The skin (the law) of writing: Duras and what remains of pure loss

Abstract

The main theme in this present work is the relation between law and writing. This way, we emphasize as basic texts La Maladie de la mort, by Duras and Television, by Lacan. So, we took the lacanian expression “from what stands of pure loss to what bets the worst from the father” as basis to make us think about the “dura lex” of dissolution also called “pure loss” or even “touch of real”. Duras writes about the absence, the tragic experience of the abandonment; the place of the erotic as a gap, intermission; the party of the tongue and the “game of the warming hand”, in other words, she writes about “happy babel”. This net built as a result of the confusions and the interlaces of languages was named by Barthes as the text of pleasure and the pleasure of text, that is to say, writing as pure fruition. This one was named by Brandão as mirror-narrative and it is here analyzed and understood as a metaphor of the reflex, reflux and cutting related to the symbolical, imaginary and to the concept of real. This way, the literary is seen as a territory of mirage and of the “secret language” of sex and castration as also the “invertion in lips and ears” or “lituraterra”, letter and trash. Earth. In this other version of what is in but is out; of what is out but is in; Lacan points out the knot in Duras’s writing as a beautiful wrapper, consisting its center on the danger provided by the stare and the anguish. So, our work is a reading on Duras interposed by Lacan’s reading about her as a technique in Abyme. The practice of letter in Duras is, according to Lacan, revealing of a writing of the unconscious while it exposes the convergence among the request of the letter, the desire and the anguish of the law of the “pure loss”. The “almar”.