The invention of tense pasts after assimilation

The previous two chapters have argued that a critique of laïcité invites a critique of the underlying concept of secularisation, and of the ways in which this is related to lingering traces of modernist concepts of the subject, of citizenship, and of modernity. I raised critical questions about the expectation that the conceptual separation of religion from visible, plural, polysemic cultural practices that are suffused with habit, custom, ethos, and, in addition, with others and power, will prove capable of contributing much to stability, fairness or democracy in multicultural societies. Moreover, I argued that the paradoxes of assimilation as they were experienced by the French Jews in the early Third Republic are taking new forms today, especially insofar as secularist discourses and conceptual frameworks are mixed up with motives connected to security.

This chapter fleshes out a further Proustian contribution to the debate about secularism and assimilation, by analysing In Search of Lost Time's complex narrative of how characters transform their memories of their collectively shared assimilatory past in the tense intercultural situation of the Dreyfus Affair (see Transit I).

Proustian memory is usually read in the light of the narrator's individualistic metaphysics of memory, mainly elaborated in the theoretical reflections on writing and memory that form part of Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé), the final part of the novel. The narrator's views show affinities with Henri Bergson's philosophy of time and memory, and many commentators have turned the framework of Bergson's individualist metaphysics into a starting point for their interpretation of the novel, from Poulet (1964) to Deleuze (2000 [1964]). A first step in my interpretation is to explain the subtle connection between the modernist view of the (religious) subject, which separates ‘sentiment’ from cultural practice and these individualising interpretations of memory in the Proustian novel.

Benjamin (1980 [1938]) develops a striking critique of Bergson's interpretation of memory in his essay Some Motifs in Baudelaire by contrasting it with a historical interpretation of Proustian memory. He understands Proustian memory through two prisms: modernity and the assimilation of the French Jews. I pursue Benjamin's intuition and interpret the cultural and historical aspects of memory in the novel.