Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of the nuclear blast was the only sovereign truth Hiroshima offered us. He’d gone on to declare that instant, that blast, “a vanishing splendor.” Duras was herself not such a sick puppy as Bataille, but the common interpretation of her script for Hiroshima mon amour as “anti-nuclear,” a treatise on peace, is not quite correct. It’s more accurate to say that Duras both condemned human suffering and then again framed it as the only vital condition for the possibility of meaning.