“Sans cause”: Affect and Truth in Marcel Proust

Abstract

The essay explores the correlation between affect and truth in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its implications for contemporary philosophy. For Proust, there is no real truth without affect and no genuine affect without truth. The affect designates an impurity of truth, while truth implies a displacement of affect. The sensible events experienced by the Proustian narrator give rise to a joy without a cause in which the negative of a truth still to be developed by the work of fiction is inscribed. The essay claims that a fictional conceptualisation of the notion of the world can be outlined through Proust’s discussion of a reframing of the world through art.