Marco Piazza

This contribution explores the concept of the unconscious as articulated by Proust in his À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust ([1913–1927] 1998–1999) and in a series of documents and texts that preceded it. It aims at understanding whether and to what extent Proust can be placed in a line of French thought that begins with the work of Maine de Biran and culminates in the reception in the second half of the nineteenth century of Biranism by French alienists: doctors specialized in the study of mental alienation. This type of interpretation of Biran’s doctrine is attuned to the increasing attention which, at the time of Proust’s education, was given to the unconscious and to the idea that, alongside the conscious self, there is an unconscious self, understood as a secondary personality that can manifest itself in the life of the individual in both normal and pathological ways. Following the interpretative path pursued in Piazza (1997, 2017), Bizub (2006), and Fraisse (2013), this article takes into account both Proust’s secondary and university education and his familiarity with experimental psychology, to which he was introduced by his father.

This article analyzes the characteristics and the purposes that the object “photography” has in Proust’s Rechercheand in Roland Barthes’ La chambre claire, by recognizing within these two texts a the double challenge represented by photography itself: that of being a transparent object and that of allowing the fruition of the extra-temporality. Barthes’ realism, however, prevents the critic from considering in its full extent the cognitive value of photography, as configured in Proust’s text, which is placed in watermark in relation to the Barthes’ discourse. Proust’s complex position with respect to the object “photography”, which he criticizes, among many other reasons, for thesnap-shot platitude, includes even a possible parallelism with the involuntary memory, since the heuristic meaning of photography is connected to the cognitive and affective dinamycs which guide our processes of remembrance and creative relationship with our own past.

The subject of this work is Maine de Biran’s theory about nature, origin and function of language, and about signs in general. Such theoretical reflection is a not very well explored aspect of Biran’s thought, whereas it is extremely important because of its connections with Biran’s doctrine of the active nature of human being. In the present article we have tried to make a reconstruction of this reflection that shows in deep the connections between Biran’s thought and the doctrines of his main interlocutors: Condillac, Maupertuis, Rousseau, Destutt de Tracy

In questo saggio l'Autore studia l'influenza che i pensatori scozzesi, da Hume a Smith, da Dugald Stewart a Reid, hanno esercitato sulla riflessione di Maine de Biran , figura chiave nella transizione dal sensismo condillachiano e dal fisiologismo idéologique verso l'eclettismo e lo spiritualismo francesi del Secondo Ottocento. Tale influenza, ben più corposa di quanto non sia finora parso agli studiosi del filosofo di Bergerac, agisce su Biran in specie sulle prime fasi del suo pensiero attraverso la mediazione, qui ampiamente ricostruita, dei divulgatori in lingua francese delle opere degli illuministi scozzesi