Intermittent Love: Relational Modes in Proust

abstract: This article revisits the representation of love in Proust. The argument rethinks the negativity critics find in the novel to make it central to something else about Proustian love, namely its prospects for unconventional relational modes. Placing Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Leo Bersani, it juxtaposes alternative relationality—which imagines attachments less domineering than love—with intermittence—understood as the ebb and flow of all desire. Intermittence may be a structure of feeling proper to interwar modernism thus raising the stakes of how it is read in and beyond Proust's fiction. Ultimately, the article proposes Proust's representation of love's intermittence contains seeds of radically rethinking relational modes. By acknowledging the organic rhythms and errors underlying relations, the novel may point toward forms of connection exceeding traditional love.