Proust, Deleuze and the Spiritual Automaton

Abstract

I start from the premise that beyond the book Proust et les signes, Proust has a structural importance in the work of Gilles Deleuze that merits extensive analysis. I will be specifically concerned here, however, with a concept that Deleuze encounters in Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu and which is subsequently plugged into other machines, in particular the cinema machine. The concept is a phrase: ‘un peu de temps a l’etat pur’ [a little time in the pure state]. This is a phrase in the sense that Proust’s narrator refers to Ta petite phrase’ [the little phrase]: a relation of intensities. It is a concept in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari intend by this word: a construction of differential relations, or a ‘tout fragmentaire’ [fragmentary whole].1 I will thus be looking at the use to which Deleuze puts the phrase in Cinema II: L’Image-temps. To my knowledge the phrase occurs twice in this volume, unattributed, with quotation marks on the first occurrence, and without on the second. It is thus not a quotation, nor an allusion, nor an element of intertextuality, properly speaking; it is a refrain connected to the proper name Proust, to the extent that one encounters it in his work.