The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras

Abstract

Pain is one of the most important things in my life.La douleurI tell him that when I was a child, my mother's unhappiness took the place of dreams.The LoverWe, the so-called civilized worlds, know that we are mortal, as Valéry declared after World War i, but now, even more, we know that we can cause our own death. Auschwitz and Hiroshima revealed that the “malady of death,” to use Marguerite Duras's term, constitutes our most hidden inner recesses. If the passion for death governs the military and economic domains as well as social and political bonds, this passion now even appears to govern the once noble realm of the mind. Indeed, a monumental crisis in thought and word, a crisis in representation, has occurred. Its analogues can be found in previous centuries (the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, the devastating periods of plague or war during the Middle Ages), and its causes can be sought in the collapse of economic, political, and legal structures. Moreover, the power of destructive forces, both outside and within the individual and society, has never appeared as incontestable and irrevocable as it does today. The destruction of nature, of life and economic resources, is coupled with an outbreak, or simply a more patent manifestation, of the disorders that psychiatry has subtly diagnosed: psychosis, depression, mania, borderline disorders, false personalities, and so on.