Abstract

Taking as its starting point Marcel Proust’s World – Insights into a Pandemonium, a short radio essay by Ingeborg Bachmann on Proust, my paper sets out to navigate the reading of the Recherche that Bachmann enlightens, while at the same time attempting to investigate echoes between two autobiographical undertakings that are – perhaps – only apparently distant: Proust’s cathedral, a monument to the search for the palpitations of the life that remains even when it has passed, and the incomplete enterprise of Bachmann’s Todesarten, which multiplies the lyric Self in a projection of complementary opposites, within the framework of an imaginary investigation into a chain of invisible crimes: a work of pure relationships, just as, for Bachmann, the Recherche is.