Proust e Boltanski

a obsessão pelas coisa

Abstract

Christian Boltanski often quotes Marcel Proust in his interviews. And, like Proust himself, Boltanski is also obsessively looking for answers to fundamental questions of the human nature: how and why to describe death? Can it be accepted outside the artistic parameter? What does the distancing of dear things and beings entail? What change happens in front of absence? Why does restoring life (if one might say so) require work on memory? Does memory allow reconstituting the object of love or is it an aesthetic illusion? However, while Proust tries to resolve the memory obsession in an epiphanic glow that gathers and condenses all lost time, in Boltanski there is an awareness of a division between self and reality, and especially the impossibility that an Ideal can fill the void created by the subject. Boltanski still believes in the redemptive function (in the psychoanalytic sense) of Art. Objects and the memory linked to them rewrite the Proustian Recherche in an anthropological archive that attempts to shed light on obscure zones of the Self.