Back to the Future: On the Temporality of Love in Plato, Proust, and Duras

Abstract: This paper proposes that romantic love is shaped by a complex temporal structure in which past, present, and future are interconnected through a nonlinear narrative flow. Love is a continuous process in which lovers collaboratively construct and narrate a mythologized memory of the past, imbuing their relationship with meaning and projecting it forward as an ideal state to be regained. To elaborate on this proposal, I draw on Plato's theory of love as recollection and examine two twentieth-century works: Marcel Proust's Swann in Love and Marguerite Duras's Blue Eyes, Black Hair .