On the Threshold of Dreams: Proust and Maine de Biran

On the opening page of Proust’s novel, the narrator describes the fluctuations of his consciousness between sleep and wakefulness as a dialectic between passive identification and active separation. Among all the possible philosophical intertexts that have been evoked to understand this passage, there is one notable reference that often goes unnoticed. This famous and yet enigmatic page can be elucidated if we look at a specific conception of consciousness that was introduced by Maine de Biran at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If Bergson’s influence on Proust has often been discussed, the study of the afterlife of Biran’s philosophy can bring new light to the literary and philosophical understanding of key aspects of the Recherche, particularly concerning the themes of sleep, dreams, and awakening. It is perhaps not coincidental that the only explicit reference to Biran in Proust’s work is nestled within a famous passage about sleep.