In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty famously wrote: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible.” To gain a fresh and original access to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Proust, this chapter places his views alongside those of another of Proust’s great interpreters, Walter Benjamin. In spite of the absence of explicit references to Benjamin in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, certain intersections are clear. For one thing, we find the originating importance of Husserl for Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin. Though they make reference to very distant periods of Husserlian thought, they share at least a distrust with regard to experience understood as Erlebnis. Second, they each give attention to the theme of essence and ideas, which, concerning artistic and literary works, are considered by the two thinkers as immanent within the works themselves. This suggests one of the most important contributions of Proust to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the concept of “sensible ideas.” Third, both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin demonstrate their common interest in perception and memory, sometimes focusing on the very same pages of Recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] to deepen, through the character of Marcel, the concept of “involuntary memory.”
Meta-awareness and the involuntary memory spectrum: Reply to Meyer, Otgaar, and Smeets (2015)
