Walter Benjamin e Gilles Deleuze: duas leituras filosóficas de Proust:distância, experiência, aprendizado

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the special relation between Philosophy and Literature that was established by both Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze when they commented the work of Marcel Proust. In order to find resonances among the chosen authors and thus articulate the three chapters of the present paper, the question of distance is proposed. The first chapter is devoted to Proust and the intention is to show that the Proustian hero, not surprisingly, views his own world under the shape of a distancing; and that there is between the past and the present a distance that the revealing moments of the involuntary memory make complex, but that they do not eliminate. These distances are multiplied to the point where it is possible to think of forgetting the present as a Proustian theme. In order to start defining what is meant by distance here, the question is delimited mainly in negative terms. Furthermore, based on this notion of distance, the rest of the chapter attempts to challenge one of the most traditional and established interpretative tendencies of Prousts work, whereby the recovery of time to which the title of the last volume of In search of Lost Time alludes, is regarded as a path of contradictions and overcomings whose fruit contains, in the end, fully developed and reconciled, that which was the seed at the beginning. The second chapter begins with Benjamins analysis of Proust. The concept of distance is introduced in order to interpret the dynamics remembrance-forgetting, and the figure of foreigness is as well proposed for other passages of the Benjaminian reading of the writer. Moreover, the figures of the peasant and the sailor (figures of distance in time and distance in space, respectively) constitute the chosen starting point for the analysis of the crisis of experience and the end of narrative. Finally, in order to emphasize certain relations between experience and path, we introduce the concepts of passage (Greffrath) and of profanation (Agamben). Still challenging the traditional interpretation of In Search of Lost Time, understood as a monument of the involuntary memory, the third and last chapter departs from Deleuzes unprecedented proposal to analyse the novel as the search of an apprentice trying to decode certain signs. The Deleuzean notion of sign deconstructs the assumption that there is a relation of immediacy between the sign and its meaning, i.e., Deleuze introduces a distance between sign, subject and object that allows him to develop his concept of apprenticeship as a powerful tool of criticism for that which he calls dogmatic image of thought. Departing from this interpretation of the novel, the philosophical game between thought, will and truth is dismantled and an unexpected image of thought is presented, which, without renouncing to truth and to necessity, gives a privilege place to the involuntary.