Human Insufficiency in Marguerite Duras’s Le Camion (1977) and Le Navire Night (1979): Ontology, Politics, Aesthetics

In Marguerite Duras’s oeuvre, the late 1970s represent a critical moment, marked by Le Camion (1977) and Le Navire Night (1979), two films that resonate strongly with her contemporaneous political reflections on the impossibility of societal revolution. In particular, Duras regarded the aesthetics of these films, which she considered to be the culmination point of her intellectual trajectory, as the most viable artistic response to the coeval political climate. While this remarkable moment in her career takes place against the background of 1970s French political history, the notion of a culmination concurrently suggests that it draws on a pre-existing intellectual history. This article examines Duras’s thoroughgoing alignment of politics and aesthetics against the background of French political history, while tracing the roots of its premises back to the redefinition of human existence as ‘insufficiency’ in 1930s French philosophy, which was instigated by the work of Alexandre Kojève. Mediated by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Dionys Mascolo, this legacy found new footing in Duras’s political film aesthetics in the late 1970s.