The Logics of Proust’s Worlds

Abstract

The paper presents mutually linked readings of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds from the perspective of the multitude of worlds as both a literary and philosophical problem. In Proust, this problem is presented as the problem of how to start writing a novel, i.e. how to find an appropriate structure that will be able to link together the life experience of the author/narrator by constructing and connecting a multitude of worlds (according to Gilles Deleuze, these worlds are the ones of high society, love, sensuous impressions, and art) into the world of the novel. On the other hand, from the perspective of Badiou’s philosophical system, Proust comes to occupy an empty structural position: if Badiou’s theses on being include an account of (Mallarmé’s) poetry, his theses on appearance should include an account of (Proust’s) prose. Proust’s worlds of high society, love, and sensual impressions are presented in terms of the three key elements of Badiou’s logic of appearance: the transcendental, the object, and the relation, while Proust’s final world, the world of art (or, more precisely, of the novel itself), is presented as a world formed by a truth procedure initiated by an event.