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ABSTRACT (en)
The paper attempts to take seriously one of the main claims of the final part of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the hero-narrator announces his intention to give his work a form that usually re- mains invisible, namely the form of time. Our question will therefore be what structure this form has and how it permeates the whole novel. Starting from the hypothesis that the Proustian concep- tion of time can be metaphorically described as a constellation, I will try to show that this constel- lation can be understood as a connection of two forms of temporality that are clearly present in the book: (1) the simultaneous qualitative time of ‘the hour’ on the one hand, and (2) the successive temporality, with its related destructive effects, on the other. If those aspects of time are considered together, the reader is confronted with a more complex idea of time as a changing constellation of relations. In the main part of the paper, I will try to show that this conception admits to thinking of time regained not only as rediscovery of the solipsistic time of the hero-narrator but also as time shared on a deeper level with others. And since the notion of joint attention is, at least I suppose, necessary for the constitution of genuine intersubjective time, I will try to show that at the central place of the novel, namely the Venice episode, Proust is concerned precisely with the question of the emergence of time from a singular moment of shared attention.
KEYWORDS (en)
Marcel Proust; time; shared attention; involuntary memory; constellation; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; qualitative time; intentionality; succession; relational conception of time; Gérard Genette; inter-subjectivity
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2024.2.9
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