The Pure Act of Recollection

The article seeks to delineate a correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot’s accounts of subjectivity through the prism of their respective readings of Marcel Proust. While Benjamin focuses on the peculiar artificiality of experience produced in Proust’s Recherche, Blanchot gives an account of the transformation of the narrator, which produces a ‘pure narrative’ and thus turns subjective interiority outward into writing. By relating their approaches to the problem of totality, Benjamin and Blanchot both indicate a concept of history, and of historical cognition, which is linked to the problem of writing, of fiction or narration and to a specific understanding of the literary work