Antoine Compagnon

Biography

Antoine Compagnon is a writer and professor, specializing in literature and particularly Proust. The chair he has held since 2006 at the Collège de France reflects the ambition of his teaching: Modern and contemporary French literature: history, criticism, theory. Alongside landmark works such as Les antimodernes (2005), Un été avec Montaigne (Summer with Montaigne) has been an international success since its publication in 2013.

Conference: What does Proust mean by Le Temps retrouvé?

The learning of time in À la recherche du temps perdu is first and foremost that of the “non-simultaneity of contemporaries”, a remarkable thesis by Siegfried Kracauer and a critique of the idea of Zeitgeist, of the unity of a historical period, of the spirit of time. Proust, before Kracauer, saw the present as an assemblage of heterogeneous moments, autonomous tendencies and incoherent events, situated on different trajectories and subject to the laws of their own history. This is what savoir-vivre is all about: discovering the non-simultaneity of the world. Without it, we make mistakes, like Madame Verdurin at the dinner table with Baron de Charlus. The child thinks the world is synchronous, uniform. The narrator’s historical lesson is that of the child, who understands that a city makes eras coincide, offers a cut through time, as in Baudelaire’s The Swan. “It never occurred to me that there could be an eighteenth-century building in the rue Royale,” observes the narrator, “just as I would have been astonished if I had learned that the porte Saint-Martin and the porte Saint-Denis, masterpieces of Louis XIV’s time, were not contemporaries of the most recent buildings in these sordid arrondissements.” The city, like the world, like life, is not simultaneous. Le Temps retrouvé is also the discovery that life is anachronistic, or that it moves “backwards and forwards”, as Walter Benjamin put it.