up before Maria? This exactitude of hope? This renewal of the air she breathes? This incan-descence, this breaking forth of a love finally without object?” (Duras, Dix Heures 146). Until this point, the reader of the novel is wondering how this plot is going to work out. How will these parallel love triangles resolve themselves? Will there be a tragic moment of climactic murder as when Rodrigo shot his wife and her lover? Will there be a comic resolution in which each will be joined in the end with his or her appropriate partner? But no, there will be no classic denouement. Rather, it is at this moment that love itself as lack, as pure desire, is articulated without an ob-ject, without resolution, without end. It is a constant pointing beyond and dépasse-ment of the self, but one that is open- ended, unto death. The novel continues. They drive on to Madrid. Maria gets drunk and the three of them go out into the night together.

In Moderato Cantabile, a scream and a murder reveal a world of seething pas-sion beneath the calm bourgeois exterior of a wealthy woman, Anne Desbarèdes, who takes her son for his piano lessons. As she returns week after week to the bar where the murder occurred, she drinks glass after glass of Manzanilla (Maria’s favorite drink) with Chauvin, a worker in her husband’s factory. Together they re-construct the crime of passion as they imagine it and construct their own fantasy of sublimated adultery. Again we wait for the classic denouement, the affair be-tween Anne and Chauvin, but instead of the expected climax, Anne returns home to a dinner party for her husband’s business associates, at which she is obviously drunk. She then escapes upstairs as the guests retire to the salon, lies down on the floor, and vomits in her child’s bedroom: a simultaneous abjection and ejaculation in what has been to this point a discursive coitus interuptus. Once more love, desire, and death are metonymically linked, but again there is no finality, only an implicit pointing beyond of the impressive iron gate that surrounds the husband’s mansion, and from which Chauvin peers in toward the house. In the final chapter, Anne re-turns to the bar to tell Chauvin she will no longer bring her son to his piano lessons, presumably at her husband’s insistence. They try to resume their past conversation. They falter. They briefly and without passion, for the first time, kiss. She prepares to leave and he says, “I would wish you were dead.” She replies, “It’s done” (Duras, Moderato Cantabile 84; cf. Cismaru 90–91; Hill 50–56). All that is left is pure desire, a movement toward the erotic sublime: a movement beyond the pleasure principle,


an incarnation of the death drive (Duras and Gautier 59; Julien 112; Žižek, Enjoy 48; Eagleton 213). The structure of Hiroshima mon amour, with its opening shot of the couple making love, intercut with scenes from the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and with flashbacks to a criminal affair in France with a German soldier during the war, repeats the same gestures. It ends not with a moment of reconciliation and for-giveness but with a moment of lack, death, and departure (Hill 127; Crowley 58–60).

Thus, the erotic as a moment of lack, of potential transcendence, but also of death is a recurrent theme in the work of Duras and in a strict sense a corollary of her evolving style. As she moves to a greater spareness and to a refusal of the total-izing gesture of a masculinist discourse, she also consistently points ever more in-sistently to the space of that which lies beyond the Symbolic, that which lies beyond the norms of discourse, what in Lacan’s analysis of the Antigone is referred to as atê or Symbolic death.12 Woman as the figure who always gives the lie to the phallus’s pretense to totality, as she who represents the “not all,” the space between words, is also always figured as a moment of lack in the patriarchal Symbolic.

Duras’s feminine style, as opposed to Robbe- Grillet’s surface without end, points precisely to the moment of nondetermination that gives rise to desire and hence also to the moment of freedom and transcendence, of introducing something new into the Real as the beyond of the Symbolic (Lacan, Séminaire VII 30; Zupancic 179; Copjec 44; Mellard 206). It is precisely this moment, which escapes Symbolic determination, that is also the moment of erotic perversity and hence predilec-tion: the moment in which desire is not reducible to biological necessity, and hence the moment in which Erōs points to liberté and the possibility of infinite substitu-tion (Gurewich 363, 372; Feher- Gurewich 191–92; Leonard 174–75). The very fact that lack is the marker of desire means that a variety of objects can fill it and that the movement from one object to the next, through the interstitial space that the Lacanian Symbolic and Durassian style assigns to woman, is also the movement whereby the self points beyond itself. It is this process of erotic substitution and self- transcendence that lies at the heart of the erotic model proffered by Diotima in the Symposium.

Such a model is on its most basic level ternary. There is the subject, the object of desire, and the possibility of substitution. In psychoanalysis, this ternary structure is what allows transference to take place, as the analyst him- or herself substitutes for the object of desire.13 In the Symposium, this logic is played out in the structure of Diotima’s speech on the scala amoris, as the desiring subject moves from the love of the beautiful boy to the love of beauty and ultimately of the good itself (to aga-thon). It finds its most condensed form in the final scene when Alcibiades enters the party and comes to lie down next to Agathon only to find Socrates already there. We then discover that Alcibiades has tried to seduce Socrates in the past in order to exchange his favors for the beauties Socrates hides inside him, and any reader of


the dialogues is more than familiar with Socrates’s own desire for Alcibiades (e.g., Alcibiades I and the beginning of the Protagoras). All three wind up on the couch together in a comic evocation of both erotic desire and the pursuit of the good, as each changes places with, and comes to deconstruct its opposition to the other, through the person of Agathon, as lover, beloved, and erotic substitute.

It is this same logic of erotic substitution that is played out at the end of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (cf. Lacan, “Hommage” 93–94). Lol and Jacques Hold, Tatiana Karl’s lover, return to the casino at T. Beach, where Lol was traumatically abandoned by her fiancé Michael Richardson for Anne- Marie Stretter, the first in a series of erotic substitutions throughout the novel. It was this abandonment that precipitated Lol’s “madness” and her subsequent marriage to Jean Bedford. That madness was not violent or even irrational, but a form of effacement. She ceased to be a subject:

The prostration of Lol, people said, was marked by signs of suffering. But was does suffering mean without a subject?

She always said the same things: that the time in summer fooled her, that it was not late.

She pronounced her name with anger: Lol V. Stein—that was how she desig-nated herself. (23)

Lol’s madness stems from the recognition of her own exchangeability, that she her-self is one in a series of erotic substitutions (Dow 62–63). The novel in large part is the story—“seen” or “invented” from the perspective of Jacques Hold (cf. Duras, Le ravissement 60, 62, 63, 64)—of her attempt to regain her desire, to resume a posi-tion as subject, through re- entering the process of erotic exchange. She does so by substituting for Tatiana Karl in her adulterous relationship with Jacques Hold, but also by recognizing her own desire, the lack at her center that makes “replacement” possible (121; 131–32; 159–60). The problem is precisely, how does one enter into this logic of substitution without creating a simple repetition? At what point does the move to occupy new positions in this structure lead to a recognition of desire and the possibility of a move beyond, a dépassement:

—We are going toward something. Even if nothing happens we advance toward some goal.—What?—I don’t know. I only know something about the immobility of life. When that breaks, I know it. (150–51)

The central question is, then, does that break ever occur in the novel or does the chain of substitutions endlessly replicate itself?

At the novel’s end, Lol V. Stein and Jacques Hold return to the casino where the


ball occurred, where Michael Richardson14 left Lol for Anne- Marie Stretter. Lol seems overwhelmed. They leave. She sleeps on the beach. They check into a hotel, and she sleeps more, dreaming the logic of substitution: repetition and difference:

Lol dreams of another time when the same thing, which is going to happen, would happen differently. In another fashion. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands who, just like us, dream of this time, obli-gatorily. This dream infects me.

I have to undress her. She will not do it herself. Here she is nude. Who is there in the bed? Who does she think? . . .

Who is it? The crisis is now. (217–18)

Lol begins to dissociate:

—The police are below.I don’t contradict her.—They are beating people in the stairwell.I don’t contradict her.She no longer recognizes me, not at all.—I no longer know, who is it?Then she barely recognizes me.—Let’s go.I say that the police would get us. (218)

The language here is exceedingly spare. The referents, like the narrative perspective, seem up for grabs. But it is clear that we have gone “toward something” and that the “immobility of life” has broken. For a moment of intense madness, Lol has com-pletely taken the place of Tatiana Karl and she experiences a simultaneous loss of identity and an extreme moment of erotic paroxysm (though not pleasure). She has completely dépassé what it means to be Lol V. Stein in a moment of madness, fear, and ecstasy beyond the veil of atê:

After, with screams, she insulted, she begged, implored that she be taken back and that she be left at the same time; she is hunted, trying to flee the room, the bed, coming back to be captured, knowingly, and there is no longer any differ-ence between her and Tatiana Karl except in her eyes empty of remorse and the designation she gave herself—Tatiana, she does not name herself—and in the two names she gives herself: Tatiana Karl and Lol V. Stein. (219)

In this penultimate scene of absolute intensity in the novel, the reader herself be-comes infected with this moment of erotic madness in which identities merge (Dow 61). Lol V. Stein alternates in identity with Tatiana Karl assuming her position and withdrawing from it, thereby designating the void that, according to Diotima,


makes substitution and hence love possible. Our positions are no longer fixed, and our desire can propel us into positions that did not exist.

That evening they return home. On the way, she speaks to Jacques about Michael Richardson. “The pain disappears. I say it to her. She is quiet” (220). Jacques will have his usual rendezvous with Tatiana Karl at six o’clock. “Evening was falling when I arrived at the Hotel of the Woods. Lol had preceded us. She slept in the rye field, exhausted, exhausted by our voyage.” The triangle is reconstituted. But this is a repetition in difference. Neither Lol, nor Jacques, can ever return to the same posi-tion in the same way as before.

coNcluSioNWhen we are operating at the level of the transcendental, today, at the

end of history, there is, I believe, a certain justification, if not a necessity—for operating at both a textual and a comparative level. And one can carry

one’s own original erasure precisely by means of comparison, superimposing one thinker’s text upon another, to produce a new palimpsest, bringing to

light something that has genuinely not been seen before.(Lewis xi–xii)

When many of us absorbed our formative lessons in graduate school, we would have been taught that Duras and Plato were antagonists. How could two writers be further apart? She was a feminist, who wrote candidly of female eroticism. He was the product of a profoundly misogynistic culture, who mistrusted the sexual act and was possessed of distinctly pederastic leanings. She was an author of the nouveau roman, and thus a writer who refused the negativity of the transcendent in favor of the positivity of the purely immanent. Plato was the purveyor of an idealism that disdained the immediate in favor of the transcendent, the material in favor of the ideal, and the feminine in favor of the masculine. Duras was a writer of the fragmentary and lacunose: her novels privileged the multiple over the one, seri-ality over subordination. Plato was precisely an apostle of the one, who preached the subordination of each and all to the good. Yet, as we have seen, when many of Duras’s most famous novels and films are read against the background of Plato’s Diotima, a woman channeled by a man (Socrates) who elsewhere compares himself to a midwife, certain critical continuities between these two antagonists become evident. Plato is not as he seemed before, but neither is Duras.

For Diotima, Erōs represents at once the movement beyond the present and an immediately situated lack. We do not desire that which we have, and if we had the greatest goods, we would not be human. We would either be gods or be dead, which is effectively the same thing. Either way we would be beyond the compromises and exchanges that characterize our daily negotiations between the pleasure and the


reality principles. Desire is the child of Poros and Penia and it is precisely the mo-ment of situated lack that incites desire, but also that allows us to progress up the scala amoris to the good.

Ironically, it is perhaps Duras of the modern French feminist writers who most clearly articulates the structure of desire, substitution, and transcendence, as Diotima defines it in Socrates’ speech, even as she is the writer who may be the least interested in antiquity or Platonic philosophy. She is no Platonist, but she and Plato both limn structures of desire that, if they are not homologous, at least bear a strong family resemblance. To uncover that resemblance requires the con-crete textual work of comparison and moving beyond the thin theorizations of the nouveau roman offered by Robbe- Grillet. It also requires a reengagement with the actual text of Plato, as opposed to the truisms of a sometimes fossilized tradi-tion. Both Plato and Duras write powerfully of the immediate power of desire, its overwhelming force. Yet each also does so only through evoking “that elsewhere— uniform, pale, and sublime—. . .beloved by [their] soul.”

u University of South Carolina

NoTeS

1 Cf. Braunstein (102–15); Mellard (2006: 163). 2 Cf. Alliez on Deleuze’s analgous reading (1992: 221), and Brisson and Pradeau’s precise

restatement of this classic position (2007: 64–68). 3 Mantinea is a real city in Northern Arcadia, but the pun on mantis seems obvious and

is exploited in the last line of the present quotation, where Socrates says he would need “prophecy” (manteia) to understand what Diotima the Mantinean (mantinikes, or “vic-torious prophet”) means. She, of course, promptly complies. On the controversy over whether Diotima is an entirely fictional character or based (however loosely) on an actual historical figure, see Brisson (Platon 28–30), though, as Dover opines, “it does not much matter” from an interpretive standpoint (137).

4 The other is Aspasia in the Menexenus. 5 Although it is not unexampled in the Platonic corpus, compare the passage in the

Theaetetus where Socrates compares himself to a midwife testing the soundness of the ideational offspring to which his male associates give birth (150–151c).

6 For a discussion of the relation of this concept of freedom to consciousness, from a Lacanian perspective, to which it is often naively opposed, see Miller (2010) and Žižek (The Parallax View 49, 78, 92, 106–07, 162–63, 168, 172, 177–78, 203–6, 243–44).

7 In this regard, note also Beauvoir’s somewhat disturbing but revelatory comments that Sartre occupied for her the same psychic space as had formerly been occupied by her parents and God (La force de l’âge 31).

8 They had been friends since at least 1946 (Adler 1998: 252–53, 366). See also Lacan’s fa-mous comment that in Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Duras turned out to know what


he taught “without him” (Lacan, “Hommage” 95; Duras and Gautier 161; Lydon; Gifford 216–18).

9 Just in case we thought we had actually escaped Sartre. 10 The word “gomme” used here is also the title of one of Robbe- Grillet’s earlier novels. 11 I have made this argument at length in several places before (Miller “Catullan Con-

sciousness”; “Towards a Post- Foucauldian Theory”; Subjecting Verses 6–16). 12 See Lacan (Séminaire VII 291; Séminaire VIII 154); Guyomard (52, 120); Žižek (Tarrying

115–16); Butler (51); Miller (Postmodern chapter 2). 13 See chapter four of Miller (Postmodern). Here the structure of transference and the

structure of erotic substitution are discussed in terms of the Symposium and Lacan’s reading of it. On “triangular desire” as the essence of emotional identification with, and structural imitation of, Socrates, see Blondell (107).

14 On the possibility that Michael Richardson is based on Duras’s younger brother Paolo, see Gifford (222). On Lola Valerie Stein as based on a character in Duras’s childhood in Indochina, see Duras (“Ecrire” 39). Both characters recur in Le vice- consul (1966).

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“Duras and Platonic Love: The Erotics of Substitution.”

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