Allegory as imaginary past: transcendence and acting subject in Proust's Recherche

Abstract

The article postulates allegory as a vehicle for « transcendental subjectivity » in Proust’s Recherche. Similar to Baudelaire’s genre spirituel this figure indicates an aesthetic threshold from which the lower outside sphere is transformed into a transcendental inner reality, an imaginary pattern of the individual past. The focus of the present study is to define the nature of this threshold contextualizing it within philosophical conceptions of the subject.