An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas

Chapter 5: How Can One Recognize What One Did Not Know?: Mnemosyne and the Art of the Twentieth Century

59 Chapter 5 How Can One Recognize What One Did Not Know?: Mnemosyne and the Art of the Twentieth Century For Giovanna I. “‘I DID NOT KNOW’ AND ‘I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN IT’” “‘I did not know’ and ‘I have always known it’”: it is through this “double formula” that Merleau-Ponty characterizes the Freudian notion of the unconscious (RC, 179/130; trans. modified) when, in the last course he was able to complete at the Collège de France (1959–60), “Nature and Logos: The Human Body,” to which I have frequently referred, he conceives its identification with feeling: “[t]he unconscious is feeling itself” (ibid.). Now, this formula inevitably reminds us of the Platonic theory of recollection . As is well known, the locus classicus for the foundation of such a theory is to be found in the pages of Plato’s Meno, where it is framed, by Meno himself, as two interrelated questions: How is it possible to inquire into what one does not know at all? And, in the event that one finds it, how is it possible to recognize it? In other words, the problem raised by Meno concerns the possibility of recognizing what was not known as such, either because its model has not been contemplated hitherto or because the model differs from the image one has encountered. This problem can be further articulated as follows: Is recognition which is not guaranteed by resemblance to a model at all Professor Giovanna Borradori (Vassar College, Poughkeepsie) discussed a previous version of this chapter with me, sharing the effort of thinking and unfolding many aspects of it. The present version owes a lot to her. 60 AN UNPRECEDENTED DEFORMATION possible, and concurrently, can resemblance be produced not through imitation but through difference? This double question proves to be crucial to the art and literature of the twentieth century. Look, for example, at how Milan Kundera struggles to make sense of what he seems to recognize in Francis Bacon. Looking at Bacon’s portraits, I am amazed that, despite their ‘distortion,’ they all look like their model. But how can an image look like a model of which it is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet, the image resembles the model; the pictures of the persons portrayed bear that out. And even if I did not know those photos, it is absolutely clear that in every cycle, in every triptych, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that one recognizes in them one and the same person. In other words, how is it possible to recognize, through its different deformations , a face never seen before? In this manner, Kundera’s question about Bacon touches on those formulated by Meno. In response to Meno, Socrates develops the theory according to which learning signifies recollecting. He does so by purporting to deduce it from metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul after death from body to body. Yet, this reference quickly gives way to Socrates’ decision to question one of Meno’s own slaves. Over the course of the first argument, Socrates observes “nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call learning—discovering everything else for himself” (Meno, 81d). He explains that this can occur because Nature is “co-generated [suggenès]” (81d): it is precisely this feature— which one could also define as “organic”—that allows whoever has recollected one aspect to infer the others. Socrates’ argument presupposes a relation between part and whole that Deleuze generalizes in the following manner: When a part is valid for itself, when a fragment speaks in itself, when a sign appears, it can be in two very different fashions: either because it permits us to divine the whole from which it is taken, to reconstitute the organism or the statue to which it belongs, and to seek out the other part that belongs to it—or else, on the contrary, because there is no other part that corresponds to it, no totality into which it can enter, no unity from which it is torn and to which it can be restored. The first fashion is that of the Greeks. As we have already alluded to in the second chapter of this work, the other way here described by Deleuze is the one he recognizes in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and classifies as “antilogos,” thus emphasizing its contrast with the tradition of Platonism. Deleuze believes that Proust departs in an essential way from...