Aesthetics of Endurance

»Save all forces for martyrdom«, Marguerite Duras wrote in her diaries and prose notes from the years 1945 and 1946, collected in the book La douleur (1985). The first 80 pages of the volume describe the agonizing wait for a sign of survival from her husband, Robert L., his return as a skeleton from the concentration camp of Dachau, and his agonizing recovery. Duras' notes are merciless; they describe the disgust with the repulsively disfigured man. But she also writes that she would have rather died than hear of her husband's death. Ultimately, she admits that it is impossible for her to continue to accept and love the last-minute survivor. She ends her notes with another wait. Waiting for him to be strong enough to divorce him. The book was published in 1985 and belongs to the series of literary testimonies of the 20th century that describe the experiences of the Holocaust from a female perspective, about a time when romantic love became impossible. 

Duras had forgotten the existence of her diary notebooks and also the memory of having written these words at all. But she knows that she wrote these extensive passages. The pathos and fear, the worries and doubts that had accumulated simply flowed onto paper at the time and would surely end up somewhere on a hard drive nowadays. If endless waiting changes the parameters of the social even for the rest of our current lives and we can engage in excessive forms of digital consumption but must do without any physical contact, then this will lead to a dematerialization of desire and expose a phenomenal disorder of thinking and feeling. In a digital culture where the incomprehensibility of visual stimuli – their abundance and acceleration – leads to an indistinguishability of appearance and reality, of remembered and memory, our identity will be lost. In this new reality, those without love would be condemned to wait for the rest of their lives. They say: »Whatever happens, one must be able to read«. Marguerite Duras and I, we tried to read, but the connection between the sentences could no longer be established; we only suspected that it existed. As a result, the unread lines have degenerated into mere black blocks, kindly protecting us from written parallel worlds and ultimately only filling the white paper devoid of meaning.

During the pandemic, he made the voice of Marguerite Duras resonate in my library. I think she fits well with the voices already present there – from Hannah Arendt, from Maya Deren. In Library Love (2019), Paul Beatriz Preciado writes that every love affair, every one-night stand leaves a book behind, like a trace or a legacy that each lover brought to the other. Thus, one could say that every relationship, even if it is only utopian, possesses its book, which allows the respective story to be told. Some relationships leave behind waiting books exclusively, which condemn their readers to always start them anew. The virus left by the books changes the aggregate state of thinking itself. The words become more intimate. It could even be that they mutate into a secret language. In this case, one says some things that one would never let happen otherwise: »If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn’t be worth it anymore. […] But every book, like every writer, has a difficult, unavoidable passage. And one must consciously decide to leave this mistake in the book for it to remain a true book, not a lie«.