certain occasions, philosophy gets a little out of itself and reads literature. In others, literature harbors philosophical concepts. In both cases the possibility opens, always dreamed, of an event in thought. But when the philosophy of a writer-philosopher is abyssed in the texts of another writer (who philosophizes, even without being a philosopher by profession), then the miracle is redoubled. This is what happens in this unprecedented meeting between Pierre Klossowski and Marcel Proust.
In 1971, summoned by his friend and colleague Michel Butor and with the excuse of a television broadcast on "Proust and the senses", Klossowski resumed his (re)reading of In Search of Lost Time. From this experience, which he describes as analogous to that of "being drugged", Klossowski writes the text "On Proust", hitherto unpublished. There he clears what he calls "the architecture of the Proustian device", and links it to its antecedents in Western literature, especially to the work of Flaubert and Dickens, but also to the mini-revolutions that at that time happened in the movement of the "Nouveau roman", especially, but not only, with Alain Robbe-Grillet.
As for the most typical field of philosophy, Klossowski, who was also a painter, translator, novelist, screenwriter and even film actor, will draw attention to Proust's (somewhat secret) link with Buddhism, and with Nietzsche (Gustavo Simona will add in his beautiful postface the figure of Schopenhauer). The thread that unites this whole plot is the common critique of the principle of identity. But beyond this suggestive flirtation with the East, Klossowski concludes that Proust remains fully "Western", since the detachment and peace he claims is not at all a compassionate Buddha peace, but a tumultuous and paradoxical Nietzschean peace: loving and Dionysian.