Proust and Signs

The Complete Text

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by Gilles Deleuze,

Translated by Richard Howard

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published October 2003, 264 pages, paper

ISBN 0816632588

New in paper (F03)

Here, Deleuze reads Proust's work as a narrative of an apprenticeship--more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search (the recherche) as one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode the kinds and types of symbols that surround him, Deleuze conducts a corollary search--one that leads to a different and deeper understanding of the signs that constitute A la recherche du temps perdu. Deleuze traces the network of signs laid by Proust (those of love, art, or worldliness) and moves toward an aesthetics that culminates in a meditation on the literary work as a sign-producing "machine"--an operation that reveals the superiority of "signs of art" in a world of signs.

In Howard's translation, augmented with an essay that Deleuze added to a later French edition, Proust and Signs appears in its entirety in English. This is one of Deleuze's most sustained attempts to understand and explain the work of art.