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Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in th…

a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly.

Suffice it to recall the endless succession of "soit que . . : ," by means of which an action is shown in an exhaustive, depressing way in the light of the countless motives upon which it may have been based. And yet these paratactic sequences reveal the point at which weakness and genius coincide in Proust

Since the spiritual exercises of Loyola there has hardly been a more radical attempt at self-absorption. Proust's, too, has as its center a loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex with the force of a maelstrom. And the overloud and inconceivably hollow chatter which comes roaring out …

The man who wrote these pieces was no flaneur. They embody, in ironic form, the same experiences which Baudelaire put into this sentence, without any trimmings and in passing: "Perdu dans ce vila in monde, coudoye par les fouIes, je suis comme un homme lasse don't l'oeil ne voit en arriere, dans le…