My purpose in the discussion that follows is to dissect the roles played by photography, photographic invention and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's L'amant. It has already been acknowledged by critics that Duras's generically indeterminate, temporally and pronominally fluid rendition of her Indochinese childhood is inaugurated and yet unillustrated by a ‘latent’ photo-image that is never actually realized, but is proffered nonetheless as an object of spectatorship for the reader's gaze. This ‘absolute’, unmade image opens up a space of writing characterized by ‘photographic’ features (including a bric-à-brac organization of snapshot-like textual moments) that enhance our sense of the centrality of photography to Duras's improperly autobiographical récit. Further, it is no less a target of the fetishizing impulse, arguably, than the ‘Photographie du Jardin d'Hiver’—the photograph of his dead mother, in her childhood incarnation— that likewise features invisibly, and centrally, in Barthes's seminal treatise on photographic representation, La chambre claire (1980). The ‘presence’ within L'amant of this absent fetish-photo offers a key to a central element in the matrix of desires revealed by Duras's self-referential tale. The nature of this desire, and the ‘aberrant’ nature of Duras's female photo-fetishism, will constitute my not unfetishized objects of scrutiny.

The ‘image’ from which the récit contained in L'amant derives its impetus is a verbalized, fantasized image, a ‘fantasme de photographie’ that Duras's nameless, self-projective adult narrator progressively ‘develops’ before our eyes in the incipit of her story (L'amant, pp. 9–21; Lover, pp. 7–17). It exists because of—and as an après-coup substitute for—a photo-image that has previously failed to materialize at the point in time at which its realization became a possibility.