Proust et les limites du corps
What is the status of the body today ? What is the role of the sensible world at a time when the thought of the artificial is shifting the lines of the academic community ? This thesis aims to determine how Proust’s writings have contributed to a contemporary culture centred around the lived body and its modalities. The writer, as a privileged witness of his time, describes how technical devices affect the subject’s “seeing” in a period of overwhelming urbanization. Some authors have taken an interest in the philosophical dimension of 'Remembrance of Things Past', conceiving it successively as initiation (Deleuze, 1964), search for truth (Descombes, 1987) or phenomenology of the subject (Breeur, 2000). If these studies have the merit of exploring a “theory of the subject that articulates in a new and coherent way different aspects of being in the world” (Leriche, 2004), they are nevertheless limited to the terms of an impossible identity and seem to miss the presence of an intracorporeal world that is so fundamental in Proust’s writing.  This project intends to question this unthought, based on the hypothesis that we are witnessing with Proust the emergence of a new way of thinking about the body. Building on the successive readings of the body in the 20th century (reflection on technique in the contemporary era, Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, cognitive sciences in the early 1990s), our analyses have a precise history. In a first chapter, it will be shown how the crisis of representation contributes to the emergence of a corporeal space. It will then be a question of determining the extent to which phenomenology in post-war France contributes to a recasting of bodily experience. We will see in particular how certain sensitive details (incarnateness, the human face, the tactile palpation of the gaze) sketch the way to an intercorporeality. The third chapter will allow us to integrate different bodies of knowledge in our analyses by underlining how the opacity of body experience can benefit from an epistemological lighting. Finally, we will have to extend our investigation to the problem of expression and to the relationship between body and enunciation.
Marcel Proust Technique 20th century literature Phenomenology Hermeneutics Crisis of representation Body Intercorporeality