Abstract

For Proust, the involuntary is not limited simply to memory and recollection. It is an essential, universal key to the reading of the Recherche. Preceded, among others, by Schelling’s unvordenklich or Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the pre-reflexive, the concept of the involuntary signifies a realism of sensitive exteriority. Proust’s novelistic truth, its depth in his writing and his thought regarding the involuntary are elaborated from a real and external object whose absolute singularity is liberated in the work