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Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXVIII  |  Number 3  |  2017  |  53–66
* Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Rok Benčin*
“Sans cause”: Affect and Truth in Marcel Proust
There is a strong correlation between affect and truth in the work of Marcel 
Proust. In the narrative and conceptual framework of In Search of Lost Time there 
is no real truth without affect and no genuine affect without truth. Philosophical 
readings of Proust have indicated that the notion of truth found in his novel – 
one based on encounter and affect – has substantial implications for philoso-
phy. Gilles Deleuze argued that Proust invented a new “image of thought” to 
rival the one proposed by philosophy: while the philosopher is a friend of think-
ing, the writer is forced to think.1 More recently, Pierre Macherey followed this 
lead by claiming that Proust laid out a new “regime of the idea” based on affect.2 
As I will show in what follows, the new conceptualisation of truth developed in 
Proust’s novel does not suggest a reduction of truth to affect. Rather, the affec-
tive nature of truth in turn implies a certain metaphysics of affect.3
1. “… en dehors des possibles”
As explained by the narrator in Time Regained, the verity that the intellect on 
its own is able to extract from “immediate reality” in “full daylight” appears 
1 “Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think and seek the truth.” 
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. by Richard Howard, University of Minnesota Press, 
Minneapolis 2000, p. 16. See also the chapter “The Image of Thought”, pp. 94–102, where 
the implications of Proust’s critique of friendship for philosophy are laid out.
2 Pierre Macherey, Proust: entre littérature et philosophie, Éditions Amsterdam, Paris 2013, 
p. 49.
3 Apart from the philosophical readings mentioned, the motivation for this essay also stems 
from a missing philosophical reading of Proust. While Alain Badiou is not a reader of 
Proust, it could be shown – although I will not pursue this reading here – that in his re-
cent work on the immanence of truth and the metaphysics of happiness, he comes close 
to properly Proustian territory. As noticed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou lacks a proper 
reading of prose (Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh University Press, Edin-
burgh 2010, p. 158). While there is a poetry of being and event in Badiou (Mallarmé), there 
is no prose of the worlds. Perhaps Proust could be read as such.
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to be merely a “possible truth.”4 A real truth, on the other hand, is something 
that occurs and affects us, something that – although obscure at first – presents 
itself to us as necessary and inevitable, with the potential to reframe what we 
perceive as reality. For Proust’s narrator, possibilities are mere imaginary in-
terpretations, while the real can only appear beyond the realm of the possible: 
“The infinite field of possibilities extends before us, and if by any chance the 
real presented itself to our gaze, it would be so far beyond the bounds of pos-
sibility that, dashing suddenly against the boundary wall, we should fall over 
backwards.”5 According to Macherey, it is not so much the content of the idea 
that is essential here, but rather the manner in which it appears or emerges 
as passing in flight. It can only be seen from a certain biased perspective and 
grasped (or missed) at a certain moment in time.6
While the Proustian notion of truth is thus marked by a constitutive impurity, 
the notion of affect is characterised by a fundamental displacement: the im-
pressions gained in the haze of the presence of a beloved person are stored up 
as negatives to be developed later in the solitary inner darkroom; the sufferings 
of the jealous lover turn out to be the royal road to the joy of gaining knowledge 
of the general laws that govern human behaviour; mourning for a deceased 
grandmother takes place more than a year after her death (due to “that anach-
ronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to 
that of our feelings”7), and, finally, the immense joy of reminiscence leaves the 
narrator with nothing but the seemingly unsolvable enigma of its truth. The 
displacement at the core of affect removes it from its immediacy and transforms 
it first into an indicator of another affect still to come and then into a sign that 
inevitably triggers the work of interpretation. Sticking to the photographic met-
aphor, the narrator describes the affect as a negative that has to be developed 
by the intellect: “Only when the intelligence illuminates it […] we distinguish, 
and with how much difficulty, the shape of that which we have felt.”8 The de-
4 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300691.txt. (Citations 
from Proust are from C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, available online at Project Guten-
berg Australia; all accessed on 1 November 2017. The exception is Swann’s Way, where a 
more recent translation is used due to greater accuracy.)
5 Marcel Proust, The Captive, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300501.txt.
6 Pierre Macherey, Proust, pp. 48–49.
7 Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300491.txt.
8 Marcel Proust, Time Regained.
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“sans cause”: affect and truth in marcel proust
velopment of the negative, it has to be added, is not merely an interpretation 
but also a form of intervention. When the feeling of the grandmother’s absence 
finally sinks in, the narrator reflects that “reality has no existence for us, so 
long as it has not been created anew by our mind.”9
The affect is simultaneously the truth’s index, ensuring its realness, and the 
sign of an evasive truth that still needs to be extracted from it. Truth and affect 
thus signify each other’s immanent difference. Truths without affects are emp-
ty; affects without truths are blind. Following up on Macherey’s assertion that 
what matters to Proust is the occurrence of truth, the manner of its apparition 
and the way it can be grasped or missed, one could say that the reflection on 
the relation between affect and truth is Proust’s way of thinking subjectivation. 
A truth that is not empty is a truth that turns an individual into a subject, a 
truth that is only developed in the course of the process of subjectivation. This 
process, however, requires affects that are not blind, i.e. affects that are not 
only felt by the individual, but rather affects that give rise to another being from 
within the individual that can be the bearer and the developer of a truth.
Affect does not guarantee the realness of truth in the sense that a truth would 
only be real if an individual genuinely feels it to be true. Rather, affect is the 
Proustian way of bridging the gap between the individual, who can hold on to 
empty truths and feel blind feelings, to a subject that is able to develop a truth. 
The narrator is a witness of “the being within him,” which “tasted the impres-
sion” brought about by reminiscence, “a being which only appeared when 
through the medium of the identity of present and past, it found itself in the only 
setting in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside 
Time.”10 From within a finite individual, concerned by his or her travails and 
pleasures, rises a subject that exists on the level of infinity, developing a truth.
Despite existing on an extra-temporal level, the occurrence of this being is com-
pletely dependent on an event of the reminiscence, the “miracle of analogy,” as 
the narrator calls it, that might just as easily never have happened. The event, 
as Macherey observes, triggers the interpellation by which this being forces 
9 Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain.
10 Marcel Proust, Time Regained.
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itself upon the individual.11 These events are not particular to an individual, 
they are a singularity out of which something universal can be developed. The 
affect may first be personal, but subjectivation is a process of depersonalisa-
tion, which, as Macherey analyses, transforms the narrative subject from “je” 
to “nous”. The experience now no longer belongs only to the individual, but can 
be transmitted and shared by others.12 Such a transmission is only possible if an 
affective experience of reminiscence is developed, if the affect is followed up by 
the work of writing, which enables the subject to trace the temporal existence 
of the extra-temporal.
2. “... sans la notion de sa cause”
This immortal subject enters the stage in the famous madeleine scene, some 
fifty pages into the novel. The narrator suddenly ceases to feel mediocre, con-
tingent, and mortal, all on the merit of a specific kind of pleasure, provided by 
the taste of the tea-soaked cake. The affect is described as follows: “A delicious 
pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its 
cause.”13 Contrary to the ordinary pleasures of cake eating, the madeleine is 
not the cause of the affect. The pleasure – in isolation – invades the narrator as 
something that suspends the immediate reality and, as can be read in a later 
scene, attaches him to another reality in which a “true life” could be led. In 
his attempts at interpretation, the narrator is perplexed by this experience that 
“infinitely” exceeds the immediate sensation of taste: 
Where could it have come to me from – this powerful joy? I sensed that it was 
connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far be-
yond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it 
mean? How could I grasp it?14 
The pleasure is not only without a cause, but challenges the very notion of cau-
sality. The sensation, concludes the narrator, leads to a truth that cannot mere-
11 Pierre Macherey, Proust, p. 191.
12 Ibid., p. 195.
13 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. by Lydia Davis, Penguin Books, London 2004, p. 45.
14 Ibid.
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“sans cause”: affect and truth in marcel proust
ly be discovered but that will still have to be created – as a cause: “Seek? Not 
only that: create. It is face-to-face with something that does not yet exist.”15
The joy of the madeleine, however, is not the affect that sets the novel in mo-
tion. According to the very logic of Search, the novel should not have started 
without an affect related to a reminiscence, an instance of involuntary memory 
that enables the lost time to be regained and thereby the novel to start. And yet, 
dozens of pages precede the madeleine scene, pages that introduce us to the 
town of Combray, to the young narrator’s sensibilities that will subsequently 
develop into a love of art, to his relation to his mother, which sets the tone for 
his later behaviour towards women, and to the figure of Mr Swann, who intro-
duces the complexity of social relations that will come to be examined in great 
detail. All the great subject matters of the novel are thus laid out before the joy 
without a cause announces the central enigma to be unravelled.
The novel actually starts with another affect, the affect of étonnement, i.e. 
amazement or astonishment, brought about by a sudden awakening from a 
light slumber. In the very first paragraph, the narrator recounts how he would 
often fall asleep reading a book, his immersion into the fictional world linger-
ing on in his mind. The awakening would disperse this immersion – not by 
delivering the narrator back to reality but by plunging him into the worldless 
dead of night: “immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a 
darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so 
for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a 
thing truly dark.”16 The amazement brought about by this “chose sans cause […] 
chose vraiment obscure” reveals both a physics and a metaphysics of affect, 
which pave the way for the logic of reminiscence that will structure the novel 
as a whole.
If one wakes up after falling asleep in an unfamiliar position, one loses the sense 
of orientation that informs the awakening body of its coordinates in time and 
space. The body’s memory thus recalls other nights and other rooms in which it 
has woken up in a similar position: “the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoul-
ders, offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept, while around 
15 Ibid., p. 46.
16 Ibid., p. 3.
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it the invisible walls, changing place according to the shape of the imagined 
room, spun through the shadows.”17 This is how the narrator is first, well before 
the madeleine scene, transported back to his childhood bed in Combray, wak-
ing up wondering why his mother failed to come and kiss him goodnight.
The physics of uncomfortable limbs is supplemented by a metaphysics of dark-
ness. The narrator imagines the time of sleep as the simultaneity of possible 
worlds, while the moment of awakening into darkness seems much like a mo-
ment of uncertainty in the decision process of the Leibnizian creator. “A sleep-
ing man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the 
years and worlds,” explains the narrator.18 However, faced with the thing with-
out cause, “their ranks can be mixed up, broken.”19 The obscure thing without 
cause seems to suggest the Leibnizian question that Heidegger regarded as fun-
damental for any metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? 
Since it implies the contingent nature of the world as a construction, it might 
very well provoke the anxiety of worldlessness, disregarding any construction 
of a world as merely a phantasy. If a man 
dozes off in a position still more displaced and divergent, after dinner sitting in 
an armchair for instance, then the confusion among the disordered worlds will 
be complete, the magic armchair will send him travelling at top speed through 
time and space, and, at the moment of opening his eyelids, he will believe he 
went to bed several months earlier in another country.20 
In the very moment of awakening one is stuck in between worlds. Robbed of 
the sense of being-in-the-world, one becomes, to follow up on the Heideggerian 
reference, like an animal, poor-in-the-world: “when I woke in the middle of the 
night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first 
moment who I was; I had only, in its original simplicity, the sense of existence 
as it may quiver in the depths of an animal.”21
17 Ibid., p. 6.
18 Ibid., p. 5.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
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“sans cause”: affect and truth in marcel proust
However, the affect the narrator describes as a consequence of the encounter 
with darkness is not anxiety, but amazement. The obscure thing is not the ul-
timate real beyond the construction of the world, but the gap that makes the 
world reconstructable. The Proustian logic of worlds is more cosmogonic than 
it is apocalyptic. The amazement based on the thing without cause is thus the 
logical precondition of the joy without cause that itself leads to the truth of the 
recreation of the world of Combray.
The affect of amazement, however, cannot be subjectivised. It is the affect of 
possibility, while a truth – as we have already observed – requires an encoun-
ter, which introduces a degree of necessity or at least inevitability. Subjectiva-
tion requires a passage from the thing to an object, i.e. the passage from possi-
bility to necessity via contingency. “There is a great deal of chance in all this,”22 
the narrator reflects when – just before the madeleine scene – he asks himself 
if the past, and with it the world of Combray, is lost forever. The past world can 
be recreated only if we have the luck to stumble upon the right object: “The past 
is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some 
material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) that 
we do not suspect. It depends whether we encounter this object before we die, 
or do not encounter it.”23 The nature of the object is purely contingent, but the 
chance encounter with the object provides a degree of necessity to the world to 
be recreated.
Combray might not be the best of possible worlds, but it is the necessary, inev-
itable one. The Proustian metaphysics is thus a certain kind of dismantled Lei-
bnizianism. On the one hand, there is the multiplicity of possible worlds and, 
on the other, the isolated monad, i.e. an alien object out of which a whole world 
could be unfolded, like the Japanese game described by the narrator, the game 
of putting folded pieces of paper into a bowl of water and watching them unfold 
into the shape of flowers, houses, or human figures.
This dismantled Leibnizianism actually corresponds to the dual use of Leibniz 
in 20th century aesthetics. On the one hand, many philosophers and theoreti-
cians tried to use the notion of a possible world to describe works of fiction. On 
22 Ibid., p. 44.
23 Ibid., p. 45.
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the other, Adorno used the concept of a windowless monad as a conceptual 
metaphor for the modern work of art. The monad in this sense is not an element 
of the world but an object alienated from it. Being windowless, it does not rep-
resent reality, but rather conveys its truth: not the theological, pre-established 
harmony, but the socially pre-established disharmony.
Nonetheless, none of these options are applicable to Proust. The fiction created 
by the novel cannot be explained as a possible world since possibility implies 
arbitrariness, lacking the verity that can only be provided by an encounter with 
something real outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, the encoun-
ter with the worldless monadic object resulting in an affect without a cause is 
merely a negative imprint of a world still to be developed by the work of art. 
For Proust, the artwork is not a windowless monad harbouring the truth of the 
world’s disharmony, but rather a monadless window enabling the work of fic-
tion, i.e. the work of reframing and recreating the world.
3. “… un plaisir irraisonné”
This allows us to propose a metaphysical definition of the Proustian affect. An 
affect related to truth is an affect brought about by the detachment of objects 
from the frame of the world. On the one hand, the frames of other possible 
worlds invade the actually existing one, frames lacking in objective materi-
ality, while on the other hand, one stumbles into objects that appear alien to 
this world, monadic objects that contain, in a folded way, a negative of another 
world that may or may not be developed, depending on an event.
This takes us back to the “plaisir irraisonné” first evoked in the madeleine 
scene, the joy without a cause but not without an object in which an object 
is isolated from its immediate spatial and temporal reality, but which already 
implies the work of development and reframing. After the world of Combray is 
reconstructed, we gain insight into the childhood promenades of the narrator, 
during which sensible events begin to invade him: 
[S]uddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell of the road would stop 
me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed 
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to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting 
me to come take and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover.24 
Trying to think of a serious philosophical topic to once write about, the young 
Marcel is instead subject to the “unreasoning pleasure” brought about by “a par-
ticular object with no intellectual value and no reference to any abstract truth.”25
Hence, the madeleine reminiscence has two predecessors: the amazement 
linked to darkness as a logical predecessor and the childhood sensible events 
as a temporal predecessor. What is striking is that the secret to be developed 
has already announced itself in the impressions of a child, who strictly speak-
ing has nothing to remember, no different temporal layers that could coincide 
(which would also confirm Deleuze’s claim that memory is a topic of secondary 
importance to Proust). Thus, what I am proposing is a reading that puts the em-
phasis not on the relation between different temporal layers and the continuity 
of time – and, for that matter, not even on the relation between spatial continu-
ity and discontinuity – but rather on the relation between isolated, worldless 
impressions and the reframing of the world, or, in other words, the relation 
between monadic objects and “monadless” frames.26
One of these childhood impressions, the famous observation of the church tow-
ers of Martinville from Dr Percepied’s carriage, delivers an illusionistic specta-
24 Ibid., p. 182.
25 Ibid., p. 183.
26 For Proust, one of the primary devices that manage to isolate objects by cutting the sym-
bolic and imaginary ties that place it into the world is photography. In a scene from The 
Guermantes Way (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300411.txt), the narrator suddenly 
sees his grandmother outside the “animated system” of his affection. The unexpected and 
depersonalised gaze allows him to see her mechanically, as on a photographic plate, as “a 
dejected old woman whom I did not know.” In The Captive, the photographic metaphor is 
evoked again in relation to Albertine, the narrator’s great amorous obsession. Albertine is 
imagined as a fragmentary series of “snapshots”, while the totality of Albertine remains 
unreachable, fuelling the narrator’s jealousy: “We imagine that love has as its object a 
person whom we can see lying down before our eyes, enclosed in a human body. Alas, it 
is the extension of that person to all the points in space and time which the person has 
occupied and will occupy.” Albertine exists simultaneously in several worlds, many of 
which remain obscure, undevelopable to the narrator. While photography provides the 
metaphor of “development”, it does not itself allow the passage from a monadic object to 
the reframing of the world.
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cle of otherwise immobile objects changing their position in space. Macherey 
comments that Proust is implying not only the lesson of Kant’s Copernican rev-
olution (Proust himself compares Kant’s revolution to the one implied by Flau-
bert’s style), but also that a priori transcendental forms are not unchangeable, 
which renders the artistic reframing of the world possible.27 Macherey suggests 
that the ultimate meaning beyond the secret of the Proustian joy is precisely its 
lack of a reason itself. The truth can only, at first, be revealed by the intermedi-
ary of an affect because it is a truth that does not yet exist, that still needs to be 
developed. Joy stands for “the radical experience of rupture,” which demands 
“a jump into the void, replacing the world full of acquired certainty with a net-
work of uncertainties that unwinds in a precarious equilibrium between the 
lost time that leads from existence to death and the time regained that opens 
the path to eternity, constantly threatening to turn from one side to the other.”28
Monadic objects are thus joined by excessive frames that rival the general 
framework of reality. Such aesthetic reframings of the world are first observed 
in Elstir’s painting. The narrator perceives the painter’s studio as a “laboratory 
of a new creation of the world.”29 Elstir manages to capture in his paintings 
what the narrator can only fleetingly perceive in the singular impressions that 
bring him such joy. The narrator describes how sometimes, when observing the 
sea through a window, he would be “led by some effect of sunlight to mistake 
what was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline, or to gaze at a belt 
of liquid azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or sky.”30 As soon as 
the impression passes, reason would re-establish the distinctions of reality and 
find the causes of the illusory impressions. However, nature is itself ultimately 
unreasonable, which is why only art’s fiction can properly represent it: “But the 
rare moments in which we see nature as she is, with poetic vision, it was from 
those that Elstir’s work was taken.”31
The aim of art, the narrator explains, is a “revelation, impossible by direct and 
conscious means, of the qualitative difference there is in the way in which we 
look at the world.” This world-view, however, is not an expression of individu-
27 Pierre Macherey, Proust, p. 134.
28 Ibid., p. 163.
29 Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300401.txt.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
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ality, but rather a subjective development of a “reality far removed from the one 
we live in,” which is made possible by art:
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees 
of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would re-
main as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing 
one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there 
are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other 
than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rem-
brandt or Ver Meer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth 
from which they emanate is extinguished.32
The rupture of the sensible experience takes us from the world as reality and 
totality to the precarity of a world that still has to be fictionally constructed.
4. “... les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style”
The correlation between affect and truth thus implies another correlation, the 
one between event and world. The world as a frame of totality is dissolving due 
to events: appearances of worldless objects and excessive frames that suggest a 
multiplicity of worlds. On the other hand, the events disappear without a trace 
if the truth they imply is not developed. The truth, as we have seen, is not in-
dividual but singular and universally addressed; it entails the construction of 
a world to be shared, which is the task, according to Proust, of an “original 
artist.” The concept of world that Proust invents here is not a reference to the 
ultimate reality or totality, nor to a transcendental construction, but rather a 
properly fictional concept of world, inasmuch as fiction entails the work of de-
veloping a truth, the negative of which appeared as a sensible event.
The concept of fiction implied here resonates with the one developed recently by 
Jacques Rancière: “A fiction is not the invention of an imaginary world. Instead 
it is the construction of a framework within which subjects, things, situations 
can be perceived as coexisting in a common world and events can be identified 
and linked in a way that makes sense. Fiction is at work whenever a sense of 
32 Marcel Proust, Time Regained.
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reality must be produced.”33 The problem for Rancière, but also for Proust, as I 
would like to argue, is what kind of narrative and temporal structure will come 
to shape the world, or, in other words, which of the possible worlds will come 
to be the common one.
The intrusion of sensible events isolated from the plots that shape the narra-
tive reality is what defines modern literature, according to Rancière. Plots and 
characters dissolve into a series of sensible micro-events – the “shower of the 
atoms”, to use the reference to Virginia Woolf – in which the literature of the 
aesthetic regime discovers its metaphysics, a Deleuzian molecular ontology. 
Rancière claims, however, that while the “the ontology of the new fiction is 
monist, […] its practice can only be dialectical: […] a tension between the great 
lyricism of impersonal Life and the arrangements of the plot.”34 Rancière has 
often discussed this tension of modern literature via the opposing principles 
of Proust’s novel, in which the linear logic of the plot is opposed to a string of 
metaphors and sensible epiphanies.
Two kinds of temporality are implied here, according to Rancière, the ones that 
Aristotle described as separating poetry and historiography. On the one hand, 
the causal linkage of what could have happened, according to the possibili-
ties of character and plot formation, and on the other, the purely metonymical 
succession of events that simply occur. While the former provides a framework 
that implies division and hierarchy, the latter implies a “democracy of sensible 
coexistences.”35 Again, the sensible events should not be understood as mon-
ads, harbouring the affective truth of the moment against any kind of duration, 
but as windows allowing “unexpected connections from this random point,” 
thereby “engendering another line of temporality.”36
From this perspective, the question is whether Proust’s novel is built around a 
paradox of simultaneously building the Aristotelian plot and dissolving it in a 
series of micro-events, as repeatedly suggested by Rancière himself, or if the 
33 Jacques Rancière, Modern Times: Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics, Multimedialni 
institut, Zagreb 2017, p. 13.
34 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction, trans. by Steven 
Corcoran, Bloomsbury, London 2017, p. 62.
35 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread, p. 13.
36 Jacques Rancière, Modern Times, pp. 33–34.
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Proustian narrative is an attempt to construct an alternative to the Aristotelian 
temporal logic and to provide a model of establishing another kind of tempo-
rality based on the connections that can be established on the basis of singular 
sensible events.
The Proustian loss of time indicates that the continuity of the world and the 
succession of time are broken. However, Search is not aimed at regaining this 
continuity through involuntary memory. The time regained rather refers to the 
development of a truth out of the sensible events that themselves are isolated 
both from the continuity of the world and the succession of time. Nevertheless, 
if the affect of joy stemming from sensible impressions suspends the continu-
ity of time, why, then, was it necessary to introduce the reminiscence and the 
seeming reconstruction of the same continuity through memory?
Sensations by themselves cannot form a relation nor develop the truth of the af-
fect. Such a development is triggered by involuntary memory, which does not, 
however, reveal a pre-established relation. Rather, it is completely dependent 
on the contingent connections that can only be formed once the continuities of 
time and the world have been lost and certain objects have been affectively iso-
lated. If another kind of temporality is to be constructed, the affect induced by 
the sensible event must form connections and reframe the world, i.e. transform 
the monad into a window. According to the narrator, the writer posits reality 
as “a relation between those sensations and those memories which simultane-
ously encircle us[;] that unique relation which the writer must discover in order 
that he may link two different states of being together for ever in a phrase.”37 
Such a relation does not entail a reconstruction of reality, but a recreation of 
the world through style:
In describing objects one can make those which figure in a particular place suc-
ceed each other indefinitely; the truth will only begin to emerge from the mo-
ment that the writer takes two different objects, posits their relationship, the 
analogue in the world of art to the only relationship of causal law in the world of 
science, and encloses it within the circle of fine style.38
37 Marcel Proust, Time Regained.
38 Ibid.
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66
rok benčin
The reference to science does not imply a reconstruction of the Aristotelian nar-
rative logic, but rather the necessity missing from an ornamental conception of 
style. In this sense, style is a procedure of the development of a truth from the 
negative of an affect, a singular window, through which a world is to be framed 
by the writer as subject. The narrator concludes: “The relationship may be of 
little interest, the objects commonplace, the style bad, but unless there is that 
relationship, there is nothing.”39 Instead of a good description – a bad style: 
this is the Proustian formula for (artistic) truth.
39 Ibid.
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