Gilles Deleuze

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

The Complete Text

Proust and Signs

Ghee

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

[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.

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