Marguerite Duras, or the Empty Place of Love

Abstract

This article examines Marguerite Duras’s work through the transformative function of writing. Drawing on biography, literature, cinema, and psychoanalysis, it investigates the relationship between childhood, paternal loss, maternal madness, exile, and the decisive role of landscape in the constitution of subjectivity. Writing emerges as a practice of rewriting life, the proper name, erotic experience, and love, making it possible to border emptiness and counter melancholic drift. From this perspective, Duras’s work shows how art can transform trauma into invention and turn the empty place of love into a space of creation and life.