The avant-garde in the archive: Towards Proust’s spectrology (in dialogue with Philippe Sollers’s Oeil de Proust: Les dessins de Marcel Proust)

Katarzyna Thiel-Jańczuk

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A b s t r a k t

This article analyzes an essay by the contemporary French writer Philippe Sollers in which Sollers analyzes Marcel Proust’s drawings found in the French writer’s private letters and manuscripts. I draw on Sollers’s notion of “inner experience,” which he, in turn, borrowed from Georges Bataille, and discuss the idealistic interpretations of Proust’s eye/gaze as found in the metaphor of the book as an “optic instrument.” Then, referring to the Derridean category of “the specter,” I analyze the significance of Proust’s drawings for the understanding of his legacy in contemporary literature.