Proust from Benjamin to Adorno: a figural reading
Marcel Proust’s notion of time inspired Walter Benjamin’s one; however, they present many differences. Since simple comparisons between the two authors have brought to contrasting results so far, this article tries to explore the possibility of making use of an hermeneutic scheme of which Proustian work may be considered an epigone, the figural interpretation studied by Erich Auerbach, in order to establish three dimensions of time – its structure, its extension and its essence – with respect to which it should be possible to carry about a strict confrontation. The figural approach to Proustian and Benjaminian accounts of time highlights that for the two authors time has both a linear and convoluted facet, but for Proust those aspects are balanced, cover everything and derive from a private act of interpretation, whereas for Benjamin only convoluted time is significant as time exists alongside its negative and is the result of a collective organization.
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Proust from Benjamin to Adorno: a figural reading
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Proust from Benjamin to Adorno: a figural reading
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Proust and Benjamin: a figural reading
Francesco Garbelli



Abstract. Marcel Proust’s notion of time inspired Walter Benjamin’s one; however, they present many differences.
Since simple comparisons between the two authors have brought to contrasting results so far, this article tries to
explore the possibility of making use of an hermeneutic scheme of which Proustian work may be considered an
epigone, the figural interpretation studied by Erich Auerbach, in order to establish three dimensions of time – its
structure, its extension and its essence – with respect to which it should be possible to carry about a strict
confrontation. The figural approach to Proustian and Benjaminian accounts of time highlights that for the two
authors time has both a linear and convoluted facet, but for Proust those aspects are balanced, cover everything
and derive from a private act of interpretation, whereas for Benjamin only convoluted time is significant as time
exists alongside its negative and is the result of a collective organization.



1. Previous comparisons between Proust and Benjamin

In an article appeared for the first time in 1961 on Neue Zurcher Zeitung Peter Szondi outlined an important
yet nowadays debated comparison between the ways of thinking of Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin.
The latter got so struck by his reading of the former’s À la recherche du temps perdu, of which he was also
one of the first German translators, to having stated that “he did not wish to read a word more of Proust
than what he needed to translate at the moment, because otherwise he risked straying into an addictive
dependency which would hinder his own production” (Adorno 1954, p.74); moreover, both authors
shared the same coeval cultural substrate, alongside with a sensitivity towards an epochal –
philosophical, social, technological, economical, religious, ecc – change in human history that was
bringing to light perspectives about man before concealed.
Apart from similarities, Szondi stressed one particular difference between the two authors: the
conception of time and consequently the subject’s way of making experience and dealing with it. As he
argues, Proust holds the view of a transitory temporality from which his aim is to flee in some kind of
crystallization of an instant of its made accessible by the experience of involuntary memory, whilst
Benjamin seeks into the past whose peculiar experience actualizes for glimpses of “lost future” (Szondi,
1961, p. 501). The point is that during the act of making experience of time in a non-temporal approach,
Benjamin anchors himself in a film-like flux in which he discovers that some frames possess the same
quality, thus making the remote ones a manifestation of the present ones and a promise of the ones still
to come: it is by their compresence that their common quality appears so that true history1 is for
Benjamin no more a temporal issue, but rather another way of observing time from this unique
perspective. Such relation that goes beyond the subject in the timeline by crossing it at right angles
concerns not only his profile but also the social environment around him: on a different and truer level


1 Although in Benjamin’s works “history” is often a synonym of “time”, it is fundamental to remark that I’m using
such term in opposition to the latter: Benjamin himself writes that “temporal” is the relation between past and
present, while “dialectic” is the one between what has been and now, and that only is “authentically historical”
(Benjamin 1974-89, Vol.5, N 3,1). From now on, if not otherwise specified, any reference to history must be read
in this sense.


         E|C Rivista dell’Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici, anno XV, n. 33, 2021 • Mimesis Edizioni, Milano-Udine
                                                       ISSN: 1970-7452, ISBN: 9788857589060 © 2021 – MIM EDIZIONI SRL
        This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0)
than linear temporality past fragments coexist and merge with current lives and offer an enigmatic hint
about their fulfillment.
On the contrary Proust is told to be merely looking for genuine memories since by the involuntariness
of their reminiscence they guarantee to him an escape from the transience of things and a grasp of them
in their ahistorical essence, which is bringer of happiness in contrast to the sway of time and the grief of
such consciousness, for that can eventually “rendre la mort indifférente” (Proust, 1954, vol. 3, p. 867). It seems
that for Szondi Proust is obsessed with a linear account of history and temporality – for Benjamin,
instead, real history is qualitatively different from temporality – whose contents are unpredictable
excepted for its term, which is death; therefore, as involuntary memory is an experience of time of a
totally different kind – indeed it cancels time and thus is a comforting relation to it - Proust becomes
addicted to it. This does not mean that time itself has a non-temporal aspect opposed to temporality like
in Benjamin, but rather that with involuntary memory Proust becomes able to suspend it and enter an
immobile, eternal dimension of essences. He locates himself in temporality just to jump out to “jouir de
l'essence des choses, c'est-à-dire en dehors du temps” (Proust 1954, vol.3, p. 871) by letting past fragments be
dragged into a present experience.
We can now summarize Szondi’s analysis as following: Proustian approach looks backward and its goal
is to abandon temporality-history to reach eternity; Benjaminian approach looks upward and its goal is
to abandon temporality to reach history. So Proust’s experience is static, consisting “d'obtenir, d'isoler,
d'immobiliser – la durée d'un éclair – ce qu'il n'appréhende jamais: un peu de temps à l'état pur” (Proust 1954, vol.3,
p. 872); Benjamin’s experience is dynamic, since it implies a potential of future or “temporal index,
according to which it is assigned to salvation” (Benjamin 1950, p. 495) hidden in every time fragment.
Though these points do not lack of sense and evidence, yet they present, especially with regards to Proust,
a partial if not misunderstood reading; no wonder they got challenged.
I take the critiques advanced by Louis Simon towards Szondi to be convincing. For Simon both Proust
and Benjamin embraced a notion of simultaneity of narrative and memories, “a dimension in which the
linear continuum of life experience […] folds upon itself, revealing at once the existence of a
nontemporal ‘pattern’ of experience…” (Simon 1997, p. 366); such model can even be visualized, as the
author states, by imagining a volume “close and unread”, “its pages of text touching one another”
(Simon 1997, p. 367). Although Szondi never explicitly posits his contrast in terms of linearity versus
non-linearity, Simon believes that this is the core of his mistake; he equates linearity to temporality and
affirms that Proustian and Benjaminian “nontemporal ‘pattern’ of experience” is an alternative to it. In
other words, time presents for them two dimensions: one straight and one folded with simultaneous
events. This entails that Proust does sustain a notion of non-linear time which is not only negative, as
eternity, but also positive, and that such Benjamin and Proust’s experience of time as non-linear shall be
requalified.
Firstly, it is deprived of any direction: this does not modify the reception of Benjamin as much as Proust’s,
since upward can be better conciliated with the evanescence of every direction than backward. About
this, Simon claims that “the Proustian mystical illumination cuts across temporal boundaries – the past,
the present, and the future – in the locus of the now” (Simon 1997, p. 365): memories then are not made
present but rather real, in an alternative pattern of experiencing time. Just like Benjamin’s change of
route from temporality to history, Proust reaches a different understanding of reality in “the convolution
of the individually woven fabric of time” (Simon 1997, p. 364).
Secondly, Benjamin and Proust’s experience of time becomes a force field capable of aggregating
different time fragments; as a whole it is a system at rest, yet inside it the components oppose their energy
in a state of tense equilibrium. This means that such experience is dynamic into its folds, but static as a
concretion: we shall again think at the metaphor of the volume. Actually, it is not just retaining both
aspects as if there was no significant interaction between them – that indeed takes place and produces
qualitative differences. As Szondi interpreted Benjaminian dynamic history, the messianic force
contained in each time fragment is allegiant to future, therefore providing a teleological inspiration that
transcends the actual experience; now it seems that Simon’s reading of such an experience cuts off any
form of external teleology, by admitting only internal forms of it. That is certainly the case of Proust,


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since his actual self, the one who reminisces, is the limit, the ultimate stage so far that cannot be
trespassed; at this threshold complicated time arrests itself. But is that true of Benjamin?
Here we face a dilemma, since the issue is left unclear by the author: finalism of the convoluted facet of
time is a new point upon which Proust and Benjamin diverge or we must abide by Benjamin’s history
only being internally teleological. A clarification is needed, which will also help understand the limits of
Simon’s work – one above all, he does not give any reason of the differences between the two authors as
his principal objective is to contrast Szondi’s interpretative line. We should regard time as a whole as a
structure intertwined with space and generative of entities; hence, by highlighting the differences
between Proust and Benjamin about the nature and the extension of the experience of time and the
ontology resulting from the overlay of linearity and non-linearity it should be possible to draw
information about their concept of time tout court. I will briefly sketch out the most important distinctions,
which will turn out useful even for subsequent paragraphs.
As opposed to Proust, Benjamin was a Marxist and colored this peculiar mystique of the everyday in a
political tone; that means that even if we assume that his true experience of time coincided with Proust’s
one, while the latter by the bliss of it affirmed to be able to contemplate things in their very essence, the
former would have put in addition into them a cry for a revolution that had to happen historically in
order to liberate them. Therefore time convolution is for Benjamin a chance to intervene with history
in temporality, starting with producing a periagoge or awakening in the conscience of the philosopher. Yet
as history is opposed to time since it provokes its annihilation, any act carried about in temporality, by
partaking of its nature, will not affect its destruction, but rather prepare it: for Benjamin revolution is a
messianic event external to the timeline, so it does not depend on individual nor collective deliberate
actions for no one can predict nor control its advent. The point is that whilst Proustian essences are at
the far edge of temporal folds, Benjamin’s promises of future enveloped in past fragments need a
completion beyond time: notice that this is the reversal of Szondi’s position, since, if we recall Simon,
Proust maintains time by offering an experience of it alternative to linearity, whereas Benjamin exits
temporality at all. This also means that the “nontemporal ‘pattern’ of experience” Simon states the two
authors share is not the same.
Such Benjaminian political drive leads to another difference. In On some motifs in Baudelaire he writes:

      According to Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself,
      whether he can take hold of his experience. But there is nothing inevitable about the dependence on
      chance in this matter. A person's inner concerns are not by nature of an inescapably private
      character. They attain this character only after the likelihood decreases that one's external concerns
      will be assimilated to one's experience. […] Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense
      of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory with material from the
      collective past (Benjamin 1939, p. 315).

Terminology here is quite important. In German Erfahrung designates a particular type of experience,
mostly unbeknown to the subject inasmuch as it is comprised of traces of perceptions sedimented in his
memory; Benjamin is contrasting it to Erlebnis, another word for experience that denotes consciously
lived memories ever accessible to the subject. For Benjamin, Proust wrongly understands Erfahrung’s
involuntariness and uncontrollability, thus predicating its privateness. Erfahrung, which is indeed the real
experience, exceeds individual possibilities but is apt to be socially organized; the fact that at Benjamin
and Proust’s epoch privates were charged with the responsibility of it, thus making matter of luck to ever
be subject of true experience, is therefore a socially determined condition.
So again the two authors part ways: notice that this is not an external aspect of their doctrine of non-
linear time experience, for in the first place it qualifies each one in a peculiar manner. True experience
of time is in Proust, when not consciously perceived, Erfahrung, and, when consciously perceived,
involuntary memory – we may regard at it as the explicit side of Erfahrung. Even for Benjamin Erfahrung
is the modality in which we make experience of time without being aware of it, but when we manage to
lay it out in the open we are participating in a phenomenon of illumination whose scope is wider than
Proustian account of memory – even though Benjamin would categorize it as “memory” in its original
sense. Benjamin and Proust share a notion of memory as a trace or sign inscribed in the body and
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charged with spirit, therefore for them remembrance does not only resurrect past experiences but allows
to experience essences (completed or lacking completion) that contributed to shape the subject; the
difference between the two kinds of memory lays in the fact that for Proust such an experience is
regulated by “the individually woven fabric of time”, while for Benjamin it is socially construed2. Hence
in the “now”, that Benjamin calls Jetzeit, in which we take the pattern of convoluted time, we can access
an organization of past traces that is not an involuntary private product, since such traces precisely call
for us in order to be saved and fulfilled with the voice of the generations that came before us and
produced them. Involuntary memory is for Benjamin a subcategory of illumination, whose effect is to
strengthen the bonds between individual and society: so when we become able to see things from the
perspective of their redemption we discover that our everyday experiences are threatened by social forms
of depletion consisting of reducing Erfahrung to Erlebnis and making us believe in an individual and not
holistic dimension of non-linear time.
In the second place and above all, involuntary memory and illumination, as different expressions of
Erfahrung, apply to different objects. Strictly speaking they share a common basis in bodily perceptions
marked with spirit, but since they refer to worlds of different quality (private or collective), their semantics
consequently change: for Proust folded time is associated with identities, for Benjamin with dialectical
images. It is true that in his essay On the image of Proust Benjamin states that even Proust “could not get
his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garnering that third [with respect
to container and content] thing, the image3 which satisfied his curiosity” (Benjamin 1929, p. 240) but
Proustian images are not the Benjaminian, dialectical ones.
In involuntary reminiscence Proust becomes the spectator of a particular type of identity of past Marcels
and of other names’ referents, which has been defined “an impossible entity – the singular repetition, or
a repetition with a difference” (Schlossman 1986, p. 102). Such an entity appears in fact as an image
resulting from the collision of sensations, the past and the present one, that mostly, but not wholly,
coincide: in the image, that is the only object of a single true experience, at least two compressed
universes or fragments of time are overlapped yet perceived as identical, as one. That is the principle of
seriality. Even if the subject is dealing with a couplet of perceptions – i.e., just one memory of the same
event – seriality is already operating since the identity it constitutes is open to a potentially infinite
sequence of integrations; the fact that Proust always describes “le miracle d'une analogie” (Proust 1954, vol.3,
p. 871), which is a relationship between two terms, is only due to his believing that the conscious side of
Erfahrung is involuntary individual memory, consisting of a resurrection of a past trace in the present by
virtue of a repetition. Erfahrung, implicit or explicit, does proceed with series, as Proust shows when he
tries to depict his multiple selves, multiple Albertines or multiple Balbecs. Proustian images are therefore
serial identities discovered by the consciously perceived resonance between two exemplars of them; in
front of such essences Proust is for an instant invested with the office of minister of a “cult of similarity”
(Benjamin 1929, p. 239) and substitutes with them, in an act of resignification, false identities produced
by the voluntary memory and associated to names by intelligence. Since for Proust Erfahrung is a private
phenomenon, identities exist only for the subject as a monad, from whose standpoint time is convoluted;
in a passage of his novel, he calls this unique voyeur “vrai moi” (Proust 1954, vol.3, p. 873).
Benjaminian images do not belong to this sort. Remember that for Benjamin Erfahrung presents a social
structure, so images produced by that are not an individual construction but the result of holistic,
historically (in a Marxist sense) determined forces. Hence images are not charged with subjective
repeated perceptions as they are not contemplated from a private spectator, but rather they come into
existence when “in drawing itself together in the moment - in the dialectical image - the past becomes
part of humanity's involuntary memory” (Benjamin 1940, p. 403); as the relation of being to been
exceeds the individual in an inter-individual, “objective” sense, and the standpoint from which images
are formed corresponds with the impersonal perspective of redeemed essences, such images qualify


2 By providing such a definition I take into account Benjamin’s abandonment of any reference to collective
unconscious after being criticized by Adorno in a letter to him (2 August 1935).
3 Notice that the term “image” is not limited to the visual – it may refer to, e.g., a linguistic image as well. From

now on I will use “essence” and “image” as synonyms.
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themselves as autonomous force fields. This means that whenever impossible unities of temporal
opposites which do not find any synthesis (that would be the case in history as destruction of temporality)
take place a – therefore dialectical – image, which is “not dichotomous and substantial, but bipolar and
tense” (Agamben 2007, p. 31; my translation) is punctually produced. Punctual is here the contrary of
cumulative, which is the cipher of Proust’s essences; for Benjamin instead dialectical images are the
symptom of the messianic force of time fragments, as apparent contradictions that could be dissolved
only outside time. One example is commodity, since it is contemporarily a good and a fetish, which are
two incompatible aspects entangled together, whose unity craves a solution. Notice also that all
commodities share the same essence, i.e. represent the same image, but alongside them it is possible to
include images which are unique and unrepeatable.
To sum up, both Proust and Benjamin, and this was Simon’s intuition, share the idea of a non-linear
time that shapes our experiences of true essences; but Simon does not take into consideration that
Proustian essences are, in the now in which they are experienced, perfect, privately produced and serial
– they are repeated identities; and that Benjaminian promises of future true essences are yet imperfect,
socially produced and punctual – they are dialectical images. As time manifests its nature by producing
a peculiar ontology such distinction cannot be ignored. We have previously come across the problem of
finalism, consisting in asking if such non-linear account of time is for Benjamin internally teleological,
like for Proust, or not. Now we can answer negatively, for Benjamin’s notion of convoluted time points
to an end which goes beyond its experience as it is found wrapped into dialectical images. So there is a
big difference between the two authors about their conception of time; but how to outline it, how to
define such directionless, static-dynamic finalism and its two declinations? Here another question arises,
since we still do not know how linear and non-linear time structures, as alternatives, coexist and interact
to produce their objects, images. I think that the notion of figura studied by Erich Auerbach might due.

2. About figura

As hinted before, “the eternity which Proust opens to view is intertwined time, not boundless time. His
true interest is in the passage of time in its most real - that is, intertwined - form, and this passage nowhere
holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without”. Here Benjamin synthetizes
that peculiar alchemy between different dimensions of time we are investigating in order to appreciate
what distinguishes his philosophy from Proust’s one. He continues:

      To follow the counterpoint of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust's
      world, to the universe of intertwining. It is the world in a state of similarity, and in it the correspondances
      rule; the Romantics were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most
      fervently, but Proust was the only one who managed to reveal them in our lived life. This is the work
      of la memoire involontaire, the rejuvenating force which is a match for the inexorable process of aging.
      […] Proust has brought off the monstrous feat of letting the whole world age a lifetime in an instant.
      But this very concentration, in which things that normally just fade and slumber are consumed in a
      flash, is called rejuvenation. À la Recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire
      lifetime with the utmost mental awareness (Benjamin 1929, p. 244).

In this passage Benjamin himself provides a reading of Proustian approach to time which is particularly
insightful. When he talks about “the counterpoint of aging and remembering” he is describing Erfahrung
and the perennial conflict between its conscious and unconscious sides; Proust’s “constant attempt to
charge an entire lifetime with the utmost mental awareness” corresponds to his strive to extend
explicitness at the expense of implicitness by means of narrative art. As Erfahrung cumulates bodily and
spiritual data deriving from physical or cultural impressions on the subject, who is ultimately shaped by
them, it carries with itself as effects of aging when the subject is unaware of it and remembering in the
opposite case. Then there is a dimension in which time runs linearly, even though our true experiences
have the power to tangle it. Moreover, temporality interacts with simultaneity of stored memories. If
linearity of time did not enter this process, Erfahrung would be just a synchronic phenomenon and there
would be produced no real images, but rather a collection of instantaneous and unrelated traces; instead,
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frames are for Proust ruled by correspondances, which we have subsumed under the principle of seriality,
thus forming repeated identities of diachronic impressions.
Age and rejuvenate the world as it is mirrored and contained - let it be added – in an image, this
“monstrous feat” that Benjamin praises Proust for, is the work, or better the very essence of identities of
this serial sort. They inhabit the subject who most of time is neither aware of their presence. “To reveal
them in our lived life”, that is the question: as discussed above, it is about that that Benjamin diverges
from Proust, since by overcoming subjective contours to open to socio-historical forces he eventually
abandons temporality to reach the contrastive compresence of instants of dialectical images. One could
say that Benjamin transposes the affinity between fragments from their integrative potential in time to
their redemptive force outside time, thus moving from the combination of diachronicity and
synchronicity to a dimension of pure, messianic synchronicity. The core of this argument is that
intertwined time manifests itself in the features it provides these images with, as Erfahrung and its
counterpoint between aging and rejuvenating are our transcendental gateway to these essences, be they
serial identities or dialectical images: therefore it is possible to study the interaction of linear and non-
linear dimensions of time by referring to what constitutes such images. Now the background has been
prepared for the keystone of the confrontation to be introduced: Auerbach’s reconstruction of the
concept of figura in the context of his literary criticism.
Auerbach’s interest for such a concept comes out of his studies on Dante. In the article Figura the author
outlines a history of the eponymous word’s uses and meanings. At the beginning he writes that “originally
figura, from the same stem of fingere, figulus, fictor, and effigies, meant ‘plastic form’” and after adds that
“the notion of the new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent runs through the whole
history of the word” (Auerbach 1938, p. 12 – following quotations referring to the same work will only
report the page number between brackets).
Here we face a first motif, “something living and dynamic” implied in the very origin of the notion. This
is why figura, as Latin progressively takes charge of the legacy of “the philosophical and rhetorical
elaboration of the language of Plato and Aristotle” (14), is used to translate the term schḕma which refers
to the perceptual shape of matter, as opposed to morphḕ and eidos which refer to what matter is informed
by and which are translated with the word forma. However “figura is broader […] than schḕma” (16) since
it also translates what in Greek is meant by the words typos, which signifies imprint, and plasis, plastic
form; on the other hand schḕma brings along the meaning of “outward shape” in the context of scientific
terminology and typos the one of exemplary (of a universal law). Hence, the original tension in figura is
further developed as its usage in the process of Hellenization of Roman culture produces a semantic
ambiguity between its original sense and meanings that eventually “efface the already faint dividing line
with forma” (15). Notice that, paradoxically, such a contamination intensifies rather than dampens the
index of dynamicity entailed in figura’s potestas verbi, since it gains all the energy of this contradiction. We
can therefore conclude that, within the notion, a plastic element and a formal element coexist.
This leads to the second motif, that we find, for Auerbach, in Lucretius:

       The important transition from the form to its imitation, from model to copy, may best be noted in
       the passage dealing with the resemblance of children to their parents, the mixture of seeds, and
       heredity; with children who are utriusque figurae (“of both figurae”), resembling both father and mother,
       and who often reflect proavorum figuras (“the figurae of their ancestors”), and so on. […] Here we see
       that only figura could serve for this play on model and copy; forma and imago are too solidly anchored
       in one or the other of the two meanings; figura is more concrete and dynamic than forma and preserves
       the individuality of the original more purely than imago4 (16).

In this passage we can track down many themes. First: figura, by virtue of its nature, is employed to
complicate the relations between the original and the copy under the concept of similarity. Children are
themselves figurae and reflect others’ figuras – singular exemplars overlaps, as their contours fade, and

4 “…and preserves the individuality of the original more purely than imago” is actually absent in the English
translation; it is my translation. In order not to make confusion with our previous use of the term “image”, we may
best understand imago as “picture”.
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resemble each other. Second: figura refers to a concrete individual that we can neither associate to forma,
since it would signify an essence too abstract to interlace and mutate with matter, neither to imago, for it
would rather designate a view in which no singularity emerged. Third: due to its carrying of the meaning
of perceptual shape, figura, as Auerbach states right after, is applied by Lucretius even to the copies of
individuals that “peel of things like membranes and float round in the air [in the context of] his
Democritean doctrine of the “film images” (Diels), or eidola, which he takes in a materialistic sense” (17).
Lucretius also calls figurae “dream images”, “figments of fancy”, and “ghosts”. Therefore we discover
that figurae can be external data or impressions organized as to denote individuals that the subject
happens to perceive and also his own productions.
It is with Christianity that Western culture was able to make another step in the progression of figura’s
meanings, which is the object of the third motif that has to be pointed out. Tertullian is the first to make
use of the term to designate the prophetic quality of a biblical individual and his biography in relation
to Jesus or other future entities and events, like Church; in this sense as figura (e.g., Christi), such an
individual is now “something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and
historical. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity” (29). What is new
from previous insistences on dynamicity, similarity and concreteness is that in Tertullian those elements
get harmonized and systematized in the tension inherent to a real exemplar towards another analogue
one. The latter pole of the connection, the “concrete historical facts” (30) to which figurae tend, is what
is called their “fulfillment”: since they are still incomplete, only the advent of what they pre-figure gives
them back their true meaning and identity.
Augustine remarks other fundamental features of Christian notion of figurae. For “the “heavenly”
fulfillment is not complete as God’s Final Judgement and Reign are yet to come, no historical fact can
ever freeze figurae’s instability by completing them. The first fulfillment brings along a promise that is
over-temporal, since it in turn needs the End of time after which God Himself keeps it: Auerbach refers
to this as “an idealism which removes the concrete event, completely preserved as it is, from time and
transposes it into a perspective of eternity”. From this standpoint exists an “omnitemporality of figurae”5
that can be best understood in the following passage of Augustine, which Auerbach quotes:

       Quid enim est praescientia, nisi scientia futurorum? Quid actem futurum est Deo qui omnia supergreditur tempora? Si
       enim scientia Dei res ipsas habet, non sunt ei futurae, sed praesentes; ac per hoc non iam praescientia, sed tantum
       scientia dici potest (De div. quaest. ad Simplicianum, II, qu.2, n.2) (“For what is foreknowledge but
       knowledge of the future? But what is future to God who transcends all time? If God's knowledge
       contains these things, they are not future to Him but present; therefore it can be termed not
       foreknowledge, but simply knowledge”) (41-43).

It is necessary God, as a divine standpoint from whose perspective all essences are synchronic, to
establish similarities between them as figurae and fulfillments. This is the condition and the center of
gravity of figural interpretation. Through God’s eye temporal fragments, took from their diachronic
dimension, are crystallized and put in contact together: the past, the present and the future converge
into their final essence, which is the result of their being into time as it runs, folds upon itself and is
eventually torn apart. This makes figura’s semantic realm “both real and spiritual, hence authentic,
significant, and existential” (45). Auerbach describes the approach to this kind of concept as follows:

       Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which
       signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two
       poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within
       the stream of historical life (53).

Both referents, however, partake of linear temporality and of eternity, because “this eternal thing is
already figured in them, and thus they are both tentative fragmentary reality, and veiled eternal reality”

5 This is not how the English translation sounds, but I take it to be more adherent to the original. See also Müller
(2015).
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(59-60). The “figural view of history”, as it is transferred from texts to reality, thus consists of discovering
a correspondance between two entities – whose similarity is strongly confused with their very identity – by
the grace of an index of a transcendent eternity hidden in both, vertically linking them to the divine
standpoint.
As it has been said, Auerbach studied the notion of figura in the economy of his Dante criticism: now
Dante is the inventor, the poet of the fourth, most crucial and extreme motif of the history of the concept.
All starts with a visionary intuition of Dante: “the Comedy is a vision which regards and proclaims the
figural truth as already fulfilled, and what constitutes its distinctive character is precisely that, fully in the
spirit of figural interpretation, it attaches the truth perceived in the vision to historical, earthly events”
(67). This is the turning point in art and in the way of seeing reality. We can articulate its consequences
in three steps. First, beside inter-individual, Augustine-like figural devices (e.g., in the character of
Francesco D’Assisi6), as the Comedy treats of the status animarum post mortem of concrete individuals who
once were alive and are now encountered in the other world, Dante introduces a totally different, intra-
individual kind of figura. Virgil, Cato and Beatrice exemplify it since their earthly existence is considered
a figura of their real, revealed identity, which is the eternal fulfillment and result of a historical
phenomenon. In other words, figurae become constituent of a unified, individual, singular identity. Notice
also that for Beatrice this means an indifference to the origin of figura: as Virgil’s and Cato’s figurae are
derived from history, which is the result of a linguistic impression, Beatrice’s one comes from direct,
sensitive experience of her in Dante’s life.
We shall move to Mimesis, Auerbach’s masterpiece, to appreciate the second and the third steps - Figura
ends by focusing on the first one, while here the author develops further his argument. In the chapter
Farinata and Cavalcante he stresses once again the aggregating feature of figurae Dante employed7, then he
notices what constitutes the second step:

       The suspense inherent in the yet unrevealed future […] has ceased. In the Comedy only Dante can
       feel this suspense. The many played-out dramas are combined in one great play, involving his own
       fate and that of all mankind; they are but exempla of the winning or losing of eternal bliss. […] With
       Dante as spectator, all the dramas are played over again in tremendously concentrated form
       (Auerbach 1946, p. 197 – following quotations referring to the same work will only report the page
       number between brackets).

What is important of this passage is that Dante is a living – experiencing suspense, concern and
commitment – spectator. Indeed, as we have seen in Augustine, the figural “dramas” would not happen
if God did not guarantee their very possibility as the standpoint from which they can exist; but Dante’s
opus, his universe and his characters, draws on a poietic act that depends on his individual and secular
standpoint. It is Dante, from his particularistic, limited, contingent and situated point of view who
organizes what he contemplates in order to produce the truth in the beauty of art; indeed a spectator is
needed in order to establish a correspondance. That is precisely the reason for which he can apply figural
reading to intra-individual identities, who are not related to other, providential entities but only to
themselves: he is in the end their poet and creator, since they appear in the scenario posited by his vision,
though he depicts it as a universal representation inspired by God. As a result, subjective standpoint
takes over for the divine one.
But this appropriation of the standpoint, thus giving it in fact an immanent quality, is not the only attack
brought to transcendence. There is another step, the third one, that illustrates this aspect. Dante “opened
the way for that aspiration toward autonomy which possesses all earthly existence. […] Figure surpasses
fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief”
(200), for Comedy’s inclusion of temporality into eternity results in



6 It is interesting to notice that this is a reversed figura, as its fulfillment, Christ, is temporally prior to it. Auerbach
proposes to call it “integral imitation”, also translatable as “existential imitation” (Auerbach 1944, p. 179).
7 “There results as it were a tremendous concentration” (Auerbach 1946, p. 192).

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      a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else, a comprehension of human realities
      which spreads as widely and variously as it goes profoundly to the very roots of our emotions, an
      illumination of man's impulses and passions which leads us to share in them without restraint and
      indeed to admire their variety and their greatness. And by virtue of this immediate and admiring
      sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole
      historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and
      obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante's work made man's Christian-figural
      being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it. The tremendous pattern was
      broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain (201-202).

The apex of the figural interpretation coincides with the purification of it from its Christian roots that
had been fundamental to develop its most peculiar characteristics. Dante’s characters are alive, plastic,
autonomous: they retain all their concrete features, amplified. The perspective is no more outside time,
in a transcendent dimension of being, but inside time, which runs linearly as the progression of figurae is
historical but which also convolutes itself in order to produce their unity in a repeated identity. This
provokes a change in focus in favor of an immanent index of integration possessed by images.
Let us summarize the main points of Auerbachian figural interpretation. We call figura something that is
dynamic and, in a sense, formal (hence, also static); that is related to other figurae by similarity; that is
concrete; that can be experienced through an impression or an expression (or production); that is
temporal and open, linked to a fulfillment which is temporal and open as well – so that we may simply
consider it another figura; that can be inter-individual or intra-individual; that presupposes a standpoint
in order to exist and relate; that is immanent. At the beginning of this paragraph we prepared a
background for the interrogation that had been set at the end of the previous one: how to mark the
difference between Proust’s and Benjamin’s teleology of time. Our leading intuition was that in order to
clarify it we should deepen the interaction between linear and non-linear time. The background
consisted of a reduction of time structures’ interaction to its products, images: for Proust, dia-syn-chronic
serial identities; for Benjamin, synchronic dialectical images. Now it is possible to apply Auerbach’s
hermeneutic tool to such images.

3. Figural comparison between Proust and Benjamin

I will make use of the motifs enucleated in the previous paragraph to define many figural dimensions
within which it should be possible to highlight the distinction between Proustian and Benjaminian
notions of time. Some of them may turn out to establish accordance, either. The presupposition is the
following: it is possible to consider serial identities and dialectical images as made up of figurae. Just like
feuillets, figurae cumulate together into or show in filigree their true essence.
Experience of figurae is Erfahrung, which stores them in the body conserving their spiritual character; with
regards to memory, they are perceptual traces of essences and contribute to shape the subject. This quite
corresponds to the fact that figurae are concrete, reside in impressions or in expressions and are
immanent, and both Proust and Benjamin would share such an assumption, as this is entailed in their
bodily conception of memory. Be careful about this crucial point: as long as Erfahrung is embodied figurae
may have a sensitive origin or a linguistic origin (which reflects the medieval transition of figural
interpretation from text to history and Dante’s transition from inter-individuality to intra-individuality),
but this is indifferent to their characteristics, in fact it does not determine whether their Erfahrung is
implicit or explicit, how they relate together, and so on. We have already discussed, by referring to the
experience of time (but the same goes for the components of images which are produced by time), how
dynamicity and staticity are to be predicated of what I am addressing to as figurae: for their openness and
their “valence”, i.e. their capacity to tend to something else which is also more identical to their true
essence, they are dynamic, whilst as crystallizations constitutive of that very essence as materials and as
parts of formal organization, they are static. They are the pages of the volume.
Having expunged these parameters, what is left can be grouped into three dimensions: the kind of
relation figurae set up, the kind of openness they are qualified by, the kind of standpoint from which they
are experienced. There is one aspect that is left aside: the inter- and intra-individuality. Surely, talking
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about essences, Proust and Benjamin accept intra-individuality, whether it is referred to the subject
(Marcel or Walter) or to other objects (Combray or commodity), since figurae coalesce into something or
point to something. Do they interchange? Can figurae constitutive of an essence be co-opted in another?
This is true for Proust, for in his Recherche one can read, e.g., that “Albertine tenait, liées autour d'elle, toutes les
impressions d'une série maritime qui m'était particulièrement chère” (Proust 1954, vol.2, p. 363). For Benjamin the
same mechanism applies to his notion of constellation (in a letter to Gretel Adorno, he calls it “figure”8).
However, that is not related to any peculiar time structure, so it won’t be taken into account.

3.1. Time’s structure: integration vs redemption

The first distinction between Proust and Benjamin in terms of figural approach to time is about the force
that animates figurae establishing different relations between them. Recall the issue of teleology: for Proust
it is internal, for Benjamin it is external to time. For Proust the now is the pinnacle of the essence, which
is perfect in the sense that there is nothing beyond it so far - it is indeed passible of a further development
by the accumulation of new figurae, but when it is experienced it is complete. In order to come into being
as an essence, it is necessary for its figurae to repeat themselves with some kind of variation: repetition is
inscribed in linearity, since it is a diachronic event. For Proust, as explained above, figurae are endowed
with an integrative potential under the principle of seriality. It is by virtue of such quality that the linear
dimension of time plays a role in his conception of it. On the other hand, the non-linear facet of time is
indispensable in order to make essences emerge in the juxtaposition of two exemplars of their serial
identity: only synchronicity of figurae, as it is provided by a fixed standpoint, allows them to cumulate
and aggregate by tending to one another. Affinity between figurae is thus inflected as integration (linearly)
through and (non-linearly) into time. This reflects our first recon about Proustian particularity in the
second half of the first paragraph, i.e. the perfection of his essences.
On the contrary, Benjamin denies that essences, as they come in front of our sight, are perfect: they need
completion, without which they cannot be essences at all but rather promises of themselves. From such
perspective, figurae are in the end always punctual and synchronic for the standpoint, since they fail to
aggregate into one: in Jetzeit, that is a clash between epochs, figurae do not merge into a synthesis, but
they show that the present and the past are incompatible, since their index of redemption has not been
satisfied yet. That very index is, however, what grants them their impossible unity. So here linearity has
to be intended in a really weak sense: it is only a determination of what is past and what is present, which
are quite indifferent to one another. Non-linearity is indeed the dimension where figurae, displayed
alongside each other by a common redemptive force, cut across time, searching for their fulfillment
outside it. This is why, for Benjamin, convoluted time is ultimately the sole detaining significance.

3.2. Time’s extension: seriality vs dialectic

“It will be a gloomy series”: thus wrote Claude Monet about his painting The Bridge at Vervy9. It is not
daring to consider Impressionism as a gear shift in Western representation of reality, maybe even more
decisive than photography and cinema. Arnold Hauser put it at the roots of the whole following art,
included Proust’s work10. But as the quotation from Monet aims at demonstrating, Impressionism is not
only – nor, maybe, primarily – concerned about impressions, but also, and this is crucial, about series of
them. Seriality is its own principle. Impressionist serial paintings challenged traditional art as they
shattered the whole of the essence paintings were supposed to represent; from this perspective,
photography only complicated the conflict, since on the one hand it made it possible to jeopardize even
traditional paintings’ unicity by virtue of the technological reproducibility of works of art it allowed –
this intuition was the guiding idea of Benjamin’s most known essay11 – and on the other hand it


8 Letter to Gretel Adorno (16 August 1935).
9 Letter to Alice Hoschedé (4 April 1889).
10 See Hauser (1951).
11 See Benjamin (1935).

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introduced the possibility to have, exception made for their material support, identical exemplars in a
serie. In other words, Impressionism and photography brought to light the serial aspect of essences; it is
not that it did not exist before – we have seen that, e.g., it was auroral in Dante – but by focusing on
instantaneous flashes, by reducing to the extreme the time compressed in images, by approximating to
the furthest limit before temporal zero, Impressionism and photography exposed in the most icastic way
such a temporal ontology, which would have been a blasphemy to Plato and Aristotle, but that in
Christian thinkers was already foreshadowed.
This had an enormous impact upon Proust’s doctrine, as on this basis he rejected the possibility to ever
come to know essences – Balbec, Saint-Loup, his own self: in the memoire involontaire, in which two
exemplars overlap, serial essences just become enjoyable, so that one can recognize their existence, but
no more (especially in cognitive terms). It is by virtue of their temporality that “for Proust, characters
are not beings at all. Fugitive and ungraspable, they are essentially without essence” (Bal 2015, p. 221), in
that seriality does not provide fixed identities and undercovers that its exemplars may integrate, as
heterogeneous as they are, in the most unpredictable way. It is simply impossible to know the full set of
figurae. What can we infer about Proustian time from this? In the first place, as stated, the temporality of
essences. As linearity and convolution are two aspects of time, we find them operate together in order to
generate serial identities, whose exemplars’ relations have been discussed above. In the second place,
the temporality of figurae, which coalesce in a progression of repetitions. Instead, Benjamin cannot accept
such temporality of images (and of their figurae) for they are not for him wholly filled with time: their
cipher is punctuality, which is produced by the empty space that connects their parts. They are involved
in a dialectic, an infinite repartee that as a principle fixes opposites and let their chemical reaction get
started without producing any substantiality, but only a tension. Benjaminian figurae lack time. This
mirrors the third aspect of our confrontation between the two authors, seriality contra punctuality.
I have previously employed the expression “openness” to contradistinguish this dimension of figurae: here
the stress is not on time’s structure, but on its spatial extension. We can now understand why Proust and
Benjamin look quite similar, though not identical, about their understanding of temporal patterns, while
they misalign more about their domain - we should not reason in terms of contrasts but rather of
occupation of more or less coinciding regions. Figural reading shows that the only difference about how
exemplars interact is produced by the temporal quality of the image they tend to be organized by: as a
regulative principle, seriality or dialectic alters the teleology of time’s structure, but the main difference
is located at its level, i.e. the level of essences and figurae’s openness to time. This second dimension,
which defines not if time is linear or convoluted but how wide its interlace with space spreads, indeed
counteract on the first one: this is why although Simon’s assertion about Proustian and Benjaminian
shared simultaneity is not wrong yet it is wanting with regards to the fact that a figural variable intervenes
and modifies in divergent ways the positions of the two authors.

3.3. Time’s essence: private vs collective standpoint

We may now focus on the aspect of figurae which refers to the standpoint. For Proust, as Gilles Deleuze
rightly stated,

      indeed, there exists an activity, a pure interpreting, a pure choosing that has no more subject than it
      has object, because it chooses the interpreter no less than the thing to interpret, the sign and the self
      that deciphers it. Such is the “we” of interpretation […]. Interpreting has no other unity than a
      transversal one; interpreting alone is the divinity of which each thing is a fragment, but its “divine
      form” neither collects nor unites the fragments, it carries them on the contrary to the highest, most
      acute state, preventing them from forming a whole (Deleuze 1964, p. 128).

The passage brings seriality to its ultimate consequences. Essences are perfect yet unstable, open and
unknowable, and they can only be experienced in the now of analogy, in the explicit modality of
Erfahrung, as images that are around, aside, above, everywhere, ever foreshortened, never in full sight:
this holds for any object and for the subject. No one of these can be the standpoint, since no one of these
can provide unity on its own. Recall that for Proust essences are privately produced, which was the
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second element in the comparison with Benjamin. But this production cannot be the work of the self, as
it is as serial as anything else. Here we face both an individual and superindividual perspective, which is
precisely the Deleuzian “we of interpretation” that Proust calls “vrai moi”: this retains that divine
capacity, before ascribed to God, to display all figurae in front of its eye and let them converge towards
different images. Deleuze recognizes them as principles of individuation and states that their unity is
“transversal”, while the standpoint, as a “formal structure” is what sets a squared transversality between
them. The “vrai moi” is thus the supreme point of view, separated from the subject, from the object and
from their figurae, which in this sense “neither collects nor unites the fragments” (be they serial identities
or their exemplars) as it is the global affirmation of each one of them. This is indeed the final revelation
of Le temps retrouvé: the body, by virtue of its Erfahrung and memory, carries folded essences within it, which
are “réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits” (Proust 1954, vol.3, p. 873): with an extraordinary effort,
in “la durée d'un éclair” of such explicit experience, not only them, but also the global configuration as the
result and the origin of a lifetime appears. This standpoint is individual just for its privateness: it unfolds
the whole history, the universe of figurae and their integrations, as they involve the body of the actual self
who is the contingent subject of the experience.
Things are different for Benjamin. The standpoint from which figurae and dialectical images show
themselves is in his conception an unidentified, secret rendez-vous of succeeding generations casting a
messianic light upon fragments of past, hence shining with future; it is a collective and convergent point
of view, made accessible by the participation of every individual to society and history in a Marxist sense.
This is not the explication of merely private experiences: it is the universal memory that tends to the
fulfillment of all its promises, whose sum is redemption. Unlike Proust, for whom the “vrai moi” belongs
to every center of memory as its purest form, Benjamin considers the standpoint a holistic eye that, for
this motive, trespasses temporal memory; this is also why it can be socially organized.
The problem of the standpoint captures another dimension of time. Alongside time’s structure and
extension, now what emerges is its essence itself. Proustian standpoint implies that “en dehors du temps”,
actually, there is nothing: nor the essences, nor the “vrai moi” itself. Time exists as it creates its voyeur, an
auto-interpreting memory: in front of the standpoint time is brought to the coincidence of linearity and
convolution, in an intertwined reality that a volume again, as a three-dimensional mosaic, represents
best. All is imbued with time, but with different significances. The expression “en dehors du temps” simply
means outside the time of figurae and of essences, in the place which is no place, as it is dimensionless as
a monadic scope that embraces a world. This of course caused Szondi to assert that what distinguishes
Benjamin from Proust is the latter’s attempt to freeze linearity as opposed to the former’s purpose to
grasp future from simultaneity. Since the “vrai moi” does not surpass the fragments but only displays their
multitude it can indeed appear that Proust is concerned about producing a stall of linearity – but this is
what one gets only if he arrests himself at the first impression. Simon predicates the temporal simultaneity
of his art, instead. By distinguishing between figural levels of interpretation, we propose that, at the
highest one, Proust insists on the coexistence of all figurae and essences in their spatiotemporal relations
so far; that all essences as images or serial (or repeated or transversal) identities or principles of
individuation belong to this domain; that figurae connect themselves linearly and convolutedly. This
phenomenon is material and spiritual: material, as it is permitted by the memory stored in a body, and
spiritual, as that memory cannot do anything but immediately auto-interpret itself.
Benjamin’s rendez-vous is temporal in a different sense. As the standpoint is a collective heritage whose
sight is not limited to what has happened so far but also to what is yet to come, the temporality of Jetzeit
consists of its enactment and its medium, that are the gateway through which an individual may access
an inter-individual patrimony. Figurae, thought they are produced into time as both linear and non-
linear, only account for this second aspect; this in fact is at the origin of the incomplete essences that are
dialectical images, which show flaws in time’s texture whose result is exposing its extensive limits;
eventually, in order to judge about this, the standpoint must be external to time, for it can link the
fragments of messianic force to history, as the perpendicular to temporality. Then time is always
coexistent with its negative, it is itself dialectic, as it is observed from the perspective of redemption. We
may consider such standpoint, whose correlated experience is illumination, a “we of interpretation” that
surpasses all bodies and memories and is located above the whole existence. Were one to ask what would

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be of time when the synthesis comes, it would cease in the sense that the standpoint would collapse: time
would not become naught, but simply meaningless, or meaningful in a totally different way. What
matters is that for Benjamin time is more a collective socio-semantic phenomenon than an private,
ontological one.

4. Conclusions

This essay has been an attempt to make use of Erich Auerbach’s interpretative concepts in order to
clarify the distinction between Proustian and Benjaminian notions of time. In particular, in the context
of a figural approach to their works, we have distinguished three dimensions of figurae: how figurae connect
together, what kind of openness they have and from what standpoint they are overlooked. This has
allowed us to study three different characteristics of time: its structure, its extension and its essence.
About temporal structure, both Proust and Benjamin share a theory of time as linear and convoluted,
but for Benjamin the convoluted aspect is the most relevant. About temporal extension, Proustian images
follow the principle of seriality, which is fully temporal; Benjamin’s ones instead follow the principle of
dialectic, which depends on a break in temporality. About temporal essence, Proustian time is an auto-
interpreting memory, while Benjamin regards time as a possible interpretation of memory; the former
is private and more ontological, the latter is collective and more semantical.
I suppose that the difficulty inherent to the confrontation between Proust and Benjamin lies in the fact
that, in their work as well as in a part of the culture of their epoch, the concept of reality began to collide
with the concept of its interpretation, thus provoking a unique interference between the two plans. But
interpretation is not arbitrary; it is the result of infinite practices that react together, in a progression of
authors that involves Proust as much as Benjamin. This is why figura, an interpretative tool that goes and
transforms itself throughout history, seems to function as a good device to comprehend their theories.
However, its use does not exhaust the topic; it only establishes a frame into which one can make things
cohere in a meaningful language. Surely figural interpretation may reveal itself helpful to carry about
other comparisons. It does not entail that there could not be other schemes capable of bringing into light
neglected aspects so far.




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Bibliographic References

In the essay, the year matching the bibliographical remarks refers to the edition in original language, while
references to page numbers refer to the English translation, if present in bibliography.

Agamben, G., 2007, Ninfe, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri.
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         des Suhrkamp-Verlages 4; quoted in Szondi, P., 1961.
Auerbach, E., 1938, “Figura”, in Archivium Romanicum, Vol.22, pp.436-489; eng. transl. “Figura”, in Theory and history
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Auerbach, E., 1944, Franz von Assisi in der Komödie; engl. transl. St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Commedia, in Italica,
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Auerbach, E., 1946, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Bern, A. Francke; eng. transl.
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Bal, M., 2015, “Memory and Storytelling in Proust”, in Nikulin, D., Memory. A History, New York, Oxford
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Benjamin, W., 1974-89, Gesammelte Schriften, c. by Tiedemann, R., Schweppenhäuser, H., Frankfurt am Main,
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Deleuze, G., 1964, Marcel Proust et les signes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France; eng. transl. Proust and Signs,
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Hauser, A., 1951, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, München, C.H. Beck; eng. transl. The social history of art,
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Müller, J., 2015, Memory in Medieval Philosophy, in Nikulin, D., Memory. A History, New York, Oxford University Press,
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Proust, M., 1954, À la recherche du temps perdu, c. by Clarac, P., Ferré, A., Paris, Gallimard, 3 Voll.
Schlossman, B., 1986, “Proust and Benjamin: the Invisible Image”, in Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol.11, Iss.1,
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Szondi, P., 1961, “Hoffnung im Vergangenen. Über Walter Benjamin”, in Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 8 October 1961;
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