Different Essences and Essential Differences: Proust versus Deleuze

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyse a point of interaction between A la recherche du temps perdu and the philosophy of difference as construed and outlined by Deleuze in Proust et les slgnes. My investigation will focus on Deleuze’s claim that essence, as it appears in Proust’s novel, is ‘une difference, la Difference ultime et absolue’ [a difference, the ultimate and absolute Difference].¹ I shall consider the question that is raised by this proposition of whether the essence of the Proustian world does, indeed, contain multiplicity or difference, whether it is ‘complicated’ in the Deleuzian sense of the word. After a brief exposition of Deleuze’s concept, as he develops it in ‘Les signes de l’art et de l’essence’ [The Signs of Art and Essence],² I shall proceed to compare a selection of passages from the Recherche to the assumptions made in ‘Les signes de l’art et de l’essence’ in a global endeavour to point out an inherent incompatibility between Proust’s ‘essence’ and Deleuzian ‘difference’.