L'Esprit Créateur

In this article, I discuss the significance of Roland Barthes’s assertions that Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is made of “variations sans thème” and that “la singularité de Proust c’est qu’il ne nous laisse rien d’autre à faire que ceci: le réécrire.” In doing so, I examine some of Barthes’s writing on Proust from the 1950s onwards, including a set of unpublished notes for a seminar he convened at the University of Rabat in 1969–70.