Finding a Way Out: Proustian Semiotics in Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

We argue in this article that Gilles Deleuze’s Proust et les signes, itself consisting of three chronologically separate instalments, should be seen in tandem with a later analysis of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in Félix Guattari’s L’Inconscient machinique, and that, taken as a complex assemblage, these interventions cohere around a radical exit from the reign of the linguistic signifier and thus from a semiotics based on the primacy of language. Proustian semiotics, as rendered by Deleuze and Guattari, is “antilogos”, both in its shattering of any single signsystem, and in the proposition of the dimension of pathos, which accompanies and undermines discursive surety.