Abstract

The interest of this paper is to discover the precondition of experience. It is suggested that Walter Benjamin's meditations on Proust, as well as on the origin of the novel, lead to the verge of that discovery. A la recherche du temps perdu is less a monumental work of fiction in this view than the limit of experience – the intransmissible fact of the transience of the present – made manifest in writing. While in Proust transience gives way to its recuperation as image, Thomas Bernhard's post-Proustian masterpiece Extinction mobilizes the present's destructive potential with compelling effect, and turns it upon the work of historical experience itself.