ABSTRACT
In Theodor Adorno's canon of self-ascribed influences, touchstones, and inspirations, there is no figure which occupies as curious a position as Marcel Proust. Kafka and Beckett, who are comparable recipients of Adorno's enthusiasm and acclaim, take center stage repeatedly in the course of both of Adorno's most important works, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, and receive dedicated essays to boot. Adorno, for all that he is an opponent of instrumental reason, is often all too happy to instrumentalize Proust's novel in ways which often betoken both an aggressively tendentious interpretation, and the beginnings of an appeal to authority. The more important references to Proust in Adorno are always epistemic. Indeed, the linkage between Proust and French Surrealism, first advanced by Adorno's friend Benjamin, is helpful in this regard. Fiction cannot serve as a justification for a philosophical position—and if Adorno thought so, we might say, so much the worse for Adorno and his philosophy.
