A smell or the glare of light may become a window to a different time of our life: our past suddenly becomes a persistent manifestation before our eyes. Anyone can testify to have experienced this phenomenon at least once in life: a sort of disruptive and intensive invasion of fragmented memories due to the presence of sensory triggers. In spite of the idea that the madeleine-memory may just be a literary expedient, it actually belongs to our everyday life. With the aid of Beistegui’s research, in this paper, I will focus on investigating the bodily sedimentation of involuntary recollections. Starting from this observation, Beistegui ( 2013) made an effort to understand this phenomenon within the architecture of involuntary memory. As it is known, Proust’s novel concludes that the source of happiness lies in regaining the “lost” past time through the manifestation of involuntary memory, which causes the enrichment of the present reality. In this article, I aim to address the question of the protagonist Marcel on the roots of his happiness and, consequently, on the genesis of the involuntary memory. However, phenomenological investigations on the bodily features of involuntary memory are still missing. Phenomenologically, the studies on Proustian memory have been part of more comprehensive investigations on embodied temporality and memory (De Warren, 2009 Kaushik, 2008). From the standpoint of the cognitive sciences, the studies have been focused on the cognitively realistic aspects of the madeleine-memory (Delacour, 2001 Troscianko, 2013). Indeed, cognitive and phenomenological studies have already used Proust’s work as an effective strategy for investigating memory (Fuchs, 2012 Groes, 2016 Rowland, 2017 Troscianko, 2013). All these fields generally acknowledge that the work of Proust is an important contribution to the psychology of memory. The madeleine-memory, an evocative term used by Fuchs ( 2012) to point at a specific type of bodily memory which is well accounted in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, has been studied both within literature and aesthetic studies and within phenomenological and cognitive investigations. Through these notions, I will show that Proustian involuntary recollections are pre-reflective experiences because previously subjects have pre-reflectively experienced the content of recollections. For this aim, I will rely on the Husserlian notions of “epistemological inadequacy of perception” and “background experiences”. Secondly, I will analyze the original experience of the madeleine within the phenomenological logic of transcendence in immanence. First, I will present that madeleine-memory is a unique case of bodily memory, by analyzing the main features that characterize it. To this purpose, I will illustrate that the epistemological relationship between the object and the subject plays a relevant role in the way the subject remembers. I aim to build upon such a mutual link and show that the pre-reflective roots of the madeleine-memory have to be traced back to the genesis of the involuntary recollections. In phenomenology, a wide literature has confirmed the relationship between the sense of body ownership and pre-reflective self-awareness. Until now, the madeleine-memory has been described as bodily and involuntary. Indeed, I aim to address the question of the literary protagonist Marcel on the roots of his happiness and the genesis of his memories. This paper investigates the madeleine-memory (so-called from Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time) as a case of pre-reflective experience, from the genesis of its sedimentation into the body.
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