Le désir, l’imaginaire et l’amour Lectures érotiques de la Recherche

Reading can be an erotic act: the Recherche is at once an essay-novel on love and a novel on reading. According to the theory of mediality, sensation, desire, and knowledge are mediated though the image and the imaginary – a fundamental principle of Proust’s aesthetic, itself concerned with the equivalence of desire and love. The end of the novel stays open, its fugitive fantasies escaping the author’s control, as Odette escapes Swann’s love.