Kaltenbeck, Franz <br/><br/>
Deciphering Ecstasy through Proust and Beckett 

 -  2007.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 21 
<br/><br/> In his essay on Proust (1930), Samuel Beckett explains Proust’s idea of the function of art. Art has the quality of ‘brightness’. Due to this quality, art can decipher the ‘baffled ecstasy’ which the narrator of the Research experienced in front of ‘the inscrutable surfaces’ of certain objects. Unlike Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, the objects which trigger Proust’s ecstasies are not extraordinary. Beckett nevertheless gives the following precisions about these objects: the ‘mystery, the essence, the Idea’ are ‘imprisoned in matter’. Reading Proust and Beckett, we analyze the deciphering of ecstasy by art and its impact on psychoanalysis.