ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the different types of philosophical reactions Marcel Proust's work received or as models constructed by them a posteriori — and there is nothing illegitimate in the procedure, on the contrary. It examines the truly literary reasons for the philosophical plasticity of La Recherche, basing author's work predominately on the motif of sleep. The different modelizations of La Recherche, which at the same time allow Proust to be a formalist, a spider stuck in a world of rhizomes, with Jean-Pierre Richard, Georges Poulet ou Gaetan Picon, a phenomenologist in tune with the physical world and referentiality. Paul Ricoeur has a tendency to give Proust the position of stranger— held in esteem and profoundly admired, but a stranger nonetheless. The novel redeployment of the types of existence is also found in the fact that sleep puts people in contact with an identity that escapes the traditional categories of sex and human filiations, or ordinary ontological categories.
