Writing on Proust Today: Notes on Mauro Carbone’s An Unprecedented Deformation

research in phenomenology 44 (2014) 421–431

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Writing on Proust Today: Notes on Mauro Carbone’s An Unprecedented Deformation

Andrew BenjaminMonash University

Abstract

Mauro Carbone’s interpretation of Proust is grounded in his interpretation of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. The aim of this paper is to call this interpretation into question by arguing that neither Deleuze nor Merleau-Ponty provides the basis for an interpretation of Proust that concentrates on the role of expression understood as ‘translation’ within his literary project. What is precluded is the possibility of an identification of expression with the process of writing. This is, however, exactly what an interpretation of Proust demands.

Keywords

Carbone – Proust – writing – memory – the contemporary

. . . le temps qui change les êtres ne modifie pas l’image que nous avons gardée d’eux.

—proust

What does it mean to write on Proust today? A question whose acuity resides in the necessity to read Proust as concerned directly with the possibility of writing today. The emphasis is as much on “writing” as it is on “today.” How is the “today” of writing to be understood? Again the question allows this “today” to set the measure for a concern with both memory and forgetting. To ask the question of the possibility of writing as a question with direct actuality is to have conceded the presence of the determining hold of forgetting. Forgetting demands that the question posed at the outset—What does it mean to write on Proust today?—acquire what force it has through the necessity of the

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inscription of that specific temporal marker. While this marker designates what can be called the now of writing, that now is not reducible to the instant that delimits the act. (Were that to be the case then the intermediary figure of writ-ing would have been excised. It would be as though expression just took place.) Forgetting defines the “now” in which that act occurs. And yet, what is actually of interest with Proust is not mere forgetting and recovery but the recogni-tion that stems from encountering what might be described as the “having for-gotten,” which is an encounter where the now comes to be disjointed and the naturalization of time as continuity that had come to appear as time becomes, as a result of that recognition, time’s artifice. (Integral to the truth of time is the recognition of continuity and immediacy as artifice rather than as time’s “natural” presence.) In order to clarify some of these points, it is essential to return to the passage from À la recherche du temps perdu with which Mauro Carbone’s study of Proust begins.1 While conceding that any passage from this work of literature will always sustain a range of interpretive possibilities, it is nonetheless essential to isolate three specific moments within the text.

The first concerns the encounter with one of the Petites Madeleines. In fact what is of interest is the formulation of the set up that pertains prior to the “instant” described as one where: “Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé sans la notion de sa cause”. He begins to eat the cake; lifting it to his mouth “machi-nalement,” he was “accablé” and pervaded by a sense of sadness. The “instant” in question interrupts this setting significantly. The cause of the instant is unknown. The second point that needs to be taken up is the way in which that instant is announced. And it should be noted that the term “l’instant” is used consistently throughout this passage. Proust’s formulation is clear. The narrator announces that “je tressaillis.” He did not therefore merely stop—no matter how attentive he would have been to that cessation and that which occurred with it (and as it). The instant is already defined in terms of what might be described as a feeling of an original intensity that presages (perhaps prefaces) a form of hiatus. That feeling will have a connection to a search for “truth,” a search that, to use Proust’s formulation, is connected not simply to the forgotten but more emphatically to the “inconnu.” Hence, this is what prompts, in part, the articulation of the search. It is expressed in the follow-ing terms: “Et je recommence à me demander quel pouvait être cet état inconnu.” It is a state falling outside the hold of “logic” and yet that has an insistent form of reality that accounts—and there is an important simultaneity here—for the vanishing of other modes of consciousness. The final moment concerns

1 Mauro Carbone, An Unprecedented Deformation. Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas, trans. Niall Keane (Albany: suny Press, 2010); henceforth Carbone, followed by page number.

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the description of the object of this search, that which is the “inconnu” and which is linked, though in a still to be determined way, to the “taste” of the cake. Proust writes thus: “Certes, ce qui palpite ainsi au fond de moi, ce doit être l’image, le souvenir visuel. . . .” And note that what is at work, working within the body, is a feeling, literally here a palpitation, that has the form of an image. The unknown object is therefore an image. Hence the redundant question—and this emerges simply from the novel’s opening—would be the one that was exclusively concerned with the status of the image, as though the image were to be understood in terms of a relationship between a signifier and signified. In other words, an image defined in terms of externality, as though, that is, there were something prior to the image. And yet, it is essential not to rush ahead with this analysis as though the question of the image, and thus the status of the image, circumscribed what is at stake here in a direct and unequivocal way. Prior to turning to Carbone’s engagement with the presence of memory within Proust—an engagement mediated by Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the “sensible idea” and Deleuze’s reading of Proust in terms of what Deleuze describes as “le renversement du platonisme”—it is essential to stay with the web of concerns created by the three moments excised from Proust’s text and which were noted above.

The image, described here also as a “visual souvenir,” was not simply for-gotten. Far more significantly, there was no registration of its having occurred in order for it to have been forgotten. Hence the present became a site of mechanical repetition which for Proust is pervaded by a sense of “sadness.” The movement that this entire passage from the novel sets in place starts with this machine like repetition. Then, during that repetitive process, there is the emphatic interruption; hence, “Mais à l’instant même . . . je tressaillis.” The body shudders, following which there is the presence of an unaccountable pleasure and then questioning. What needs to be pointed out here is twofold. First, there is the necessity of the link between pleasure, understood as the site of the body’s intrusion, and questioning. And second, that the questioning of this state of affairs—namely, the movement outlined above—involves another form of repetition. (This other form of repetition is one to which a return needs to be made.) To cite, again, the passage already noted, “je recommence à me demander quel pouvait être cet état inconnu.” What is the status of this won-dering that has started again? Part of the answer to that question involves the status of the image, the “image” that palpitates. There is a clear link between the two bodily sensations. The first is the one that identifies both the quality as well as the quantity of the interruption, that is, “je tressaillis,” while the second identifies the presence of the image as “ce qui palpite.” Before proceeding, what needs to be underscored is that the forgotten appears here as the “unknown.”

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It will be this unknown state that becomes the forgotten or, to be more exact, comes to be identified as that which has been forgotten. There is however an important, if obvious, rider here. While the project may be remembrance as the discovery of having forgotten, the rider is that neither act is intentional.

When Proust writes—“je recommence”—the significance of the words can only be understood in terms of their marking the recognition of having for-gotten. To wonder at the state of the “unknown” is to come to recognize it in the first instance as the unknown (the recognition of the unknown as the unknown). This recognition sustains the stated undertaking of the novel’s final volume, Le temps retrouvé, in which the project of writing, a project driven by the continual questioning of the unknown, leads to a formulation of writing in terms of translation and metaphor. In regards to translation and metaphor, it should not be thought that what are carried over or transported are literal images. Rather, it is the image in its being carried over. Moreover, the possibil-ity that this image could be understood as having any form of comparability with the photograph is thereby undone. For Proust there is a necessary impos-sibility that the photograph, while being an image, is the image that brought with it the truth of time, where both time and image are linked to the reality of a place. Proust’s concerns are bound up with places. The images that are linked to “mémoire involuntaire” cannot be linked to the photograph—thus the limitations imposed on the photographs of Venice.2 Hence, in what sense are photographs images in the Proustian sense? It is not as though what is at work here is no more than another description of the photograph, one in which the photographic image, in no longer being determined by either its connotative or denotative dimension, had taken on the quality of its having a “third meaning” and thus “signifiance.”3 Here the image breaks its relation to the traditions of the image’s history tout court and thus with any possible relation to the photograph. As a beginning the only way in which it is pos-sible to answer this question is to accept the already noted link between the image and the body. Established by that link is the identification of the already experienced, though no longer present, as a state of affairs that is harbored within. It is present as a possibility that can only be accounted for in terms of a type of potentiality—a potentiality within the body the actualization of which

2 All references to Proust are to À la recherche du temps perdu. Édition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié, Collection Quarto (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); henceforth artp, followed by page number. See, in this regard, p. 2355.

3 Hence the photograph would be moved beyond the concerns and trajectory developed by Roland Barthes in “Le troisème sens (Sur Eisenstein),” in his Oeuvres Complètes, Tome iii (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2002), 485–506, and “Le chamber Claire,” in ibid., Tome v, 791–887.



can only ever be registered somatically. Potentiality, however, will always be defined not just by questions of actualization but, more significantly, by modes of actualization. Hence there needs to be a move from the actual presence of feeling to expression (in which expression is understood as another modal-ity of actualization). It may be that Proust’s use of the language of the image should not be understood as having recourse to the conventions of the image. And this will be the case no matter how those conventions are understood; that is, an understanding based on either a logos or an antilogos. What defers those conventions would be the insistent presence of “today” and its relation to writing’s necessity, that is, its relation to expression.

“Today,” as the temporal marker, becomes decisive. Once “today” is taken as the site of mechanical repetition—held here in terms of the figure of machine-like chewing, a chewing that has to be understood as redefining repetition in terms of the endless reiteration of the same—what opens up is the possibility of the interruption of this repetition. The relationship between “today” and repetition then provides the setting in which the time that is at hand and the experiences defining it have already been attributed a specific quality. As a beginning the “day” is the setting of a repetition in which the particularity of the “day” becomes lost within it. The interruption or the hiatus is that which, in breaking with and through the repetition, works to establish the particular-ity of the day. However, it is no longer just the day; moreover, it is not a mere interruption. Nor is it the “day” within a sequence in which days differ only in terms of variety. The interruption in question is not a caesura, if the caesura is understood as an act that brings with it nothing other than the act itself. (There is an intimation why such a set up does not pertain in the identification of a form of necessity in the move, already noted, from pleasure to question-ing.) To the extent that this is an event—the re-presentation of the emergent “today” as the event—it can only occur as such because it allows. What is at work therefore is a caesura of allowing. (This allowing is the other modality of actualization noted above.) What is allowed is writing, occurring in and as the now of writing. The full registration of this allowing is the project of the overall novel’s final volume Le temps retrouvé and thus the work itself, that is, the novel in its entirety, À la recherche du temps perdu. That allowing, however, has to be thought in relation to a form of truth—not the truth that is thought to have occurred in the past, occurring in its now being occluded. On the contrary, it is the truth created by the undoing of the mechanical and thus indicating that what is possible is the creation of a future for which there is no accompanying image—though equally this is not a claim invoking the banality of the utopian image of the future. The image in question is that which is there as an already present possibility within what will become the “past” (in its becoming the

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past for the present), though which has been effaced through the continuity of the repetition of the same and the naturalization of time as continuity.

Fundamental to the undoing of the repetition of the same is that sameness as the site of repetition appears as such. The appearance of the same as the same is the moment in which there is a cessation of repetition. Prior to that it was simply the state in which sadness and boredom prevailed. A melancholia that could only ever be overcome through the recognition that what was lost was neither an object nor a person. Thus loss would have to have an impor-tantly different quality. What Proust identifies is a process in which not only is there a form of interruption linked to allowing—where allowing is the project of writing, named here, following Proust, as translation and metaphor—that interruption also works to identify a sense of time. The time in question is “today,” a setting determined by both boredom and sadness. While it may be the case that Proust fails to think the particularity of the day, what will always have been at stake here is a relationship between the image, today, and a ver-sion of potentiality. (Potentiality is the term necessary to account for the move from feeling to expression.) This provides the setting on which it becomes pos-sible to approach Carbone’s engagement with this aspect of Proust’s project in his book An Unprecedented Deformation.

This remarkable study, as much a work on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as it is on Proust, returns time and again to the move from eidetic intuition to eidetic creation. Indeed if it were possible to summarize the book’s emphatic trajectory it would be to argue that within the realm of art what the contem-porary demands is a form of understanding—and thus an interpretive prac-tice—in which works are no longer taken as more or less adequate expression of ideas but as the creation of ideas. A position that is dramatized by Paul Klee when the latter wrote that “art does not reproduce the visible, but makes vis-ible.” This repositioning of the visible while evidenced for Carbone in a great deal of contemporary art—and at work, for example, in comments made by both Kundera and Deleuze on Bacon and cited by Carbone—can be under-stood as the trajectory of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In strategic terms the presence of distortion and deformation gestures to a specific truth about presentation, namely, that a presentation need not be guided by a model. Nonetheless, even in assuming that this guide is not there, it is still pos-sible to recognize the face as a face within a portrait by Francis Bacon. Raised here are the concerns of a certain strategy within philosophy from Plato’s Meno onward. Carbone, by developing positions advanced by both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, rewrites the problematic status of recognition in the terms set by the following question:



Is recognition that is not granted by resemblance to a model at all pos-sible and concurrently, can resemblance be produced not through imita-tion but through difference?4

The answer to this question can be located in the way Proust is taken to allow for this precise possibility. The argumentation developed by Carbone involves the following important considerations. As a beginning the question of recog-nition is positioned in relation to an antilogos. Within the frame of reference being developed by Carbone, this becomes a modern conception of recogni-tion. It works contra Plato and, as such, distances the hold of imitation and the presence of the model or the paràdeigma that is taken to be there prior to the event of presentation and, in being prior, sets the measure for any subsequent presentation. In this setting Carbone makes use of Deleuze’s interpretation of a line from Chateaubriand cited by the “Narrator” of À la recherche du temps perdu. The line in question is the following:

A sweet subtle scent of heliotrope . . . was brought to us not [elle ne nous était point apportée] by a breeze from our own country but by a wild Newfoundland wind, unrelated to the exiled plant, without sympathy of shared memory or pleasure [sans sympathie de reminiscence et de volupté].5

It is the work of the ‘without shared memory’ that underscores that what is at work here is not Platonic recollection. Nor is it merely a form of imitation. And yet there is a type of presence. (What should be noted, in addition, is that this scent was nonetheless ‘brought to us.’ It will be essential to return to this point.)

As the argument continues and the clarification of the centrality of eidetic creation develops, the next moment of central importance is the formulation of the mode of recollection and thus of the creation of the event of presenta-tion, following Deleuze, in terms of the creation of an idea. It is at this point that what is invoked is the figure of Mnemosyne. Based in part on the work of Vernant, what is central to Mnemosyne, whom Vernant analyzes in terms of her presence within archaic Greek thought, is that memory within that set-ting acquires a poietical quality; that is, memory itself is a creative faculty. As a result, recollection is not that which remembers the past. More significantly,

4 Carbone, 59–60.5 Carbone, 61.

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it creates it. However that creativity is not there in its opposition to forgetting. Rather, forgetting—in the archaic Greek context present as Lethe—is “the side in virtue of which Mnemosyne can exercise its eidetic creativity.”6 The time structure that is at work within this archaic context can be said to appear within significant aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s writing, specifically those that pertain to flesh and to the unconscious. It is therefore an operative temporality allowing for expression where expression is neither mimetic nor predictive. More generally, this operativity, in a sense the source of expression, can be located in “feeling.”7 Carbone brings together the three writers with whom he is concerned in following way:

As Proust has shown, and Deleuze has stressed, Mnemosyne is . . . the creative faculty of those ideas which Merleau-Ponty qualifies as the sensible.8

In this context the sensible idea needs to be understood as the inscription of the general or ideational within the sensible as opposed to the sensible being no more than the presentation—in whatever form—of the intelligible.9 It should be noted that once this position is taken more generally, then what is at work here needs to be viewed as part of a radical reconfiguration of the rela-tionship between the sensible and the intelligible that is as much at work in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as it is, for example, in the writings of John Sallis, and this despite the genuine and important differences between these philo-sophical projects.10

The final element that needs to be identified concerns the way that recol-lection is linked to the idea. Rather than the sensible recalling the idea or what has been forgotten being a type of relation—no matter how that relation is to be understood—ideas are, in fact, created. Hence for Carbone they “are cre-ated in operative experience” to which he then makes the following decisive addition.

6 Carbone, 647 Carbone, 66.8 Carbone, 66.9 Developing what is meant by “sensible ideas” is the project of chapter 2 of An

Unprecedented Deformation. Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas. See pages 25–32.10 In regards to the work of John Sallis, see my ”And Colour? Sallis on Art’s Colouring,” in

On the True Sense of Art: A Critical Companion to the “Transfigurements” of John Sallis, ed. Jason Wirth, Michael Schwartz, and David Jones (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming).



Ideas, that is, created through difference and not through imitation of preliminary models that can only arrive, as Deleuze has shown, as being recognized as models.11

What has to be noted here is the centrality of “recognition.” The problem with any insistence on recognition, though now the term needs to be given greater extension, is that what it opens up in the case of Proust—and here this com-ment is limited to Proust—is that feeling, and its link to the image, and thus the more complex relationship between both and “memoire involuntaire” are all to be understood in terms of the creation of a preliminary moment. In being preliminary, therefore, recognition has to be thought more generally in terms of potentiality. In other words, creativity, were the word to have clear purchase here, is there in the move from potentiality to expression. Within the context of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, this occurs via translation and metaphor.

The argument has to be, therefore, that there cannot be eidetic creativity without the recognition of the intermediary act of writing. If writing is left out, then eidetic creativity—and this is Carbone’s term that incorporates both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s work on either Proust or the “unconscious”—comes to be constrained by an immediacy that cannot be sustained. Indeed, it remains a question as to whether it is possible to have recourse to such a term—to the term and thus the thinking of eidetic creativity—once writing is reintroduced. The further contention would be that this is the point that Proust can also be taken as making. Of the many moments that could be used to support this contention, two will be deployed here. The first identifies the presence of a feeling of “bonheur” as that which occurs when “un hasard nous apporte le souvenir veritable.”12 While this is presented in terms of a question, it remains the case that not only is “chance” (hasard) identified as central, it is also the case that once brought in, it then brings memory into play. However, the mere bringing of memory into a field of activity is not the point, and this will be true even if it is the “le souvenir veritable.” What is essential here is the relationship between memory and expression. Another way of formulating this position would be to argue that what is of greater significance in this con-text is the relationship between memory and writing. As such the question of memory cannot be posed independently of writing. Writing is not the modi-fication of memory. Writing brings into play what could be described as the

11 Carbone, 67.12 artp, 2273.

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presentation of the image. The image is not present as itself. Whatever it is that eidetic creativity is, it has to involve mediated presence, that is, writing.

Again, in the passage cited from Chateaubriand, what occurs does so “sans rapport” with that which should have been the source. And, even though the position is couched in the negative, it remains the case that in breaking with the familiar, here “la patrie,” there is still an event. “Une odeur fine et sauvage” arrived. That which carried it across such that it was brought to bear was “le vent sauvage.” A question arises. What in this context would “le vent sauvage” be? Despite appearances this is the precise question to be asked. Not because it has a direct answer but because the question addresses ab initio both the power and the ineliminability of metaphor. The question brings metaphor to the fore. To write of “le vent sauvage” is to write of that which stages expression. It is, literally, a metaphor for writing as the process of enacting.

The second point to be considered therefore is the necessity that presenta-tion occurs as either translation or metaphor.13 What is significant here is that metaphor names a type of expression, writing—that occurs after the cessa-tion or interruption—linked to feelings, which are announced in the text with formulations such as “je tressaillis.” However, it needs to be recalled that these interruptions and the link to feelings and thus the body are themselves always prior to actualization as expression. They are therefore to be understood in terms of potentiality. The recognition of potentiality is the recovery of (and from) having forgotten.

The final point that needs to be made demands a return to the presence of the now of writing. What this formulation notes—and it might be suggested that this noted element is absent from interpretations of Proust that take Deleuze as their point of departure—is that while that now is the point at which poten-tiality finds expression, it is equally the moment where the repetition of the same is interrupted. Again, and as has been suggested, this interruption is not a simple caesura; more importantly, it is a caesura of allowing. However, this interruption is not merely poietic. Such a formulation would rid these concerns of the quality of occurring “today.” While Carbone is keen to engage the con-temporary, he locates it in the demands made by art as though those demands occurred within a neutral field. For all Proust’s limitations, his literary project evinces a keen awareness that the impediment to recognition lies within the temporal construction in which interpretation takes place. Proust locates the limit within the naturalization of the repetition of the same. He understands this condition in terms of boredom and sadness. While these conditions may set limits, there is nonetheless at work in Proust’s overall project the awareness

13 artp, 2280.



that implicit in any act is what may be described as the inescapability of a poli-tics of time. Time is political precisely because the naturalization of time and the attempt to sustain the repetition of the same, in which difference is under-stood as simple variety, must always contain and attempt to restrict, if not cur-tail, the possibility of a caesura of allowing. Proust’s dramatic contribution to thinking the politics of time lies in his recognition that a caesura of allowing is a potentiality that is already there within the fabric of existence—there as for-gotten, returning by working through the body leading to expression. Showing itself bodily—there in the image as palpitation—it offers expression to that which is actually other.

Writing on Proust Today: Notes on Mauro Carbone’s An Unprecedented Deformation

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