The essay examines Proust’s involvement in the “Lemoine Affair,” a diamond-fabrication scam that captured the French popular imagination in 1908. Lemoine’s hoax inspired Proust to undertake his own virtuosic exercise in fraud: in the year before he began drafting In Search of Lost Time, he published a series of pastiches in the newspaper— fictional accounts of the affair written in the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, Michelet, and others. These pastiches highlight Proust’s penchant for newspapers, magic tricks, and ventriloquistic play. Experiments in the phenomenology of “convulsive” and “unstable” preciosity, they reveal Proust’s fascination with the volatility of value and the peculiar status of the aesthetic object in modernity.

Critics from Bourdieu to Bersani have emphasized a redemptive logic governing Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. This essay investigates an alternative, non-appropriative paradigm for reading in Proust—an aesthetics of the unqualifiable, or “quelconque” (“whatever”). I argue that the most striking aesthetic experiences in the novel are those that expose the critic’s incapacitation in the face of the incomparably commonplace object. At stake here is not the compensatory, self-aggrandizing aesthetics of involuntary memory, but a mode of ravished attention to the ordinary that spoils the profits of distinction.

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Benjamin Péret was a French surrealist poet whose expansive body of work exemplifies the surrealist commitment to adventure, sacrilege, and irrational, marvellous imagery. Born at the turn of the century in Rezé, Péret participated in Paris Dada before joining the surrealist movement. He authored over 30 volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction, and co-edited the first three issues of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, the movement’s mouthpiece during its founding years.

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