The Signifying Corpse: Re-Reading Kristeva on Marguerite Duras

Abstract

olitics, in the postmodern arena, has been driven underground.2 Althusser's overdetermination, Baudrillard's simulation, Foucault's death of man-each of these figures speaks out of the same political impotence. The postmodern subject finds himself irrevocably welded into the structures that contain himthe postmodern subject finds himself a without organs.3 I say him, however, precisely because I propose that the overdetermined subject is also a gendered subject, and that body without organs is a figure not for some revolutionary androgeny but precisely the impotence of the overdetermined subject. In contrast to this neutered figure (man minus), I intend to examine the textual reproduction of intact female bodies as allegorical signifiers for political revivification in the work of Marguerite Duras. Situating Freudian lack back where it belongs (upon the male desire for