Proust Between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature

234 Pages·2022·11.338 MB·English

by  James Dutton

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Half-title page
PROUST BETWEEN DELEUZE
AND DERRIDA
Series Editor’s preface
Crosscurrents
Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts,
humanities, social sciences and sciences
Series Editor
Christopher Watkin, Monash University
Editorial Advisory Board
Andrew Benjamin
Martin Crowley
Simon Critchley
Frederiek Depoortere
Oliver Feltham
Patrick ffrench
Christopher Fynsk
Kevin Hart
Emma Wilson
Titles available in the series
Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and
Quentin Meillassoux
Christopher Watkin
Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism
Gerald Moore
Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer
Nicholas Davey
The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology
Mathew Abbott
The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French
Amaleena Damlé
Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences
Wahida Khandker
The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead
Leemon B. McHenry
Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future
Stephen Zepke
Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière
Robert Boncardo
Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy
Danielle Sands
Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou
Sarah Hickmott
The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics
Aidan Tynan
Visual Art and Self-Construction
Katrina Mitcheson
Proust Between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature
James Dutton
Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-crosscurr
ents.html
Title page
PROUST BETWEEN
DELEUZE AND
DERRIDA
The Remains of Literature
James Dutton
Copyright
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
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© James Dutton, 2022
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Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com
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printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 9050 4 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9052 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9053 5 (epub)
The right of James Dutton to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Text: The Difference between Philosophy
and Literature 1
1. Voice: Tracing Restance through the Textual Abyss 22
2. Sense: The Hollow of Experience, the Mark[ ] of Aiôn 46
3. Desire: Deferring a Productive Without 87
4. Love: Differentiating Groups, Faciality and the Black Hole/
White Wall System 117
5. Jealousy: Absolute Knowledge as a Dream (of) Writing 145
6. Grief: The Revenant and the Impossibility of Mourning
(Writing) 172
Conclusion: Sign: Ending Text 196
Bibliography 206
Index 216
Series Editor’s Preface
Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a
turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows
and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought
creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it
flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as mathematics
and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The
work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou,
Bernard Stiegler and Jean- Luc Nancy, among others, participates in
this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive for-
mations are engaged, not with the aim of performing a pre- determined
mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters
in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fun-
damental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular
events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather
to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The
cross- disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor
a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradi-
tion.
Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this re-m aking
is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the
future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy
in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that
flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an
exceptional site for bold, original and opinion- changing monographs
that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross-
disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new
ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which
European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines
across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising
that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself
spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore
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Series Editor’s Preface vii
nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of
European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-d isciplinary
enterprise.
Christopher Watkin
Cambridge
February 2011
Acknowledgements
This book has been a consuming passion of mine throughout its long
life. The greatest of thanks are owed to John Attridge, whose guidance
has served as a constant, confidence- building foundation, and to Sean
Pryor, Sigi Jöttkandt, Jasmin Kelaita and Chris Danta, whose support
and insight at significant moments has proved telling. I am fortunate
to have worked with such inspiring academics. I would also like to
thank my doctoral supervisors, Claire Colebrook and Derek Attridge,
for their exemplary scholarship that has encouraged my efforts in this
work and beyond. I am grateful to Carol MacDonald – whose belief in
this project made all the d ifference – along with Chris Watkin and the
anonymous readers of this manuscript, as well as the production staff at
Edinburgh University Press. In turn, Elliott Plank, Fahryn Hill, Mitchell
Unger, Gareth Sciffer, Evy Wiggins and Rhys Dutton have been invalu-
able supports throughout this process, and their company and insights
have contributed in often unexpected ways to what follows.
Earlier versions of material from this book appeared in Textual
Practice and Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, and I am
grateful to their editors and publishers (https://www.tandfonline.com/)
for permission to reprint this content.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Claire Keating, whose love, patience
and magnanimous spirit is my daily inspiration, and to my parents,
Clive and Robin Dutton: my love and gratitude for you is beyond
measure.
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