Gilles Deleuze

A criticism of the book "a la recherche du temps perdu"

The Complete Text

Proust and Signs

Ghee

Why a machine? Because the work of art, so understood, is productive of certain truths. No one has insisted more than Proust on the following point: that the truth is produced, that it is produced by orders of machines that function within us, extracted from our impressions, hewn out of our life, delivered in a work. 

[the modern work of art] is a prophecy about the sexes, a political warning that reaches us from the depths of the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War, a cryptogram that decodes and recodes all our social, diplomatic, strategic, erotic, and aesthetic languages, a western or a wacky comedy about the Captive, writing on the wall and salon guide, a metaphysical treatise, a delirium of signs or of jealousy, an exercise in training the faculties; anything we like provided we make the whole thing work, and "it works, believe me."

The modern work of art is anything it may seem; it is even its very property of being whatever we like, of having the overdetermination of whatever we like, from the moment it works: the modern work of art is a machine and functions as such. 

Consider language: proper names have first of all their entire power as boxes from which we extract the contents, and, once emptied by disappointment, they are still organised in terms of each other by "enclosing," "imprisoning" all history; but common nouns acquire their value by introducing into discourse certain noncommunicating fragments of truth and lies chosen by the interpreter. 

The leitmotif of Time regained is the word force: impressions that force us to look, encounters that force us to interpret, expressions that force us to think.

What can one do with essence, which is ultimate difference, except to repeat it, because it is irreplaceable and because nothing can be substituted for it? This is why great music can only be played again, a poem learned by heart and recited. Difference and repetition are only apparently in opposition. There is no great artist who does not make us say: The same and yet different" (III, 259).

(what we call the external world is only the disappointing projection, the standardizing limit of all these worlds ex- pressed). 

Only art gives us what we vainly sought from a friend, what we would have vainly expected from the beloved. "Only by art can we emerge from from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those that might be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply, and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds will we have at our disposal, more different from each other than those that circle in the void. .." (II, 895-96).

as intelligence is always coming “after”, the mediative stage of a process is always necessary, and more valued, even

A mediocre love is worth more than a great friendship because love is rich in signs and is ted by silent interpretation. A work of art is worth more than a philosophical work; for what is enveloped in the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations. 

Proust's work is not oriented to the past and the discoveries of memory, but to the future and the progress of an apprenticeship. What is important is that the hero does not know certain things at the start, gradually learns them, and finally receives an ultimate revelation. 

[W]asting time is insufficient… We must first experience the violent effect of a sign, and the mind must be “forced” to seek the sign’s meaning.

To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate. But this explication" is identified with the development of the sign in itself. This is why the Search is always temporal, and the truth always a truth of time. 

Who is in search of truth? And what does the man who says "I want the truth" mean? Proust does not believe that man, nor even a supposedly pure mind, has by nature a desire for truth, a will-to-truth. We search for truth only when we are deterinined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a search. Who searches for truth? The jealous man, under the pressure of the beloved's lies. There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace. 

Learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted. There is no apprentice who is not “the Egyptologist" of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs. Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs. Proust's work is based not on the exposition of memory, but on the apprenticeship to signs.

What constitutes the unity of In Search of Lost Time? We know, at least, what does not. It is not recollection, memory, or even involuntary memory. What is essential to the Search is not in the madeleine or the cobblestones. On the one hand, the Search is not simply an effort of recall, an exploration of memory: search, recherche, is to be taken in the strong sense of the term, as we say “the search for truth." On the other hand, Lost Time is not simply "time past"; it is also time wasted, lost track of. Consequently, memory intervenes as a means of search, of investigation, but not the most profound means; and time past intervenes as a structure of time, but not the most profound structure. 

To remember is to create, not to create memory, but to create the spiritual equivałent of the still too material menory, to create the viewpoint valid for all associations, the style valid for all images. 

This is precisely the originality of Proustian reminiscence: it proceeds from a mood, from a state of soul, and from its associative chains, to a creative or transcendent viewpoint—and no longer, in Plato's fashion, from a state of the world to seen objectivities.

Essence, according to Proust, as we have tried to show above, is not something seen but a kind of superior viewpoint, an irreducible viewpoint that signifies at once the birth of the world and the original character of a world.

The Search is constructed on a series of oppositions: Proust counters observation with sensibility, philosophy with thought, reflection with translation. He counters the logical or conjoined use of all our faculties—preceded by the intelligence that brings them all together in the fiction of a "total soul"—by a nonlogical and disjunct use, which shows that we never command all our faculties at once and that intelligence always comes after.

We are wrong to believe in facts; there are only signs. We are wrong to believe in truth; there are only interpretations.

serves as a short primer less to the work of proust, more to that of deleuze. deleuze’s thesis is essentially this: truth is exploration of signs (worldly, love, n sense) that are, to him, the crucial objects in our journey of making sense of the world as an “apprentice (that learns what these signs mean)” by way of “time (through the passage of which, signs reveal more of themselves to us)”. after all, the search of lost time is, rather, the search for truth.

memory, too, is a crucial aspect of this “learning”. as intelligence “comes after”, involuntary memory is a catalyst for a “learning” that is not “too late”, as deleuze puts. this is opposed to voluntary memory which comes after the moment in which we need to decipher signs.

proust is especially relevant in this “search” by way of his conception of reminiscence. we begin with a mood, and from its contours and links, to a productive (creative, additive) viewpoint, that allows us to interpret signs, and eventually the world.

“to remember is to create”— involuntarily, that is. 

serves as a short primer less to the work of proust, more to that of deleuze. deleuze’s thesis is essentially this: truth is exploration of signs (worldly, love, n sense) that are, to him, the crucial objects in our journey of making sense of the world as an “apprentice (that learns what these signs mean)” by way of “time (through the passage of which, signs reveal more of themselves to us)”. after all, the search of lost time is, rather, the search for truth.

memory, too, is a crucial aspect of this “learning”. as intelligence “comes after”, involuntary memory is a catalyst for a “learning” that is not “too late”, as deleuze puts. this is opposed to voluntary memory which comes after the moment in which we need to decipher signs.

proust is especially relevant in this “search” by way of his conception of reminiscence. we begin with a mood, and from its contours and links, to a productive (creative, additive) viewpoint, that allows us to interpret signs, and eventually the world.

“to remember is to create”— involuntarily, that is. 

Proust and Signs The Complete Text

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