The author of this book is an eminent literary critic whose influential work spans half a century. His vast, in many ways unclassifiable, oeuvre has traversed and blurred the boundaries of the disciplines of modern French literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, film theory, philosophical aesthetics, and masculinity studies and sexuality studies. This text is his first book on Proust, originally published in 1965. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others.