The temporalization of difference: Reflections on Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 1-20

  Borrador, Giovanna ^a  

^a Vassal College   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52549083013     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1011418818792     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. The influence of Bergson on poststructuralism has been virtually ignored up to this moment. Although Deleuze's early years were spent producing a series of monographic studies in the history of philosophy, very few Deleuze scholars have tried to examine the interrelation and, even more importantly, interdependence, between the different philosophers Deleuze wrote about individually. Michael Hardt, in An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), addresses three of Deleuze's authors systematically, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, and devotes some attention to their interrelations. Hardt's thesis is that Deleuze gets his ontological framework from Bergson, which he then enriches ethically via his encounter with Nietzsche. Finally, Hardt views Deleuze's interest in Spinoza as the attempt to translate a still purely metaphysical set of positions, drawn from Bergson and Nietzsche, into politically meaningful action.
2. More recently, Keith Ansell Pearson, in Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), offers another version of the interconnection among the three historical figures to which Deleuze devotes his monographic studies. Since Pearson is interested in tracing the vitalistic theme in Deleuze - particularly to the extent that it elicits a reflection on the boundaries between the concepts of human, post-human, inorganic perception, and life - his work regards the influence of Bergson as being quite substantial.
3. Regarding Deleuze's work over and beyond his studies in the history of philosophy, the ongoing presence of Bergson has been more widely debated. Gillian Rose, in the chapter entitled "The New Bergsonism," from her book Dialectics of Nihilism (Blackwell, 1984), 87-108, emphasizes the Bergsonian element in Deleuze, in relation to the Kantian antinomy of law, elaborating the notion of "ontological injustice."
4. Deleuze's appropriation of the Bergsonian theme of virtuality is insightfully discussed by Constantin V. Boundas in "Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual," in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 81-106.
5. For the influence of Bergson on Deleuze's interpretation of cinema, the reader may turn to the second section of the essay "Deleuze's Bergson: Bergson Redux," by Paul Douglass, in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 380-385. The first part of the essay (368-380) provides an excellent assessment of Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson after his encounter with Nietzsche.
6. See M. Barthélemy-Madaule, "Lire Bergson," in Les Etudes Bergsoniennes 8 (1968), 83-120.
7. Gilles Deleuze, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," translated by Melissa McMahon, in The New Bergson, edited by John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999; French edition, 1956), 43-65 [hereafter, BCD]. The essay has attracted only very marginal attention in the English-speaking context. Two exceptions should be mentioned, viz., Pearson's brief commentary in the first chapter of Germinal Life, 20-22; and Hardt, who was the first Deleuze scholar to identify the importance of this early essay. Acknowledging the importance of this essay, which precedes Deleuze's work on Nietzsche, is the reason why Hardt is able to identify Deleuze's interest in Bergson as preceding his interest in Nietzsche. However, Hardt's focus is not on the shaping presence of Bergson in Nietzsche but rather on the way in which Deleuze evolves away from Bergson and ontology into an ever more intense ethical and political projection of his thought. My reversing the sequence Nietzsche-Bergson to Bergson-Nietzsche is thus in contrast to Hardt's reading of the role of Bergson in Deleuze's Nietzsche. Hardt limits Deleuze's transvaluation of Bergson to the ontological dimension, and believes that the ontological dimension does not filter through the political-ethical emphasis that he attributes to Nietzsche. Instead, my aim in this paper is to show how Deleuze's ontological involvement with Bergson persists throughout his encounter with Nietzsche, shaping it in a Bergsonian direction.
8. Deleuze's early interest in Bergson ranged more widely than the essay at the center of this paper. Simultaneously with "Bergson's Concept of Difference," another essay on Bergson simply entitled "Bergson: 1859-1941," was published in an anthology edited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, entitled Les Philosophes Célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956), 292-299.
9. Only one year after the two essays, Deleuze assembled a collection of essays by Bergson entitled Matière et Vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957).
10. Deleuze's study of Nietzsche has been the object of copious critical attention. To begin mapping the Anglo-American interpretations of Deleuze's Nietzsche, the reader could turn to the essay by Petra Perry, "Deleuze's Nietzsche," in Boundary 2, Spring (1993), 174-191.
11. In Nietzsche's French Legacy: Genealogy of Poststructuralism (London: Routledge, 1995), Alan Schrift undertakes the complex and yet essential task of locating Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche within the French context of the 1960s.
12. See, in particular, the section entitled "Putting Nietzsche to Work: Genealogy, Will to Power, and Other Desiring Machines" 59-81.
13. The first chapter of Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989),
14. "Deleuze's Nietzsche: Thought, Will to Power, and the Eternal Return," 15-34, offers an in-depth analysis of Deleuze's key concepts.
15. Vincent Pecora's "Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist Thought," Substance 48 (1986), 34-50, is a critical appraisal of Deleuze's use of the concept of difference in Nietzsche, particularly with regard to the notion of force.
16. Finally, Hugh Tomlinson, Nietzsche on the Edge of Town: Deleuze and Reflexivity," in Exceedingly Nietzsche, edited by David F. Krell and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 150-163, criticizes Deleuze's interpretation to the extent that it systematizes Nietzsche's philosophy via the dualistic pair of active and reactive.
17. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Zone Books, 1991; French edition, 1966) [hereafter, B].
18. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, French edition 1962), [hereafter, NP].
19. "Thus, either philosophy proposes this way and this aim for itself (differences of nature in order to arrive at internal difference), or else it will only have a negative and generic relation with things, it will end up as criticism or generality, in any case in a merely external state of reflection" (BCD, 43).
20. "Alteration must maintain itself and find its status without letting itself be reduced to plurality, or even to contradiction, or to alterity even. Internal difference will have to be distinguished from contradiction, alterity, and negation. This is where the Bergsonian theory and method of difference is opposed to that other method, to that other theory of difference that is called the dialectic, as much Plato's dialectic of alterity as Hegel's dialectic of contradiction, both implying the power and presence of the negative" (BCD, 43).
21. One of the most penetrating interpretations of the Bergsonian view of creative evolution is provided by Pearson in "Bergson and Creative Evolution/Involution: Exposing the Transcendental Illusion of Organismic Life," in The New Bergson, 146-167.
22. In the same collection, see also P.A.Y. Gunter, "Bergson and the War against Nature,quot; 168-182.
23. Deleuze puts a lot of emphasis on the role that intuition plays in Bergson's thought. A systematic presentation of the way in which Deleuze reads Bergson's notion of intuition in a "methodological" key is offered by the first chapter of Bergsonism, "Intuition as Method," 13-35. However, in my view the sharpest discussion of intuition is to be found in the other essay on Bergson published by Deleuze in 1956, "Bergson: 1859-1941." Not yet translated into English, this essay begins by the defining of a great philosopher as "a creator of new concepts: such concepts should be able to overcome the dualisms of ordinary language and, at the same time, to give a new truth to things, a new distribution, an extraordinary arrangement". [Un grandphilosophe est celui qui crée de nouveaux concepts: ces concepts à la fois dépassent les dualites de la pensée ordinaire et donnent aux choses une verité nouvelle, une distribution nouvelle, un découpage extraordinaire], 292. For Bergson, intuition defines the life of the spirit, which "posits and constitutes problems" (qui pose et constitue les problèmes) rather than analytically evaluating their formal configuration and truth-value. There are, Deleuze continued glossing Bergson, fewer false solutions than false problems. At the heart of a philosopher's beliefs there is always an intuition, and this is why intuition is the "method" used by Bergson to eliminate false problems. In "Bergson: 1859-1941," Deleuze reports that, as a method, intuition has two main features. The first is that, "in it and through it, something presents itself, gives itself in person, rather than being inferred from something else and concluded" [en elle et par elle quelque chose se présente, se donne en personne, au lieu d 'être inféré d'autre chose et conclu], 292. As in modernity, philosophy cannot think of itself as the mother (la mère) of the natural sciences; its role becomes that of "establishing, or better recuperating both a relation with things which is thoroughly other, and another knowledge of them; it is such knowledge and relation that science has been hiding from us, of which science has been depriving us, because it has allowed us exclusively to conclude and infer without ever presenting to us the thing-in-itself" [la philosophic pretend instaurer; ou plutôt restaurei; une autre relation avec les choses, done une autre connaissance, connaissance et relation que la science précisément nous cachait, don't elle nous privait, parce-qu'elle nous permettait seulment de conclure et d'inferer sans jamais nous présenter, nous donner la chose en elle-même], 293. From this point of view Bergson's theory of intuition is at the root of Deleuze's attempt to think of philosophy over and beyond the "critical" limits assigned to it by Kant. But there is a second feature of Bergsonian intuition that Deleuze wants to underline: intuition as a return (retour). A return to what? To the pre-discursive dimension of thinking that Bergson calls duration. "The kind of philosophical relation that locates us in the things themselves, rather than outside, is recuperated by philosophy rather than established, rediscovered rather than invented. We are separated from things; the immediate datum is not immediately given; and yet, we cannot be separated from things by a pure accident, by a mediation that comes from us and concerns us only: it is necessary that the denaturalizing movement be in the things themselves, that the things begin losing themselves before we lose them, that oblivion be founded in being itself" [La relation philosophique, en effet, qui nous met dans les choses au lieu de nous laisser au-dehors, est restaurée par la philosophic plutôt qu'instaureée, retrouvée plutôt qu'inventée. Nous sommes sépares des choses, la donnée immédiate n'est donc pas immédiatement donné; mais nous ne pouvons pas être sépares par un simple accident, par une médiation qui viendrait de nous, qui ne concernerait que nous: il faut que, dans les choses mêmes soit fondé le mouvement qui les dénature, il faut que les choses commencent par ce perdre, il faut qu'un oubli soit fondé dans l'être.], 293. Hence, Deleuze continues, Bergson's metaphysics does not contain "the slightest distinction between two worlds, a sensible and an intelligible, but only the distinction between two movements, or better, two directions of the same movement" [nous pouvons dire déj̀ qu'il n'y aura pas chez Bergson la moindre distinction de deux mondes, l'un sensible et l'autre intelligible, mais seulment deux mouvements ou plutôt même deux sens d'un seul mouvement], 293.
24. For a lucid explication of this crucial hinge of Bergson's metaphysics and his polemic with Bertrand Russell, see A.R. Lacey, Bergson (London: Routledge, 1989), particularly the second chapter, "Space and Time."
25. The distinction between perception and memory is based on Bergson's assumption that space and time are fundamentally asymmetrical. This is Lacey's schematization of a series of arguments that Bergson lays out in his work: 1. Time has a direction. Space or objectivity does not. 2. Time seems to "flow." Space does not. 3. We can move freely in space; we cannot in time. 4. An entity is complete at any point in time, but may not be complete in space. See Lacey, Bergson, particularly the chapter on "Space and Time."
26. See Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
27. In "Bergson: 1859-1941," Deleuze points out that a characteristic of intuition is to bring into focus the " denaturalizing" movement intrinsic to the world itself (292). Such a movement corresponds to what the dialectical tradition of thought, since Hegel, has epistemologically, and unduly, "reduced" to negation, alterity, and contradiction.
28. On this ground, Bergson declared biology as a science fundamentally different from physics.
29. This allows Deleuze to define the notion of internal difference in vitalistic terms. "Against a certain mechanism, Bergson shows that vital difference is an internal difference. But also that internal difference cannot be conceived as a simple determination . . . Not only will vital difference not be a determination, it will rather be the opposite, it will lean towards indetermination itself" (BCD, 50).
30. In BCD, Deleuze devotes considerable attention to the issue of evolution but, unfortunately, leaves readers to figure out for themselves its connection with the notion of tendency. "Biology shows us the process of differentiation at work. We are seeking the concept of difference insofar as it cannot be reduced to degree or to intensity, to alterity or to contradiction: such a difference is vital, even if its concept is not itself biological. Life is the process of difference. Here Bergson is thinking less of embryological differentiation than of the differentiation of species, which is to say, evolution. With Darwin the problem of difference and life come to be identified in this idea of evolution, even though Darwin himself had a false conception of vital difference" (50).
31. Whether Deleuze - through what I claim to be his Bergsonian reading of Nietzsche - injects a vitalistic element into poststructuralism, is a virtually ignored question that I wish to consider on another occasion.
32. For Bergson's notion of intuition, see note 11.
33. The confusing part comes as we try to understand the distinction between difference in kind and difference of degree. Degrees are usually assumed to be homogeneous units of measurement. If composites indicate the degree of expression of tendencies, the tendencies themselves become the condition for the homogeneity of the degrees. But Bergson takes tendencies to be pure heterogeneity, that is, a disjunctive pair. Because of its absolute primitiveness, such a pair cannot be predicated as anything other than pure difference or difference in kind. If this is true, the expression "difference of degree" does not make any sense. How can tendencies, which are irreducibly heterogeneous, act as a homogeneous scale of measurement divisible in degrees? Occasionally in the 1956 essay, and more steadily in Bergsonism, Deleuze defines the difference occurring between composites with an inverted formulation: not difference of degree but degree of difference. The effect of this metonymy is a crucial one and fits much better what composites are supposed to be. If I say degrees of difference, degrees have difference as a scale of measurement, which may be a paradoxical expression but describes much better the way in which Bergson looks at composites, or entities. The term "degree" would simply indicate the fact that a tendency has reached expression, namely, that it has actualized a number of properties at a precise point in time.
34. At the very beginning of the essay, Deleuze seems to be suggesting that poststructuralisin is a kind of Bergsonism. "The notion of difference must throw a certain light on Bergson's philosophy, but inversely, Bergsonism must bring the greatest contribution to the philosophy of difference . . . if the being of things is, in a certain way, in their differences of nature, we can hope that difference itself is something, that it has a nature, finally that it will deliver Being to us" (BCD, 42).
35. However, by establishing the hermeneutic and quantitative orders as irreconcilable, doesn't Bergson, and Deleuze with him, reinstate what is most commonly imputed to all forms of dialectical thought: the reliance on oppositions and dualisms? If this is true, isn't it paradoxical that Deleuze indicates Bergson as the definitive critic of dialectics? Deleuze fences off this obvious criticism of the Bergsonian framework by contrasting him with Plato, another great displayer of dualistic pairs. Because he divides composites into tendencies, Bergson could be accused, writes Deleuze, of splitting composites into halves: for instance, essence and appearance. But while the Platonic categorization of essence and appearance is inscribed within a common parameter of truth, it is in fact only superficially "different," the superficiality of their difference residing in their being measurable against each other. In this sense, the Platonic distinction between essence and appearance indicates a difference of degree and not in kind. According to Deleuze, the Platonic as well as Hegelian "difference" - between appearance and essence, matter and spirit -is defined on a homogeneous scale, where the degrees run between perfection and imperfection, being and nothingness. This is why dialectical thought is guilty of collapsing difference in kind into difference of degree. By contrast, Deleuze continues, Bergson avoids the mistake by rendering pairs such as essence and appearance irreducible to one another.
36. This is Pearson's view in Germinal Life, 22.
37. As duration represents a tendency, it has both a phenomenological and an ontological extension. Phenomenologically, duration corresponds to memory. Ontologically, it corresponds to the creative "vital impulse" that Bergson sees as the ground of evolution.
38. In this framework, the vitalistic character of Deleuze's Nietzsche, and more specifically the notion of life in which it is anchored, represents an interesting exception to the more general social historicization of Bergsonian ontology that took place as Deleuze met Nietzsche in 1962. The absence of the vitalistic theme from the 1956 essay, and its presence in Bergsonism, proves that vitalism, is one of the authentically Nietzschean themes, which evades the influence of Bergson in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche.
39. While Bergsonian duration stops here, at the contemplation of the transformative power of time, Nietzschean affirmation is the project of activation of such power. And this activation is both a creation and a creative process.
40. I wish to stress that Deleuze's Nietzsche was the most influential interpretation of Nietzsche on the French scene in the 60s. Deleuze had a seminal function in launching Nietzsche into poststructuralism. He was behind the organization of the first postwar international conference on Nietzsche held in Royaumont, France, in 1964. Only a year separates the publication in German of Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, in 1961, from Deleuze's Nietzsche, and yet, Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche is as far from that of Heidegger as any interpretation of Nietzsche of that period ever went. This, I claim, is because of the influence of Bergson.