Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life

In her new book, Suzanne Guerlac interrogates standard interpretations of Remembrance of Things Past and argues that Proust does not record the dead time of recollection, but the effervescent time of becoming and the real as it was described Felix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson and Georg Simmel. By placing Proust's novel within a web of money and contemporary popular culture like commercial photography, pornography, the regulation of prostitution and the Dreyfus Affair, Guerlac reveals that Proust's motivation was not the recuperation of lost time, but the adventure of living in the present moment on an individual and social level--