ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze has made obvious the interest of Marcel Proust's novel for the poststructuralist philosophy of Difference, preoccupied with the concept and functioning of sign, truth, and intersubjectivity. This chapter presents the way in which these two 'clusters of problems', the Other, or the structure of being-with, and Difference inextricably intertwine in Proust's novel. The narrator's most important experience of the weight of difference as separateness from the non-I, of Difference as inherent in unity, and of the existence of the Other in general, is associated with the figure of Albertine. Emmanuel Levinas regards the face as the actual site of the incarnation of the Other's alterity, and he attributes to it the call for acknowledgment and acceptance represented by responsibility. The eternal fragmentation and slipping-away which make the ideal whole of the Other impossible to reach also deploy their destructive force at the level of the face.
