L’odorat comme non-langage: Proust et la création olfactive

At the end of the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work was increasingly concerned by the so-called “non philosophy”, which encompasses the non-speculative and non-abstract intellectual production: art, literature, spirituality, the body, perception. To put it simply: existence. Proust’s writing was a central focus of his research, as he found in it the intellectual nourishment necessary for his own elaboration of an “ontology of the flesh” (Franck Robert, 2021). It is precisely the non-philosophy that makes existence thinkable, the aporia being both the problem and the solution. Proust had faced a similar conundrum, aiming at expressing “in human words” the irrational qualities of matter and life (Letter to Lucien Daudet, Novembre 27th 1913). Smell is one such example, as there are no words to adequately describe it. As Plato famously said, “there is no semantic field of smells” (Sperber 1975). Smell is thus a ‘non-language’, an indigestible fragment of matter and life that that must be articulated to access the “age of things” (Letter to Louis de Robert, 1913), which is the ultimate goal for the writer. To utter smell, however, a new literary language is required. To utter smell, however, a new literary language is required. The linguistic aporia, then, is our hypothesis, the very source of Proustian language and style, whose horizon, as for Merleau-Ponty later, is “silence” (Simon, 2016).