The Shadow of Love: The Role of Jealousy in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu | Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives | Oxford Academic

Jealousy is a theme that appears and reappears with remarkable frequency in Proust’s novel. Not only do we see characters subject to the feeling of jealousy, and some who act on the basis of such a motive, but the topic itself is a frequent theme of the narrator’s reflections. This, the bearing of the novel on a philosophical issue, is particularly so because jealousy does not seem suitable for any definitive Socratic definition. Reaching a high enough level of abstraction to suggest necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept’s determinacy must inevitably thin out its various connotations to such an extent that we lose hold of its experiential concreteness and so falsify the concept considerably in order to define it precisely. Imagination of some considerable inventiveness is called for in getting the phenomenon in view, so why not rely on a genius at imagining, one of the greatest novelists ever? But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presen

Jealousy is a theme that appears and reappears with remarkable frequency in Proust’s novel. Not only do we see characters subject to the feeling of jealousy, and some who act on the basis of such a motive, but the topic itself is a frequent theme of the narrator’s reflections. This, the bearing of the novel on a philosophical issue, is particularly so because jealousy does not seem suitable for any definitive Socratic definition. Reaching a high enough level of abstraction to suggest necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept’s determinacy must inevitably thin out its various connotat