“À présent, je n’aime plus rien” Carmen: constructing absence

“À présent, je n’aime plus rien”: we propose a reading of this sentence that Mérimée lends to Carmen, forming the hypothesis that there is a lacuna in the text, not in relation to a more complete, lost object, but to an object posterior to the text, in this case an excerpt from Virginie Despentes’ essay King Kong Théorie. We thereby arrive at imagining the possibility of a rape in Carmen and at questioning more generally the relationship between the rape narrative and the narrative motivation.