In search of lost time. A rhizomatic analysis
The study is a post-semiotic approach of Marcel Proust’s novel; preserving the classic conceptual and discoursive framework, the present study’s analysis abandons the vertical fabric, obsessed with the purity of a certain theoretical language, for the benefit of a fabric which is rhizomatic, pulsational, plural, a succession of the most unexpected intuitions and associations, bringing together psychoanalysis and etymology, mythocritics and epistemology, phenomenology and neurosciences, history of religions and hermeneutics, cultural anthropology a.s.o. Marcel Proust’s masterpiece requires such an approach, as it has produced a real revolution not only in literature, but also in the self-awareness of the (post)modern man. Marcel, the author-narrator-character, is an archetype of the “last man”, who sets himself as only purpose and unique universe and who, using the principle of the texistence as a band of Moebius, generates a new reality, an artificial and virtual one, but nevertheless the only reality still accessible to him and inside which his existence still makes sense. Marcel Proust is, through his masterpiece, a true prophet of the paranoiac non-existence, of the average exceptionality and of autotelic memory, all these being marks, or even earmarks, of the (post)modern man, living in a secularized world.
Keywords: Marcel Proust, semiotics, texistence, rhizomatic analysis, revelatory experience, Logos Spermatikos