Abstract
If Beckett’s study of Proust has belatedly received the criticisms its author no doubt anticipated, another influential study published a little over thirty years later has, like its predecessor, elicited, among others, the critical response that the author of the Recherche finds himself recruited to the self-serving project of the critic. Gilles Deleuze’s Proust is cast not as the pessimistic Schopenhauerian which Beckett makes of him, but rather, as a force of affirmation in the quasi-Nietzschean register of the ‘powers of the false’. Deleuze would studiously augment his 1964 study with two additions in an effort to improve it. The consequence of this is to render its textual genesis a testament to one of the themes, and for Deleuze the theme of the Recherche, namely, apprenticeship. Moreover, the ‘pedagogy’ to which Proust’s novel subjects the philosopher becomes itself an example of the ‘untimely’ operations of art upon what Deleuze calls the upright or dogmatic image of thought.