Examines the role of experience within Adorno’s philosophy of language and epistemology.

This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I identify the mentions of Schopenhauer in À la recherche du temps perdu. I use an implicit reference to Schopenhauer by Swann to open a discussion of Schopenhauer’s theory of music. I attempt to downplay its identification, suggested by some commentators, with both the views about music expressed in the novel and the form of the novel itself. In the second section, I discuss Proust’s references to Schopenhauer in his essay (...) on reading. I confirm that Proust well understood Schopenhauer’s relationship with his own erudition and suggest that Schopenhauer’s influence on Proust may take the form of an incitement to think for oneself. In the third and final section, I consider several potential points of convergence between Proust and Schopenhauer concerning states of the will. However, in all cases I find, as I do throughout the chapter, that below the surface Proust and Schopenhauer often part ways. (shrink)

Recognizing yourself in literature cannot only help you to get a clearer grasp of what you already think and feel. It can also deeply unsettle your vision of yourself. This article examines a hitherto neglected mechanism to this effect: learning by way of seeing yourself in others’ blindness. I show that In Search of Lost Time epitomizes this phenomenon. Confronting characters oblivious to their old age makes the protagonist realize that he, too, has aged without noticing it, and invites readers (...) to analogous insights. The paper contributes to the discussion on how you can learn from literature and adds a twist to Proust’s claim that the purpose of literature is that readers recognize themselves in it. (shrink)

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your (...) own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value. (shrink)

The question of how well we need to be known, to be loved, is considered. A ‘second-person’ model is argued for, on which love requires that the beloved’s demands to be known be respected. This puts pressure on the idea that lovers need to make a beloved’s interests their own, taking that to require comprehension of the beloved’s interests: a lover would have to appreciate the normative intelligibility and motivating force of an interest. The possibility of love with failure of (...) comprehension is defended, using illustrations from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. (shrink)

There is an unusual link between the two most prominent themes in Proust’s In Search of Time Past: the psychological dimensions of love and the experience of lived temporality. Each experience is shadowed by, and intensified by, even seems to require, absence. The absence of the beloved is the source of jealousy, and that experience is treated as inseparable, and sometimes as indistinguishable, from love itself. And the absence of reliable access to the past, or the vanishing of the past (...) into a realm of fantasy and projection, undermines any confidence in our mutual interpretability. At the extreme, jealousy is depicted as sustaining a love all by itself, something captured in Swann’s famous, puzzling closing statement at the end of the “Swann in Love” section of the first novel: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I have experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.” The aim of this paper is to understand the dynamic of presence and absence, its role in the link between these two themes, and thereby to understand such a claim as much more than a singular character’s expression of a neurotic obsession. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that a recovery of the cognitive role of the experiencing subject is the common theme uniting Theodor Adorno's philosophy and Marcel Proust's literary project. This shared commitment is evidenced by the importance given by both thinkers to the expressive dimension of language in relation to its social function as a vehicle for communication. Furthermore, I argue that Adorno and Proust conceive of language's expressive dimension as the expression of suffering. However, whereas, for Proust, this means (...) the private suffering of the artist transforming itself into a work of art, for Adorno it means suffering that is rooted in sociohistorical conditions. It is this thesis, I suggest, that enables Adorno to employ the recovery of the experiencing subject as a form of social criticism. (shrink)

The philosophical reading of Proust’s Recherche presented here suggests Proust’s aesthetic method as a model for philosophy. The term “aesthetic” refers to the constitutive role of sensation, perception, and sensuality for the practice of philosophising. In Proust’s peculiar descriptions a specific form of “sentient thinking” takes shape. This thinking is characterised by the entanglement of the particular as detailed description and the general as theoretical reflection. With reference to Proust, the philosophical practice of describing is developed into a central element (...) of philosophy as aesthetic practice. (shrink)

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The final volume of Marcel Proust's novel _ la Recherche du Temps perdu (Recherche)_ presents a striking puzzle. In this volume, the narrator Marcel proposes a literary theory which is supposed to provide the theoretical basis for the whole book, such that the _Recherche_ can be considered a novel which contains its own theory. However, the _Recherche_ as a whole does not seem to comply with this literary theory. I suggest in this paper that this puzzle (...) can be solved by appreciating that Marcel's theory of literature, and his understanding of the way literature relates to his own life, is based on a Hegelian notion of teleology. (shrink)