Proust's Perverted Past
Rafael Holmberg is Wrong about Time and Freedom
In Search of Lost Time is about anything but the past - it is not a psycho-literary account of lost and recollected memories. It is a critique of the late-19th century psychometric notion of memory itself. When Proust’s fragmentary instances of everyday life comprise an infinite possibility in the recollection of temporality itself, of a lost time, what we experiences is not the arrow of time being retraced, nor the past being recollected. What we instead see is the arrow-less non-directionality of time itself. Temporality in its qualitative discrepancy is revealed in these moments, but revealed as incomplete, as pointed towards enigma both towards the future and towards the past.
The memories which Proust ‘recollects’ are as much created as they are relived. To relive something, for Proust, is at the same time to experience it for the first time. The “song of a bird, the call of a hunter’s horn, the air that a shepherd plays upon his pipe”, the bite of a Madeleine in which an entire world of childhood recurs, all these subjective repetitions are distinctly virtual. Proust never repeats, he explores an incomplete past that stages itself against an impossible and never-attained future. In other words, it is an alternative account of memory as not existing, of the past as a self-parody, formally adaptable to any function.
What I most enjoy about Proust was his recognition of the liberated creativity which material objects have, both as homages to a fading future and as inscriptions of an unstable past. In a short article, The Temporality of Freedom,
opposes a Schelling and Sartre’s depictions of an ontology of freedom. The ‘free act’ is either directed towards the future (Sartre), in which an incompleteness is located in the present and formatted by non-existent, or hypothesised, future possibles. Alternatively, the free act is oriented towards the past (Schelling). In Schelling’s view, the capacity of the past to exist emerges out of God’s rejection of his own impotent recession into himself. God is forced to dissociate himself from himself, and in so doing creating the temporal ground for his own existence. The origin of freedom, in this perspective, is where an abstract and indeterminate moment rejects itself and posits that which would have preceded it.It is true that Holmberg reminds us that an inquiry into freedom must open up not only the future, but also the past. That in every moment of recollection, there is a free act of creation that is necessarily tied to the question of freedom itself. Yet Proust’s formula of recollection is irreducible to either of these positions, to the incompleteness of the past contrasted with the incompleteness of the future, and to an attempt of locating freedom on one side of this divide. With Proust, with the Madeleine, past and future collapse into the imperceptible virtual-ness of the Madeleine itself, into the ‘leakage’ which constitutes the present. Deleuze was perhaps the closest theorist of this leakage: we cannot faithfully frame repetition as operating in relation to past, present, or future. Rather, repetition and recollection pierce the present. They reveal the invisible imprint in the present of that which it is not - that the present as such is an empty formulation. For Proust, the present is a contraction which colours the temporal discrepancy that we call past and present.
Holmberg is still caught in the very trap that his use of Schelling intends to remove him from. A choice is made: either freedom is retroactive, or it is proactive - it is either a moment of constituting an incomplete past or it formulates the possible existences of the future. Perhaps it is his insistent Lacanianism - or more accurately a persistent Laplancheism - which underlies this separation (since for Laplanche the past has first and foremost to be constituted from an instance of recollection), but it is the language of Proust, and even of Deleuze, that leaves Holmberg’s point incomplete.
Proust’s ontology performs a shift in frame - it does not ask the question of whether we should direct our attention to the past or to the future, but to the thing itself which entertains this discrepancy. The singular moments of repetition of In Search of Lost Time provide no divide, they are not caught between a selective act of temporality, but in recognising the failed temporality of any singular instance. These leitmotifs, as Alex Ross calls them, insisting on the Wagnerian theme of Proust’s work, are a black hole in time. They act as a material reminder of the virtual dimension of the present, and its inability to dislodge itself from a position that somehow comprises those dimensions that it rejects (past and future). Whatever the present is, the question is not whether it is ‘oriented’ in any temporal direction, but how it manages to criticise temporality itself. How, in other words, it is that past and future collapse into an indefinite positing wherever we reflect on the subjective meaning of an objective experience. If freedom is to be found anywhere, it is to be found in this paradox.
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Thanks for the post, reminds me to re-read Proust it’s probably been a good few years.
As regards your post, I tend to think that just as the past consists of recollections, with all events having happened objectively but having become colored by myriad factors as the present grinds forward. The objective reality of said events becomes obscured - as such, I’d argue that in the same way that the past becomes subjective based upon the observer- there is no determined future in much the same way, due to the random minutae of daily interactions with the present and the differences of the interpretations of observers ultimately make all past or future events.
Perhaps the real paradox is that we know that past events happened objectively, and that future events will happen objectively, most questions of either will remain in the realm of subjectivity begging the question of whether anything actually exists outside the realm of the subjective?
Just a thought 🤷