Proust Between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature

Explores the deep affinity between Proust’s textual experimentation and the revolutionary philosophical interventions of Derrida and Deleuze James Dutton argues that Proust’s lone published text, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), stages a uniquely productive encounter between philosophy and literature. In its genre-defying originality, it anticipates some of the most important concepts and strategies of poststructuralist French thought exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.

While Derrida and Deleuze are often held to occupy irreconcilable philosophical positions, both philosophers are equally relevant to an understanding of Proust’s philosophical significance, which fundamentally rests on his deferral of textual presence. Drawing on a range of conceptual tools from these two philosophical oeuvres, including many that are often overlooked by commentators, Dutton shows that À la recherche stages a process of uninterrupted textual becoming, in which the distinction between the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘literature’ themselves is broken down. He reads textuality as constitutively unfinished, suggesting a new confluence between all three thinkers’ emphasis on life as an endlessly productive deferral.