ABSTRACT
In his preface to the third edition of Proust and Signs (1976), Deleuze explains that the first part, published as Marcel Proust and Signs in 1964, concerns the “emission and interpretation of signs,” whereas part two, added in a second edition in 1970 and divided into chapters in 1976, concerns “the production and multiplication of signs themselves, from the point of view of the composition of the Recherche.” In both instances, the problem Deleuze addresses is that of the unity of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, this mammoth search for, inquiry into, and research on lost time (and the regained time [“temps retrouvé”] of the seventh volume). What is the singleness of a novel that has as its subject something that by its very nature cannot be grasped as a whole-i.e., time? What is the “unity of this multiple, of this multiplicity, as a whole of these fragments: a One and a Whole which would not be a principle, but on the contrary the ‘effect’ of the multiple and its disconnected parts” (PS 195; 144)? From the perspective of the emission and interpretation of signs, the Recherche is “the story of an apprenticeship” (PS 10; 4) in signs, but one that must be grasped from the point of view both of an ongoing process of discovery and of a final revelation of the truth of signs in the work of art. From the perspective of the multiplication and production of signs, the Recherche is a machine that produces “unity effects” as well as changes in the reader. Time is
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the narrator’s object of investigation and the medium in which that investigation takes place, but time is also the active subject that produces signs and the unity effects of the Recherche, for “such is time, the dimension of the narrator, which has the power [puissance] to be the whole [le tout] of these parts without totalizing them, the unity of these parts without unifying them” (PS 203; 150).
