Abstract
Working out from the role of place names in Proust, this essay considers the sense in which certain encounters with language signal an intrinsic relation to their experience - one whereby any perspective on things comes to obtain less as a subject or viewpoint than as a certain "style" of predication. The underlying claim is that any rendering of these encounters requires consideration of certain philosophical positions to be found in critical developments of Leibnizian thought that extend the field of sensation beyond the given to include the imagined, the remembered, and the anticipated. These developments, as the essay shows, might well be said to be thoroughly transcendental - but importantly, only on condition that the modality by which things are thereby predicated of subjects (that is, by which objects are at all conceived) is to be understood as emerging by means of experience rather than as somehow conditioning what is generally thought to be experienced, or somehow taken to be universally experienced. As an example of the outlook of these "intrinsic denominations," the essay considers the effects of Proust's discussion of travel destinations.