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Abstract
The conjunction of money and desire is an important focus of several of Duras's works where capital gains are associated with erotic prods (prostitution, seduction and voyeurism) and also social and political corruption. In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the theme of prostitution as sought-after by both brother and sister in a familial-based fortune seeking co-exists with the critique of a state-sponsored promotion of the colonial adventure as investment for profit. My essay addresses the representation of economies of desire in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and its re-written version more than 40 years later, L'Amant, in order to explore changes in Duras's treatment of cash flows conjugated with desire. Using Deleuze and Guattari's notions of capitalism as deterritorialized flow, I will examine images of liquidity in the two novels to mark differences in their representation of economies of desire. The relative deterritorialization of capitalism as thematized in Un Barrage yields to the absolute deterritorialization performed in L'Amant where the confluence of money and desire flows differently, chaotically, unbound by capitalist axiomatics. In this text, Duras privileges not the flow of some underlying substance (such as capital) but rather the creative flow of life and the imagination.
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Carol J. Murphy
Carol Murphy is Professor of French and founding Director of the France-Florida Research Institute (2002–2012) at the University of Florida. In addition to book-length studies on the authors Marguerite Duras and Julien Gracq and a translation of an essay on art by the writer-editor Jean Paulhan, she has authored numerous articles on contemporary cultural production in France.