»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 eighty pages 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 slow, tormented 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 his death. Ultimately, she admits that it is impossible for her to continue to accept and love the last-minute survivor. And so she ends her notes with another wait — waiting for him to be strong enough to divorce him.
The book was published in 1985. It belongs to the series of literary testimonies of the twentieth century that describe the experiences of the Holocaust from a female perspective, about a time when romantic love became impossible. But what interests me is not only what Duras survived. It is the form that her endurance took — the specific texture of a waiting.
Duras had forgotten the existence of her diary notebooks. Forgotten the memory of having written these words at all. But she knew that she had written them — this is the strange epistemological condition of the text. Not amnesia exactly, but a dissociation so complete that the writing had become a foreign object, returning from an archive she had not consciously maintained. She knows the passages exist. She does not know how to read them as hers.
There is something here about the nature of writing under extreme endurance that differs from ordinary autobiographical recollection. The body, under conditions of sustained and unresolvable tension, generates its own secretions — and sometimes what flows onto the page is less an act of narration than a form of survival metabolism. The pathos and fear, the worries and doubts that had accumulated simply flowed. As if writing were a form of hemorrhage. As if the body had run out of other vessels.
One wonders where such secretions would go now. Onto a hard drive, surely. But hard drives do not breathe. They do not yellow at the edges or smell of the year they were sealed. The digital archive is promiscuous with everything except degradation — which is to say, it withholds the very evidence of having endured.
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During the pandemic, he brought the voice of Marguerite Duras into my library. I think she fits well with the voices already present there — Hannah Arendt, Maya Deren, Simone Weil in a corner she barely occupies. In Library Love (2019), Paul Beatriz Preciado writes that every love affair, every one-night stand, leaves a book behind. A trace, a legacy. Something the lover brought to the other that could not be taken back when the leaving happened. Each relationship, even if only utopian, possesses its book. Some relationships leave behind only waiting books — books one is condemned to begin again each time, never arriving at the last page, because the last page would mean the end of waiting, which would mean something had been decided.
The virus left by books changes the aggregate state of thinking itself. The words become more intimate. They may even mutate into a secret language — a code legible only to those who have been inside the same endurance, who have learned that patience is not a virtue but an ecology.
If endless waiting changes the parameters of the social even for the rest of our current lives — if we can engage in excessive forms of digital consumption but must do without physical contact — then what results is a dematerialization of desire. A phenomenal disorder of thinking and feeling. In a culture where the incomprehensibility of visual stimuli, their abundance and acceleration, leads to an indistinguishability of appearance and reality, of the remembered and memory itself, something in identity begins to dissolve. Not catastrophically. More like forgetting a word one has always known — the absence arriving before one notices the loss. And those without love, as Duras understood, are 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, somewhere, in the architecture of the paragraph, the way one suspects a room behind a wall. The unread lines had degenerated into mere black blocks, kindly protecting us from written parallel worlds and ultimately filling the white paper with a devoid of meaning that was, in its own way, complete.
»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.«
I return to this passage not as conclusion but as contradiction. Because Duras also forgot — and yet the book remained. Whatever she had decided at the moment of writing had been made by a self she subsequently could not locate. The decision to leave the mistake, the decision to endure, the decision to wait — these were not made by a unified subject in command of its materials. They were made in the way that waiting is made: in the absence of any alternative, and with the whole body.
This is perhaps what distinguishes an aesthetics of endurance from an aesthetics of mastery. It cannot be designed in advance. It can only be recognized afterward, in the residue — in what the waiting left behind, visible now that it is over, or not yet over, or not yet known to be over.
What would it mean to build a practice from this? Not from what one wants to make, but from what the endurance has already made, whether one intended it or not?