At the close of Proust’s A La recherche, Marcel reflects on his late discovery that there is within him a ‘vast dimension’ of lost time, composed of moments that ‘still adhered to me and that I could still find again, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself’. The vehicle through which he is to achieve that descent, he thinks to himself, is the novel itself, the novel he is now to write.

A la recherche is, for this reason, a novel which demands to be reread, a novel which reveals the structural necessity of rereading that inhabits all acts of being in time. This essay responds to this demand, and this necessity, by reading Proust’s novel as an exercise in rereading. The epiphanic close to the novel rests on the conviction that there will come a form of writing, and a form of reading, that might absorb lost time into itself, and in so doing stage a recovery of a spent past, and of a spent life. But in calling in this way for its own repetition, the novel can only live, again, through the loss that it seeks to overcome. This inescapable play between recovery and loss, though, does not constitute a failure of the hope that the novel seems, on each reading, to rediscover. Rather, in inserting a logic of rereading into its own expressive mechanism, the novel becomes a scale for weighing those elements of time that are recoverable against those that are not. It allows us to see the novel as a differential machine, that can find the junction, in the contemporary moment of reading, between that which can be saved and that which cannot – the junction that is the horizon, in our own time, of literary, political and personal possibility.

This chapter moves through three clear stages. First, the initial sections highlight some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory (including Badiou, Deleuze, and Marcuse); and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of (what the chapter terms) philosophical modernism. Second, the chapter tarries with a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the “apocalyptic view of the world,” and it brings these remarks into dialogue with the work of a number of other literary and philosophical figures, including Gertrude Stein, Günther Anders, and Theodor Adorno. Third, and finally, although Wittgenstein’s remarks on apocalypse appear in his private, postwar notebooks, they nevertheless provide us with a crucial link to his later philosophy, specifically Philosophical Investigations and this is what I turn to in the last sections of the chapter. In the Investigations, it is not simply the language of the book that we might describe as apocalyptic, but also, and more importantly, the fundamental conception of philosophy that we find therein. This returns us to the view of philosophical modernism previously outlined.

The author’s reflection takes off from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin. The chapter proceeds by assessing the hesitant answer given by Barbara Cassin in response to a question from the audience (can we ever learn a second language to the level of our first?) at the end of a lecture entitled ‘More Than One Language’. Her answer is negative on the whole, and she evokes Hannah Arendt’s attachment to her native German. From these two points of departure the chapter seeks to give an account of what we mean by a ‘Mother tongue’, starting with a diachronic account. The Mother tongue isn’t a unitary entity; its construction is the result of a continued process of linguistic interpellation of the speaker; it is therefore the product not so much of an individual as of a social relation. Two detours, through Lucien Sève’s Marxist anthropology and the ‘tetraglossic’ theory of Henri Gobard, help account for this individual-cum-social construction of a speaking subject. The acquisition of a second Mother tongue can then be envisaged, a process that duplicates the acquisition of the original Mother tongue, thus giving a positive answer to the question addressed to Cassin.

Finch’s chapter argues that the rhetorical artifice in Wallace Stevens’s poetry may be best understood through the concept of manner. In contrast with style, which focuses on the personal signature of a writer’s work, manner refers to the more social, public aspects of a writer’s rhetorical bearing. Drawing on a range of critics who have theorized aesthetic manner and the politics of manners, including Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, Henry James, and Lionel Trilling, this chapter proposes that Stevens’s interest in textiles and clothing, in figurations of nobility, and in the mannerist syntax of repetition are not just neutral aesthetic traits but expressions of a sensibility tied to social categories that include class and race. After examining these intersections in poems spanning Stevens’s career, Finch closes by suggesting that the most meaningful approaches to Stevens’s formal prosody should remain attentive to the social posture and cultural tones of his language.

In addressing Deleuze’s “New Bergson,” the chapter argues for reading Bergson, and his ontology of time in particular, in light of what we need to think today. The reading proposed here brings out Bergson’s consistent privileging of concrete experience over abstraction, his thinking of life, in particular in relation to time. To rectify his image as an anti-philosopher, the chapter highlights how his thought resonates both with the work of earlier philosophers (Schelling and Ravaisson in particular) and the task of thinking today. Rereading Duration and Simultaneity against Deleuze’s interpretation, which evacuates consciousness from universal time, the chapter stresses the central importance of consciousness, along with observation, perception, and lived experience, to Bergson’s philosophical challenge to Einstein. By no means, then, is Bergson’s achievement in the confrontation with Einstein some kind of abstract articulation of the virtual and the actual; rather, it lies in expanding his ontology of time from individual living beings to a universe that lives, in spelling it out in terms of a philosophy of livingness.