Proust and Signs. The Complete Text. Translated by Richard Howard

The essential work on Proust, in a complete English translation for the first time.

In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Marcel Proust's work as a narrative of an apprenticeship-more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search to be one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode the kinds and types of symbols that surround him, Deleuze conducts us on a corollary search-one that leads to a new understanding of the signs that constitute A la recherche du temps perdu.

In Richard Howard's graceful translation, augmented with an essay that Deleuze added to a later French edition, Proust and Signs is the complete English version of this work. Admired as an imaginative and innovative study of Proust and as one of Deleuze's more accessible works, Proust and Signs stands as the writer's most sustained attempt to understand and explain the work of art.

"Deleuze conducts readers on a corollary search that leads to a new and deeper understanding of the network of signs laid down by Proust." -Translation Review

"This isn't a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But don't dismiss it as out-of-date. Like the book it analyses, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, it pitches the reader into the future with a rare vigour. Deleuze's book reveals the various ways Proust's novel can help the reader with everyday life. Deleuze sees the presence of the novel as the thing itself; the essential achievement. Right from the start, Deleuze insists that the novel is not about memory, as is commonly assumed, but signs. It is Proust's feat to reveal the process by which these signs work and how we might discern the truth of our lives from them." -Spike Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Translator's Note
Preface to the Complete Text
Preface to the 1972 Edition
Works by Proust

Part I. The Signs

1. The Types of Signs
2. Signs and Truth
3. Apprenticeship
4. Essence and the Signs of Art
5. Secondary Role of Memory
6. Series and Group
7. Pluralism in the System of Signs

Conclusion to Part I
The Image of Thought

Part II. The Literary Machine

8. Antilogos
9. Cells and Vessels
10. Levels of the Search
11. The Three Machines
12. Style

Conclusion to Part II
Presence and Function of Madness: The Spider

Notes