The Search for Strange Worlds: Deleuzian Semiotics and Proust

In his first major semiotic work, Proust and Signs, Deleuze not only ignores the whole field of semiotics, but the entire history of the philosophy of the sign.2 In a bold affront to both, he instead uses Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time as if it were some authority on signs and their concept. Nothing short of scandalously, Deleuze wrestles the sign away from analytic scholarship toward an existential theory that is consistent with his material realism.