Learning to Live: Six Essays on Marcel Proust

In this collection of essays, Maurizio Ferraris explores the world portrayed in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He ponders how memory is tied to self-identification and knowledge; how the passage of time is only perceptible after it has passed; and how life, ultimately, is accurately portrayed in literature in ways that were seen as inconceivable in our youth. Running throughout the book is the sense that memory is all we are; we are what we remember or what others remember of us.

Table of Contents

Presentation to the First Edition
Note

The Sweet Cheat Gone 
1 The Fugitive
2 Truth, Misunderstandings, Rumours

Notebooks and Novel
1 Unpublished Works
2 What the Cahiers can Teach Us
3 Names
4 Characters
5 Metamorphoses and Migrations
6 Fragments and Contexts
7 Affections
8 Bibliographical Note

Bal de têtes.bête, bêtise and Identity 
1 The Guermantes Matinée
2 Personality and Seriality
3 The Group and the Band
4 Theory of Identity
5 Psychology, Sociology, Biology

Problems with Autobiography
1 The Autobiographical Pact
2 The Writing of Life
3 Structural Anthropology
4 Time Lost and Time Regained

The Master of the “Madeleine” and the Master of the “esprit de Guermantes”
1 Problems with marcellism
2 The Failure of Pure Narration
3 Secondary Rehabilitation of Intelligence

Like Giants Immersed in Time: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Marcel Proust
1 It No Longer Exists but I can Perceive It
2 Ontology
3 Phenomenology and Epistemology
4 The Atemporal Self
5 In Search of Lost Time, or the Children’s Crusade

References
Index