ABSTRACT
Proustian love may be a thing of the mind - cosa mentale - but this is not to say it represents a minor matter in the economy of A la Recherche du temps perdu.1 Within the lexical field of Proust’s novel, statistical analysis of frequencies puts the words ‘love’ and ‘desire’ in first and second places respectively (ahead of ‘memory’ and ‘time’).2 Perhaps more than any other writer, Proust indeed strikes us as a novelist of total libidinal awareness, whose writing consists in perpetually retracing, reflecting upon, and deciphering human Eros apprehended in the diversity of its forms and questioned in its deeper unity, as a problem of both self-understanding and existential self-realisation.3
