Nietzsche, proust, and will-to-ignorance

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-23

  Landy, Joshua ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34047133807     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2002.0015     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. Throughout this article, references to Proust - given by volume and page number, and with occasional slight modifications to the translation - are taken from In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1992)
2. For one deconstructive reading of Nietzsche, see Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 79-102
3. critical discussions of de Man's argument may be found in Maudemarie Clark, "Deconstructing The Birth of Tragedy," International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 67-75
4. and Alexander Nehamas, "The Genealogy of Genealogy: Interpretation in Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation and in The Genealogy of Morals," in On Literary Theory and Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Encounter, ed. Richard Freadman and Lloyd Reinhardt (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 236-52
5. For the claim-based almost exclusively on evidence from the unpublished fragments - that Nietzsche is a Pragmatist on truth, maintaining a steadfast "refusal to admit the notion of a truth disconnected from interests and needs," see Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 2-3, 30
6. "Nietzsche, Socrates and Pragmatism," South African Journal of Philosophy 10 (1991): 61-63
7. Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 150
8. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3
9. "Solidarity or Objectivity?," in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21-34, p. 32
10. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 27
11. Compare also Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 72. For evidence - from the published corpus, this time - that Nietzsche explicitly dismisses such an understanding of truth, considers it thoroughly disconnected from needs and interests, and indeed views "untruth as a condition of life," see BGE 39 and 4, as well as BT 7, 18; UM II:1,7,9,10; GS 107, 121, 381; ASC 5; TI I:5; EH II:4
12. and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 54. (Further references, using the abbreviation NLL, will be inserted parenthetically in the text.) Nietzsche may well be Pragmatically-spirited when he places human needs above the truth, but he does not, for all that, give the latter a Pragmatist definition: truth, for him, remains what it is independently of those needs
13. For an evolutionary-psychological explanation of why selection might favor individuals capable of periodic self-deception, see Robert L. Trivers, "Foreword," in The Selfish Gene, ed. Richard Dawkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. v-vii. I am grateful to Andrea Nightingale for drawing this to my attention
14. It is for this reason, presumably, that Albertine's lesbian desires come to stand synecdochically for the terrifying inaccessibility of her inner world as a whole: "All that I had wanted to know about her life," reports Marcel, "merged into this one sole curiosity, to know in what manner Albertine experienced pleasure" (V, p. 750). Still, female bisexuality is not a necessary condition for male jealousy, as the case of Robert and Rachel makes clear. Hence Leo Bersani's careful and nuanced presentation of this point (in Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], chap. 2) is ultimately more convincing than the extreme position occupied by Gilles Deleuze (Proust et les signes [Paris: PUF, 1964], esp. p. 123). Further references to Bersani and Deleuze will be inserted parenthetically in the text
15. Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain I (Paris: Plon, 1952), p. 432
16. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 58
17. Richard Terdiman, The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 112. Further references will be inserted parenthetically in the text
18. See V:495 and IV:315-16. For the impact of the two-hypothesis problem on Proustian style, see my "Texture of Proust's Novel," in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, ed. Richard Bales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 117-34
19. Marcel's reluctance is all the more salient for readers who are familiar with Alfred de Musset, since the kimono incident appears to be a direct allusion to the climactic penultimate scene of La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973, pp. 302-3). Here as in Proust, the hero (Octave) suspects his lover of infidelity; here as in Proust, the hero's lover lies asleep, with her dress - just like Albertine's kimono - slung across a chair; here as (hypothetically) in Proust, there is a love letter in the pocket of the dress; but here as not in Proust, Octave finds the letter and, without so much as a moment's hesitation, rips it open to read it
20. "Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full ... I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart and then on every part of her body in turn ... The sound of her breathing, which had grown louder, might have given the illusion of the panting of sexual pleasure, and when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep. I felt at such moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature" (V, p. 88). It is hard to agree with Richard Bales, in Proust: A la Recherche du temps perdu (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995), pp. 59-60, that "there is something close to the idyllic about some of the scenes in La Prisonnière, as when she [Albertine] is asleep"!
21. see also Louis Martin-Chauffier, "Proust et le double «je» de quatre personnes," Confluences 21 (1943): 55-69
22. Justin O'Brien, "Marcel Proust as a moraliste," Romanic Review 39 (1948): 50-69
23. and Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 249
24. For rare statements of the opposing view, see Roland Barthes, "An Idea of Research," trans. Richard Howard, in The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), pp. 271-76; and Malcolm Bowie, passim
25. For the way in which love, like art, reveals the precise nature of a temperament, see my "Les moi en moi: The Proustian Self in Philosophical Perspective," New Literary History 32 (2001): 91-132
26. Martha Nussbaum phrases the point about self-deception particularly effectively, defining rationalization as "an activity of self-explication engaged in at a superficial and intellectual level which, by giving us the confidence that we have accomplished a scientific analysis and arrived at exact truth, deters us from a deeper or fuller inquiry" - Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 254. Nussbaum, however, seems to take it for granted that a "deeper or fuller inquiry" is the best thing for us
27. Edgar Allan Poe, in his own (and most famous) narrative of epistolary theft, to which Proust alludes at IV:528, would appear to agree with Nietzsche's (and Pascal's) assessment. If the flat-footed Prefect of Police G - is unable to solve the mystery of the "Purloined Letter," then it is because he is the esprit de géometrie incarnate, an adept of nineteenth-century science who can see little further than the end of his microscope; he and his ilk are only able, as Dupin makes plain, to "extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles" - Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1956, p. 341). They are capable, that is, of attending to the whats, whens and (in the present case) wheres of criminal behavior, but extremely reluctant to raise any questions concerning the hows (still less whys) of their own activity