DEAD WRITE

Abstract

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories (Proust, any one of his narrators, us as readers, and any one of those) blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness.

Keywords:

• Proust
• Derrida
• mourning
• spectre
• signature
• being-dead

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Derrida’s work on le propre of the signature and the différance it evokes is well known. In Glas, he notes that the

glas’s, such as we shall have heard them, toll the end of signification, of sense, and of the signifier. Outside which, not to oppose the signature, still less to appose, affix it to that, we remark the signature through its name, in spite of what is thereby named, no longer signifies […]

A text “exists,” resists, consists, represses, lets itself be read or written only if it is worked (over) by the illegibility of the proper name. I have not – not yet – said that the proper name exists, or that it becomes illegible when it falls (to the tomb) in the signature. (Glas 31, 33)

It is this différante movement that I seek to trace in this article.

2 In the same manner, Jean-Michel Rabaté notes that the “ghost of Albertine survives as a perfume, a color, a birdsong, endlessly present and absent, the penultimate trace of a writing that is full of pain but ineluctably haunting and haunted” (13). Malcolm Bowie attributes her persistence to the “vigorous resurrectionist tendency of the narrator’s imagination” (290).

3 For Derrida, it is appearance, or phainesthai, “itself (before its determination as phenomenon or phantasm, thus as phantom) [that] is the very possibility of the specter” (Specters of Marx 169). Roger Luckhurst refers to “something of a ‘spectral turn’ in contemporary criticism” (527) in describing the critical enthusiasm which followed Specters of Marx, and the application of this kind of intra-phenomenological reading of absence in literary theory (535).

4 The fractal work of this scene was discussed by Derrida in an unpublished seminar (Hillis Miller 77).

5 A contention which haunts Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, and thus appears (Dissemination 164–67) when considering the weaving of differences (a “triton ti” outside of “classical ontology”) that is common to both writing and Being.

6 And, especially and of course, the hardest work of the multiplying re-s of rereading.