The Signifier of Demarcation

The signifier of demarcation is encountered constantly in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Traces referring to sensoriality are one of the essential motive forces that animate the narrative. Rather than the example of the madeleine, let us take Swann's evocation of the women that he has loved. Far from being unique, they are eminently contingent and have only exerted their charm through the associations that they have aroused, associations consisting of sensations and memories in which sensoriality and pleasure or sadness are mixed: “When I succumbed to the attraction of a new face,” Proust writes, “… I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, insofar as it is love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman” (2015, p. 239).

In Freud, we find a remarkable example of this in the text on Jensen's Gradiva. Norbert is under the sway of a signifier of demarcation: “The sculpture represented a fully-grown girl stepping along, with her flowing dress a little pulled up so as to reveal her sandalled feet. One foot rested squarely on the ground; the other, lifted from the ground in the act of following after, touched it only with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel rose almost perpendicularly” (1907, p. 10). Norbert found the almost perpendicular position of the right foot exaggerated; while he found it beautiful, he regretted that, because it was created only by the fantasy or whim of the sculptor, it had not been reproduced in a life-like manner. It took all the guile of Zoe Bergang, who in their relationship has the role of the analyst, for N