Commentators are in general agreement that Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and practice is too deterministic, but they have failed to provide a workable template for revisions. Here the French novelist Marcel Proust is proposed as a phenomenological corrective. There are strong family resemblances between his approach to social life and that of Bourdieu. In Remembrance of Things Past, however, Proust offers an understanding of action that is more sensitive to contingency, self-reflexivity, change, desire and the layering of the (...) self. Attention to this will pay dividends for those seeking to creatively reconstruct Bourdieu’s project. (shrink)

Although William James was a significant presence in Paris at the dawn of the 20th century, his psychological and philosophical theories well known, any role he played in the gestation of Marcel Proust’s ground-breaking novel À la recherche du temps perdu has been neglected by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic—until now. Much of what made Proust’s novel so startlingly original stems from James’s writings, which were available to Proust in French translation.

This book describes the development of Proust's treatment of material objects from his earliest work Les Plaisirs et les jours to his mature novel À la recherche du temps perdu. It examines the literary influences on Proust's way with objects in the light of certain critical texts and reconsiders the significance of Ruskin. As the movement from unreflective and spontaneous representation to a meta-narrative of consciousness is traced, some questions as to the banality of the 'banal object' arise. The meta-narrative (...) finds resonance in a peculiarly Proustian pictoriality which has been largely unnoticed. It resides in descriptions where objects appear simultaneously or at different times as things in paintings and in the real. By exploring connections between Proust's pictoriality and his reflections on 'matière' and 'surface', the author suggests a radical approach to the modernism of À la recherche du temps perdu. (shrink)

Oxford University Press published eminent literary critic Leo Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and features a new preface from the author.

A la recherche du temps perdu van Proust lezen is binnen een reflectie op de zintuiglijkheid niets minder dan een feest. We raken via de rijke evocaties en metaforen in de werkelijkheid van oorden en plekken ondergedompeld. Dat wil zeggen dat we zelf deel gaan uitmaken van hun lijfelijkheid en bijgevolg van hun eigen tijd. In de reflectie genieten we van een ‘ont-plooiing’ van het sensuele, van een verlangen naar wereldlijkheid. Een tegenpool vinden we in het latere werk van Beckett. (...) Zijn wereld schijnt af te sterven, het lichaam-subject vergaat, de oorden en plekken verschrompelen, de dingen vervreemden en de gebeurtenissen zijn nog slechts accidenten waarvan de reikwijdte niet meer te verwoorden valt. Er is een ‘in-plooiing’ van het sensuele. De woorden sterven. De wereld ‘ontwereldlijkt’. (shrink)

Marcel Proust’s works contain a lot of ideas consonant with the ideas that were actively discussed by philosophers of his time. Many philosophers focused on the issues of perception, memory, will, freedom, personal identity, etc., which constituted an important part of academic curriculum. Proust familiarized himself with the issues studying philosophy at the Lyceum and at the Sorbonne. In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes an existential experience of his character viewing these issues from a particular (...) perspective, through the prism of the main character’s lifelong search of his calling. He gradually proceeds from philosophical psychology exploring the interaction of memories and impressions in a particular perception, to philosophy proper, to metaphysics aimed at understanding the truth, at going beyond time. The article traces some moments of this transition, shows that for Proust it is not just the work of memory that is important but the emphasis on those states of consciousness where the present and the past coincide, merge, and thereby we go beyond time, to eternity. The author analyzes some images and signs that accompanied the character of the novel on the way to the realization of his calling. Particular attention is paid to the Proustian interpretation of the role of art in changing and enriching the perception of the world, as well as the importance in human life of a habit in which positive and negative aspects are highlighted. Proust himself believed that a work of art is an optical instrument through which the readers begin to discern in themselves what they would otherwise fail to see. His own novel was such an instrument. (shrink)

“Involuntary Memory: Marcel Proust and the Poetic Discovery of the Inner Self. An Analysis from the Philosophical Perspective of Walter Benjamin”. In this article, we undertake, from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s philosophical work, the phenomenon of involuntary memory discovered by Marcel Proust in the writing process –exercise of subjectification– of In Search of Lost Time. In the analysis the following approaches are developed: the relation between oblivion and memory, the poetic discovery of involuntary memory, the conditions for (...) the revelation of mnemic images –images of the inner world–, the recovery of the lost time and of the narration in the novel, and the auratic character of the involuntary memory’s images. (shrink)

En plus d'un excellent ouvrage analytique sur Proust, cette thèse dépasse son objet en distinguant bien la pensée du romancier de celle du théoricien. Ainsi la notion de philosophie du roman est profondément explorée et la proposition d'une réforme de la théorie du récit (narratologie) est esquissée. Suppose lecture de la ##Recherche##.

What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more clearly—in a sense, even more crudely—than any other major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of (...) modern high culture by Proust’s time, persists, I believe, in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience has, furthermore, been served by psychoanalysis—more specifically, by a certain view of sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes normative—both for an individual and for a culture—the mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu.As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the Proustian narrator’s discovery of his vocation as a writer. Let’s begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre, the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the “resurrection” of Marcel’s grandmother on the first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence of art on death. Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and Modern Culture, written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his most recent publication. Professor’s The Freudian Body/Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter. (shrink)

Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, (...) postcards, book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography. (shrink)

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, raises an interesting philosophical issue, namely, how can one be in touch with past things if they no longer exist? It provides us with a way to address this issue by outlining an ontological view according to which past things still exist within a four-dimensional world. Although one cannot be in touch with past things by means of ordinary perception, one can do so by combining perception and memory. In this sense, In (...) Search of Lost Time helps us to reconcile a four-dimensionalist ontology according to which things have both spatial and temporal parts with a realist phenomenology according to which experience gives us access to things as they are. In so doing, Proust’s masterpiece allows us to shed some light on what it means for a subject of experience to exist in a four-dimensional world. (shrink)

This work develops the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability through the integration of the phenomenon of involuntary memory in Marcel Proust's work and ...

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to (...) William James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

The self as the identification of the self with itself is a product of the dynamic transformation of European culture beginning in the Renaissance. The self, or absolute ego, was an outgrowth of the consciously rationalist spirit. However, modernity's Faustian drive was conscious paradoxically without being self conscious of itself or its cultural creations. Modernism deconstructed the values and assumptions of modernity. A casualty was the problematization of the self that had been banished and/or erased by formalism, structuralism and deconstruction. (...) The modernist self erases the absolute ego reconstructing it with a rich, complex, narrative idea of a self‐conscious relational self encompassing memory, repression, autobiography and history. This paper explores the modernist conception of self in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust demolishes the absolute ego in favor of the paradoxical self which knows itself only in relation to otherness actualized in persons and culture in the sacred time of existence. (shrink)

Le roman proustien est hanté par la présence du possible, qui appelle son élucidation en logique modale. Il est aussi balisé de notions mathématiques. Ces deux aspects convergent dans la psychologie amoureuse, donnant au romanesque une teneur intellectuelle qui se prolonge dans sa portée politique.

Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck’s work has to be regarded as a true commonplace. Scholars were able to collect a huge amount of Proust’s loci (not only in the Recherche) where it is easy to meet with the sound echo of Maeterlinck’s pieces and poems. An additional number of hidden references to Maeterlinck was detected in Proust (and in this case mostly in the Recherche) by scholars working about the cultural context underlying the genesis of Proust’s novel. The philosophical side of (...) Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck, however, didn’t until now undergo a careful scrutiny. Through a comparative analysis of the relevant chapters of Maeterlinck Le Temple enseveli and of the last pages of the concluding section (Le Temps retrouvé) of the Recherche, the paper aims to show how such a scrutiny seems to be unavoidable and highly fruitful, in order to clarify Proust’s ideas concerning not only time and memory, but – and above all – Self and moral life. (shrink)

Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck’s work has to be regarded as a true commonplace. Scholars were able to collect a huge amount of Proust’s loci (not only in the Recherche) where it is easy to meet with the sound echo of Maeterlinck’s pieces and poems. An additional number of hidden references to Maeterlinck was detected in Proust (and in this case mostly in the Recherche) by scholars working about the cultural context underlying the genesis of Proust’s novel. The philosophical side of (...) Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck, however, didn’t until now undergo a careful scrutiny. Through a comparative analysis of the relevant chapters of Maeterlinck Le Temple enseveli and of the last pages of the concluding section (Le Temps retrouvé) of the Recherche, the paper aims to show how such a scrutiny seems to be unavoidable and highly fruitful, in order to clarify Proust’s ideas concerning not only time and memory, but – and above all – Self and moral life. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Studie entwirft die Konturen einer neuen Philologie, die es erlaubt, in bislang noch nicht dagewesener Weise der Komplexität und den pluralen, multi-dimensionalen Beziehungsgeflechten von Texten systematisch Rechnung zu tragen, ohne an analytischer Präzision und Differenziertheit zu verlieren - und dies in einer kultur- und geschichtsübergreifenden Perspektive. Auf der Basis einer umfassenden Kritik am klassischen Kategorienbegriff wird im ersten Teil ein grundsätzlich neues - trans-kategoriales und poly-systematisches - Textualitätskonzept entwickelt und durch einen Katalog konkreter neuer Interpretationsverfahren ergänzt. Damit sind (...) die Fundamente für eine nicht-eurozentristische Literaturwissenschaft der Zukunft gelegt, die weit über bisherige Liminalitäts- und Poly-System-Theorien hinausgeht: Komplexität und Ordnung, Universalismus und Pluralismus werden auf neue Weise verbunden. Der zweite Teil demonstriert die Leistungsfähigkeit des neuen Modells. Er konzentriert sich auf zwei Autoren, die als besonders dunkel und komplex gelten: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz und Marcel Proust. Mit den neuen Interpretationsverfahren eröffnen sich völlig neue Einsichten in die behandelten Werke und Autoren: Leibniz gibt sich als ein besonders früher Denker des Liminalen und der Poly-Systematizität zu erkennen, der zudem entscheidend auf Prousts ästhetisches Projekt der Recherche eingewirkt hat. Damit lädt die Studie zu einer Re-Kartierung der Denk- und Literaturgeschichte ein, die gleichsam im Inneren Europas selbst ansetzt. (shrink)