Inner Speech and Prejudice in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

In this paper, I present some remarks about inner speech and prejudice based on an analysis of one passage of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time). It shows how stereotypes are build and maintained and how the process of prejudice can be understood when one pay a phenomenological attention to what happens in inner speech. It allows to understand the connection between prejudice as prejudgement and prejudice as damage done which are the two meanings of the term « prejudice » in English. Moreover, Proust suggests that the rules that governs large pieces of historical episodes, like a war, are the same as those that are observable in trivial errors of ordinary life. The suggestions is made through the use of a certain kind of reasoning (which are neither metaphorical nor linguistic) that takes place in inner speech which is presented and discussed.

Keywords

• Proust
• inner speech
• phenomenology
• prejudice