Abstract

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness.