The body quickened through sexuality remains the object of most intense interest for our culture. It is worth dwelling on one example that will serve to draw attention, once again, to the problematics of the gaze directed at a body which is conceived as the object of a writing project, this time by a woman. The author, Marguerite Duras, is particularly sensitive to issues of looking, and has indeed worked successfully in the cinema, as well as in the theater and narrative fiction. Duras accepts the tradition of the body in the visual field but works subtle and subversive displacements within it. Although any and all of her work would be pertinent to this discussion, I shall focus on the novel that transformed her from an avant-garde novelist into a best-seller: L'amant (The Lover), which is a narrative of somewhat deceptive limpidity.

L'amant tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl in French Indochina in the 1930s who has her first sexual relationship with a Chinese financier. The affair is thoroughly scandalous from all points of view: the transgression of racial lines, the youth of the girl, and the girl's refusal to delude herself with romance. She knows from the outset that she is not in love with her lover (who is very much in love with her) but only with love itself, with the erotic transaction, and with the pleasure experienced by her body. In the social isolation that her transgression brings—other girls in the lycée are forbidden to associate with her—she makes an imaginary identification with the “woman of Vinh Long,” whose young lover killed himself in despair when she announced the end of their liaison. The identification of the girl with the isolated and stigmatized woman of Vinh Long comes from the experience of their bodies: “Alone, queens. Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both of them destined to disgrace because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their mouths, given over to the infamy of a pleasure to die from, as they call it, to die from in this mysterious death of lovers without love.”¹

What particularizes the girl, from the moment she is observed by her future lover while crossing the Mekong River on the ferry, is the capacity of her body for erotic pleasure—jouissance, or orgasmic bliss.² It separates her from her mother: as soon as she has been to bed with her lover, she knows that her mother has never known this pleasure. It separates her from her family, and the tyrannical law of her elder brother. It gives a special destiny to her body, as removed from the contingencies, indignities, and displeasure of her everyday existence. She becomes the body of the beloved, and this confers on her a special status.

This status is created by the desiring gaze of the other, the lover. A key moment of the novel comes when the lover, in bed, looks at her: “Il la regarde” (121), and the text continues to describe her observation of his observation of her:

I used to watch what he was doing with me, how he made use of me, and I had never thought that one could do anything like that, he went beyond my hope and in accordance with my body's destiny. Thus I had become his child. He had also become something else for me. I began to recognize the inexpressible softness of his skin, of his sex, beyond himself … Everything worked to his desire and made him take me. …

He takes her as he would take his child. He would take his child in the same way. He plays with his child's body, he turns it over, he covers his face, his mouth, his eyes with it. And she, she continues to abandon herself in the very direction that he took when he began to play. And suddenly it's she who begs him, she doesn't say what for, and he who yells at her to be quiet, who cries that he doesn't want her anymore, that he doesn't want to take pleasure in her anymore, and there they are again caught between themselves, locked between themselves in terror, and then this terror undoes itself again, and they give in again, in tears, in despair, in happiness.

(122-23)

If she is her lover's child, it is because she is to a degree his creation, something created in the act of lovemaking, a body fashioned for his pleasure which is also a body fashioned for its own pleasure and destiny: her body become what it was supposed to become. In response, she is able to espouse the direction of his desire, and her body follows the inflections given to it by his caresses toward its own pleasure. The body is here both hyper-conscious—“I used to watch what he was doing with me”—and the place of a knowledge of inexpressible pleasure.

The passage quoted bears witness to a narrative peculiarity of L'amant that is closely related to the status of the body as I have been attempting to describe it. The first of the two paragraphs is in the first person, a retrospective narrative in which the girl, now a woman of some years, and explicitly a writer (and indeed, explicitly Marguerite Duras), recalls her youth. The second paragraph is in the third person: the “I” has become “she.” The shift between first and third person in L'amant doesn't necessarily take place between paragraphs; it can happen from one sentence to another. And the play of the subjective and objective perspectives is not limited to presentation in these two pronominal modes. Consider, for instance, her reflections on the desirable body of her friend Hélène Lagonelle: “These flour-white forms, she bears them without any knowledge, she shows these things for hands to knead them, for the mouth to eat them, without holding them back, without knowledge of them, without knowledge also of their fabulous power. I would like to eat the breasts of Hélène Lagonelle as he eats the breasts of me in the room in Chinatown where I go each evening to deepen the knowledge of God. To be devoured by these flour-white breasts that are hers” (91). Translating Duras is extremely difficult: her style is deceptively limpid and simple, achieving astonishing effects by slight distortions of normal diction. In this passage, for instance, “elle montre ces choses pour les mains les pétrir, pour la bouche les manger” resorts to an almost childish syntax to express the value of Hélène Lagonelle's breasts in terms of their pleasurable use by a putative lover. “Je voudrais manger les seins d'Hélène Lagonelle comme lui mange les seins de moi” skews normal usage (“mes seins”) in order to suggest her own bodily parts as experienced by her own lover. What is at issue in such moments is precisely the body known as the site of pleasure by way of the pleasure that a lover takes in it. By experiencing her own desire for Hélène Lagonelle's body, she can experience her own body as the object of the lover's desire. Point of view, the use of pronouns and perspectives, the place of the subject and the object, have to do with positions in respect to desire.

One of the prime effects of desire, in this novel, seems to be to make subject into object, to allow or to force the subject to grasp itself as it is for the desire and in the perspective of the other. Marguerite Duras' fiction has been praised by Jacques Lacan as a confirmation of his doctrine, and the view of desire presented in L'amant is in fact quite Lacanian. For Lacan, the unconscious is “the discourse of the Other,” which means, inter alia, that the individual's desire is always structured for him or her by that impersonal Other that defines the individual's ego, at the mirror stage, as alienated, that is, as the product of others' gazes and perspectives. In Lacan's conception, the demand for love is always absolute, a demand for recognition that never can be fulfilled, based on infantile scenarios of original lack. Desire, born in the discrepancy or lack between need and demand, is thus not desire for this or that, but desire tout court, driven by radical unsatisfaction, for which any given object is a stand-in, an “imaginary” and hence deceptive simulacrum. What a lover desires is “the desirer in the other,” that the lover be “called to as desirable” by the person chosen as the object of desire.³

The Chinese lover resembles Lacan's “objet petit a”—the other, not the Other—in that he is simply in the place where desire seeks an object. He is an imaginary object, as he himself understands after he has first made love to the girl, when he tells her that he has known from their first meeting on the ferry that she would “love love,” and that she will deceive him and all the men who will be her lovers in the future (54). And she understands “that he does not know her, that he will never know her, that he has no way of understanding such perversity” (48)—the “perversity” being her desire for desire, without regard for the person that is its pretext. “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” Lacan says in one of his famous dicta. The knowledge that she obtains—that she “deepens”—in her erotic encounters is expressed, in the passage quoted above, as the “knowledge of God”: that is, of something transindividual, impersonal, desire in itself.

The discourse of desire in L'amant is especially about the place of the body in the economy and discourse of desire. The girl's place in the economy of desire is originally and insistently a product of the gaze. The first encounter with the lover, on the ferry, is initially presented by way of a photograph that might have been taken and wasn't. The girl's mother regularly arranges for photographs to be made of the family, as testimonials to its existence, somewhat in the manner that the Indochinese have themselves photographed in old age in order to be remembered after their deaths and, through the effects of age and the photographer's retouching, all end up looking the same. That the decisive encounter with the girl's lover was not photographed gives the image of their meeting its “virtue, that of representing an absolute” (17). The lacking photograph subtends the presentation of the scene as insistently visual. In the visual field thus established, our attention is insistently called to a single detail: the men's felt hat worn by the girl which, by its “determining ambiguity,” transforms her looks and her very identity. Her “awkward thinness of form” becomes something else: “It ceased to be a brutal, fatal, given of nature. It became quite the opposite, a choice against the grain of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly, here's what one wanted. Suddenly, I see myself as an other, as an other would be seen, from the outside, made available to all, made available to all gazes, put into the economy of towns, roads, desire [mise dans la circulation des villes, des routes, du désir]” (20).

In the following pages, the narrator develops this awareness of the gaze of others (essentially, of other men) as an experience of the girl's adolescence; the gaze by definition conveys an understanding of the potential for erotic encounter with its object: “It wasn't a matter of attracting desire. It was in her, the woman who provoked it, or it didn't exist. It was already there from the first glance or else it had never existed. It was the immediate understanding of sexual relation or else it was nothing” (28). Thus the girl, marked by the hat that transforms her into the object of the erotic gaze, has already entered the circulatory economy of desire when she is approached by the Chinese financier—who immediately comments on the hat. She conceives of her body as that which will henceforth be defined by that economy, and no longer by the domestic economy of the family. When she enters the Chinese financier's black limousine, she knows that her “obligations toward herself” mean that she will now have to deal with an exogamous system, that she has passed—in the direction that the hat has made her appearance pass—as it were from nature to culture, where culture is defined as the positions assigned by desire. The Chinese financier's approach to her is the first time in the text where the first person is replaced by the third, where she does not directly assume her subjectivity but rather sees herself as seen by the other: “He looks at the girl with the man's hat and the gold shoes. Slowly he comes toward her. It's evident that he is intimidated” (42).

The play of gazes in L'amant subtly displaces the traditional field of vision of novels in the realist tradition. Woman is the object of the male gaze. She is defined by her position in relation to desire, which is expressed by way of the male gaze. She assumes that defining property of the male gaze, adopts her identity in relation to it. And yet, the capacity of the girl in L'amant to assume her identity in relation to male desire consciously and deliberately, and to manipulate desire in order to realize the “destiny” of her own body, subverts the traditional model. The play of subjective and objective narrative perspectives suggests that she controls positions in regard to desire: she is no longer the passive object of the gaze (as postulated in much film theory) but actively exhibitionist. Lacan claims that woman's sexuality is inseparable from the representations through which she comes to know it: “images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman … It is … the representation of feminine sexuality, whether repressed or not, which conditions how it comes into play.”⁴ By assuming control of representation of her sexuality—by becoming the scenarist of her own body as it comes into play—the girl of L'amant makes woman's relation to the displayed body active and conscious, and indeed complicates accepted notions about activity and passivity in spectatorship.⁵

One might say that Duras seems both to espouse and to subvert Freud's declaration that there is only one libido, and that it is male. Freud's somewhat cryptic statement appears to mean that there is no separate libido for women since libido is signified by the phallus as the marker of desire, and perhaps also that libido has been defined throughout history as male. Woman's freedom, on this model, is her capacity to understand and to use libido so defined, to make its masculine definition serve her own pleasure and thus to make the lover only the excuse for love, an impersonal goal. The girl in L'amant bears affinities with such earlier (male-created) heroines as the Marquise de Merteuil, in Les liaisons dangereuses, and the adolescent protagonist of Stendhal's Lamiel. All three work a reversal of perspectives within the male-generated and male-dominated system. Men, in the words of the Marquise de Merteuil, are “dethroned tyrants become my slaves.”⁶

The liaison of the girl in L'amant with the lover develops, then, as a realization of the desire of the other, experienced as the true “destiny” of her own body as part of an erotic economy in which she has found her place, precisely by being displaced from the subjectivity, and the familial economy, in which she began. Upon her first assignation with the lover in his apartment, we have the comment: “She is there where she must be, displaced there” (47). Displacement, like the “perversity” she finds characteristic of her emotions a few pages later, marks a new position in regard to desire. And after her first experience of sex with the lover, as they lie together in bed: “I realize that I desire him” (Je m'aperçois que je le désire) (51). Desire comes as a realization, a perception, as it were as the result of a mental operation on the body which now has entered into the system of desire. The erotic, one might say, is the intelligence of the body. It is the body become sentient and self-aware by way of the other.

It is illuminating to return, in this context, to the passage that evokes her desire for the body of her friend Hélène Lagonelle. “I am prostrated by the beauty of Hélène Lagonelle's body stretched out against mine … Nothing is more extraordinary than this surface roundness of the breasts she carries, this exteriority held out toward the hands. Even my younger brother's little coolie body disappears next to this splendor. Men's bodies have stingy, internalized forms” (89). Then follows the passage cited earlier (“These flower-white forms, she carries them without any knowledge …”), which leads to a phantasy scenario in which she would take Hélène with her to the place where every evening “I have myself given the pleasure that makes one cry aloud.” The passage continues:

I would like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me so that he might to do it in turn to her. This in my presence, so that she do it according to my desire, that she give herself there where I give myself. It would be by way of Hélène Lagonelle's body, by the passage across her body, that pleasure would come from him to me, in its definitive form.

Pleasure to die from.

(92)

As I understand this difficult passage, it is about the intellection of desire, about desire becoming knowledge. Hélène Lagonelle's body as intermediary between the lover and the narrator—as the medium through which his desire is transmitted—serves, in phantasy, as a vehicle for the expression of desire in a form that she can see, realized before her eyes, and thus understand. Her lover's desire and her own would meet and become visible when acted out on Hélène Lagonelle's body. One is reminded of Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or, where the body of Paquita Valdès becomes the place where the desires of Henri de Marsay and the Marquise de Saint-Réal are inscribed, in a way that represents the “infinitude” of their (ultimately incestuous) desire, and murders Paquita. It is as if another body had to be in place in order to realize fully the eroticism of the visual that is so much the definition of desire in the novel. To be “definitive,” pleasure, orgasm, must be seen.

Pleasure and knowledge are products of positioning the body in relation to desire. So are suffering, sadism, and the imposition of the law. The girl's affair with her Chinese lover violates the social taboos of the European colony in Indochina, and in particular disqualifies her for the colony's marriage market. She has lost status; she risks never being able to “place” herself in society. This realization periodically drives her mother into a rage in which she locks the girl in her room and strips her, seeking the smells and signs of the lover's body on her underwear and her body, and then strikes and beats her. As she is beaten, her elder brother is listening through the walls, with pleasure. He encourages the mother to strike, in the name of the need to discover the truth, and in the name of the law according to whose standards the girl stands condemned. Meanwhile, the younger brother begs the mother to stop; he is afraid his sister will be killed, and afraid also of his older brother. His fear finally calms the mother, rage dissolves in tears. The girl cries with her, and denies that she is having sex with the Chinese financier. The account of this repeated incident ends: “I know that my older brother is riveted to the door, listening, he knows what my mother is doing, he knows that his younger sister is naked, and being beaten, he would like that to go on and on, till it became dangerous. My mother is not unaware of this obscure and terrifying intention on the part of my brother” (74).

The scene bears a close resemblance to a typical scenario analyzed by Freud in his essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” (“Ein Kind wird geschlagen,” 1919). Here, Freud also emphasizes positions in relation to desire and its repression. A girl will typically move through three positions, the first and third sadistic—another child is being beaten—the second masochistic, erotic, and deeply repressed: she is the child being beaten, by her father. For a boy, in a yet more complicated process of transformation, a first phantasy, “I am loved by my father,” is transformed into the conscious phantasy “I am being beaten by my mother.”⁷ Without attempting to find direct correspondences between Freud's scenarios and Duras' beating scene, one can note a general resemblance of the positions of the three children in relation to the beating and the various positions that can be assumed by one child according to Freud. In particular, the older brother's excitement at his naked sister's beating suggests both sadistic and masochistic urges, and the desire to be in the places both of beater and beaten. As in Freud's essay, positions in relation to desire in L'amant are virtually a matter of grammatical transformations. The subject finds and takes up positions in relation to desire, active and passive, sadistic and masochistic, in processes capable of reversal and contradiction. Freud's essay, read in conjunction with the beating episode of L'amant, suggests again the crucial importance of where one stands in relation to desire, including its negative transformations. Desire is always desire of the other, and of the other's desire; there is no such thing as a simple, unmediated, unproblematic desire on the part of the subject. The girl creates desire on the part of her future lover from the moment he looks at her, while his desire creates her, as part of that circulatory system which, in the description given by Freud in this essay, allows the subject to take up multiple positions within it.

To return once again to the girl's lovemaking, and particularly to the moments that describe her lover's gaze at her, one further passage needs quotation:

He looks at her. His eyes closed he looks at her still. He inhales her face. He breathes in the child, his eyes closed he breathes in her breathing, the warm air that comes from her. He discerns less and less clearly the limits of this body, this one is not like the others, it is not finite, in the room it keeps growing, it is still without fixed forms, being made at every moment, it's not only there where he sees it, it is also elsewhere, it extends beyond his view, toward risk, death, it's supple, it embarks whole into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult, it is without guile, it has a frightening intelligence.

(121)

Besides offering a remarkable view of herself in terms of the desiring gaze directed at her, and an understanding of her own capacity to serve as the object of desire, this passage suggests the importance of desire and the erotic as potential transgressions of human finitude.

For Georges Bataille, in L'érotisme, the erotic is fundamentally transgressive of taboos and limitations. Human beings are “discontinuous”—finite, closed, incapable of deep communication with others because the bodies of others are closed to them. In the erotic encounter discontinuity and finitude are breached, if only momentarily. One body accedes to another, breaches its walls, enters its bodily orifices. Bataille writes:

All the work of eroticism has as its principle a destruction of the structure of the closed being that each partner in the game is in the normal state.

The decisive action is making naked. Nudity is opposed to the closed state, in other words, to the state of discontinuous existence. Nudity is a condition of communication, which reveals the quest for a possible continuity of being, beyond the closing in on oneself. Bodies open to continuity by these secret passages that give us the feeling of obscenity. Obscenity signifies the trouble that disorders a condition of bodies in possession of themselves, a possession of a durable and affirmed identity. …

What is at stake in eroticism is always a dissolution of constituted forms … But in eroticism, even less than in reproduction, discontinuous life is not doomed, despite Sade's claim, to disappear: it is simply put into question. It must be troubled, maximally disordered.⁸

Putting one's body at risk in this manner creates a disequilibrium in which one consciously puts oneself into question. The erotic thus offers a momentary transcendence of limits, of discontinuity. It is comparable to sacrifice, as the revelation—and creation—of the sacred. “The sacred is precisely the continuity of being, revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinuous being” (92). Death offers the final transgression or transcendence of the closed body. Eroticism as an act of transgression indicates that “the sacred and prohibition are bound up together, and that access to the sacred takes place in the violence of an infraction” (139). Bataille thus redefines the age-old intimacy of love and death: eroticism is “the affirmation of life all the way unto death” (“l'approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort”).

I cite Bataille because he so well captures the trans-personal state achieved in erotic realization by the protagonist of L'amant, and how this state opens onto a sacred state (“the knowledge of God,” she calls it) that is also akin to death. For both Bataille and Duras, the erotic is a state of expenditure and excess. These are key terms for Bataille, since they underlie his attempt—given its fullest statement in La part maudite—to found a social economy based not on saving and capitalization but on expenditure (la dépense), waste, and unproductiveness, which are necessary to regain a sense of the sacred beyond the utilitarian. Art is in this sense also expenditure, waste, excess. Poetry, says Bataille, is “creation by means of loss … the pursuit of inconsistent shadows that provide nothing but vertigo and rage. The poet frequently can use words only for his own loss.”⁹ The view of writing advanced in L'amant is quite similar.

L'amant closes with a phone call from the Chinese lover to the girl, now married and divorced, and a mother, many years after her return to France, during his visit to Paris. The call ends with his avowal that he loves her still, that he could never stop loving her, that he will love her unto death. The desire created in L'amant is absolute, beyond the specific circumstances in which it is enacted. The episode of the phone call is immediately preceded by the narrative of the lover's arranged marriage with the Chinese wife chosen by his father—events which the girl did not witness and could not know. According to her account, the lover must for a long time have been impotent with his new wife, unable to consummate the marriage because of his memory of the white girl, as if her body stretched sideways across the marriage bed:

She must have remained for a long time the ruler of his desire, the personal reference of his emotion, of the immensity of his tenderness, of somber and terrible carnal depth. Then the day came when it must have been possible. Precisely when desire for the white girl must have been so strong, so unbearable that he could recall her image in its totality as in a raging fever and could penetrate the other woman with this desire for her, the white girl. It must have been by way of a lie that he found himself inside this woman, and by a lie that he engendered what the two families, Heaven, his ancestors in the North, all expected from him, that is, an heir to his name.

(140-41)

In the manner of the phantasmatic scenes played out on the body of Hélène Lagonelle, the body of the girl serves as intermediary in the realization of desire, indeed takes on the role of the phallus: it is with this desire that the lover finally succeeds in entering his bride. But whereas the phantasmatic body of Hélène Lagonelle serves the intellectual comprehension of desire, here the hallucinated body of the girl—invoked as in a fever—serves rather the lie, the substitution of sexual objects. One may then ask which kind of phantasy or hallucination presides at the writing of this passage, which narrates not what the girl has witnessed and knows to be the case, but rather the way things “must have been.” Is this a lie? Or is it the kind of phantasy that creates truth, the truth dictated by desire? Is it, in this sense, an emblem of the very fiction-making process, of the capacity to narrate not only events but also the history of desire underlying events, the history in which events are merely symptoms of a determinative, hidden narrative? It is not to cast doubt on the truth of the events recounted in L'amant to suggest that the guiding thread of the narrative, and the dynamic of the plot, have less to do with the relatively sparse and simple events of the novel than with the force of desire, as the source of hallucinated and phantasized bodies, of bodies that have a corporeal reality but become significant in their placement in relation to desire. The writing of the book also has to do with positions in relation to desire. The writing body retraces the eros of the story in a state of deprivation and hallucination.

There is a moment in the novel, following the girl's fantasy of Hélène Lagonelle in the arms of her lover, when the place of erotic encounter with the lover, the Cholon apartment, is analogized to the place of writing. Within the aridity and hardness of her family the girl gains her essential conviction that she will be a writer. She has come to understand her family in a new light because of the hours she spends in the Cholon apartment. “It is an unbearable place, it borders on death, a place of violence, of pain, of despair, of dishonor. And such is the place in Cholon” (93). That is, the place of writing, its spiritual space, is one of agony and despair, also of eroticism and death. We are reminded of a passage early in the novel where the narrator refers to her vocation of writing, which she discovers along with eroticism at age fifteen, as characterized by an “inconvenance fondamentale,” a fundamental impropriety. Writing is a violation of accepted norms, a transgression of limits, an experience of pain and of orgasmic pleasure. Writing indeed (as I have suggested) may originate in the erotic. And the erotic espouses the mission of writing when it is the source and the object of an act of intelligence, when it is seized intellectually as a testing of limits.

Writing for Bataille is linked in much the same manner to the lucid, willed transgression of proprieties and prohibitions, the creation of value through the experience of infraction and loss. Bataille's essays in literary criticism, in La littérature et le mal, turn around the issue posed in Baudelaire's phrase, from the poem “L'irremédiable,” “la conscience dans le mal,” consciousness of evil and consciousness within evil, the transgressor's awareness at the moment of transgression. It is not so much that wrongdoing is pleasurable, as that taking pleasure is seen as evil. “Evil is not transgression, it is transgression condemned. It is precisely sin.”¹⁰ The importance of sin lies in its conceptualization, as that kind of transgressive act that changes one's spiritual condition and entails sanctions. In sinning, one may choose the state of damnation, and therefore know it in full lucidity. Eroticism, for both Bataille and Duras—as also for Baudelaire—offers the most direct experience of mal: transgression condemned, turned into sin. The act of erotic transgression is a moment of heightened consciousness beyond the normal limits and conventions. The transgression of writing—another form of “communication”—is fundamentally similar; it assumes the impossible, as place and as state of being, a condition akin to mortal sin where pleasure is derived from the knowledge of mal, of one's wrongdoing, and knowledge itself is that pleasure.

Notes

1. Marguerite Duras, L'amant (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), p. 111; English trans. Barbara Bray, The Lover (New York: Pantheon, 1985). The translation of this stylistically challenging text by Barbara Bray is excellent. I have preferred to give my own translations, however, in an attempt to remain closer to the peculiar syntax of the original, although this often results in an English version less fluent and graceful than Bray's. Duras in 1991 published another, very different version of her story, L'amant de la Chine du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), which apparently was begun as a screenplay for the film of L'amant and, not used in this capacity, developed into a novel, though one with indications to the maker of a possible film of the original novel. It is a strange performance, much less subtle and compelling than L'amant.

2. In the wake of of Roland Barthes' use of jouissance in distinction to plaisir, it has been usual to translate the former term as “bliss.” But the connotations of “bliss” strike me as hopelessly wrong for designating intense, orgasmic bodily pleasure. I note that Barbara Bray also uses “pleasure” to translate jouissance.

3. See Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in François Barat and Joèl Farges, eds., Marguerite Duras, rev. ed. (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1979), pp. 131-37. Lacan writes, “Marguerite Duras s'avère savoir sans moi ce que j'enseigne” (p. 133). Lacan's piece was originally published in the Cahiers Renaud-Barrault (December 1965). I adapt here especially material from Lacan, Le séminaire, book 8, Le transfert (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991), p. 415.

4. Lacan, “Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité féminine,” in Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 725-36; I quote from the translation by Jacqueline Rose, “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 70. For Rose's comments on this passage, see p. 43.

5. Sharon Willis makes a similar point in the context of feminist theory: “The figure of an exhibitionist female subject should have special force for feminist readers. … [Duras'] work centers on issues of concern to most feminist theoretical enterprises: desire and sexuality, gender and biology, the relation of the body to language. The Lover reinscribes the exhibitionist scenario in a woman's active self-display, a presentation of her life as spectacle—active, that is, as opposed to the passive form of woman as object of/spectacle for a mastering gaze, that of reader or spectator.” Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 7.

6. Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1979), Letter 81, p. 169.

7. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Standard Edition 17:179-204.

8. Georges Bataille, L'érotisme (1957; Paris: Union Générale d'Editions/10/18, 1965), pp. 22-23. The evident affinities of Bataille's thinking about eroticism with Lacan's are not accidental: Lacan was much influenced by Bataille.

9. “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 120.

10. Bataille, L'érotisme, p. 140.