Bergson: The Philosophy of Dure-diffrence

John Mullarkey

It is nothing new to remark on the puzzling nature of the term postmodernism.1 For all its
prefix's portentous celebration of finality, postmodernism is a thoroughly modern
phenomenon. As a firm fixture of present-day thinking, a particularly obstinate paradox has
attached itself to the word. Of course, the paradox recedes when modernity is read not
simply as the present-day but as a certain tradition within human thought and culture
spanning from the Seventeenth-century to the Twentieth.

The postmodern then signifies a

new manner of thinking with prejudices, themes, and methodologies all its own. In this
essay, however, it is the first alternative which is being taken as granted. Rather than pretend
that there is a general metatheory defining the postmodern in all its forms, another axiom will
be embraced in what follows, namely, that there is much more in common between the
ostensibly modern and the avowedly postmodern than either may be willing to admit.
Postmodernity does not constitute a radical break with modernity so much as a particular
innovative understanding of such modern and mundane topics as subjectivity, the present,
and perception.
This said, I am not going to continue with any metatheoretical discussion of philosophy
here. My object instead is to look at this innovative understanding through the work of one
currently neglected thinker whose work has for many years been regarded as irredeemably
modernist. The figure in question is Henri Bergson, the author of a philosophy which was
very much the philosophie nouvelle of its own time.2
For nearly two decades Bergsonism was at the forefront of European philosophy; for half
of that time, from 1907 to 1917, Bergson was the philosopher of Europe with an influence
spreading far beyond his own discipline and into the fine arts, sociology, psychology, history,
and politics.3

Yet by the end of the Great War that influence was over.

In a manner

presaging our contemporary cult of change, Bergsonian thought departed from the scene

almost as quickly as it had arrived on it.

For reasons we will not examine here, his

philosophical legacy became more of an historical curiosity than a viable position.

Recent examinations of his work, however, have sought to re-establish the philosophical
integrity of Bergsonism, one avenue of research being its status as a precursor to that
currently new philosophy we call postmodern.

Yet there are few obvious routes of

unambiguous philosophical influence that can be traced in this regard: the postmodern
paradigm has been unconditional in its marginalisation of Bergsons significance for its
thinking.4 So it is Bergson's thematic antecedence that holds an interest for those engaged in
this particular exercise of philosophical rehabilitation. Rather than through any
acknowledged historical influence, Bergson's philosophy proves its worth, it is argued,
through its prescient analyses of such first-order themes as time, space, and subjectivity.
For the most part, however, these postmodern readings have confined themselves to reinterpretating subject-matter traditionally associated with Bergson: dure, intuition, and lan
vital. Rarely have the characteristically postmodern notions of difference, presence, and the
aporia of perception been investigated as properly Bergsonian themes as well.5 The purpose
of this essay is to reverse this situation.

I want to show that Bergson is thinking about

difference and presence at the same time as he writes about the mind-body problem and the
status of scientific objectivity (to take just two examples) and that his postmodernism does
not lie solely in the retrospective light of contemporary theory: the philosophy of dure is
equally the philosophy of dure-diffrence.
The three areas of difference, perception, and presence, therefore, will set the structure
for what follows.6 Part One examines Bergson's own philosophy of difference as it emerges
from his critique of negativity to receive a truly Bergsonian incarnation as the concept of
dissociation.

Parts Two and Three in their turn respectively tackle the themes of

perception and the temporal dimension of presence - the present - showing how the two
receive a treatment from Bergson that underscores a multiform and pluralistic understanding
of them both.
Bergsonism, a philosophy of temporal novelty in every sense, is an interesting and
challenging case to choose for an excavation of nascent postmodernism; it would be fitting if
his work, so long shunned by the new philosophies of the Twentieth-century, existentialism,
8

critical theory, and structuralism, should now provide the means by which postmodernism,
by definition the newest of these intellectual movements, is reclaimed by an older thought.

I. Negativity, Difference, Dissociation

A noticeable interest for certain postmodern readings of Bergson lies in recasting him as an
early post-structuralist philosopher in particular. Bergsonian intuition, for instance, has been
read anew as a philosophical method partly synonymous with the method of
deconstruction, alerting us to the mobility of difference.7 Part of this new enthusiasm
must be put down to the influence of Gilles Deleuze and what has been described as his
post-structural8 appropriation of Bergson's thought.9 Vincent Descombes, Gillian Rose, and
others all help to compound this impression with references to Deleuze as either the
disciple of Bergson, or the embodiment of the New Bergsonism.10 This is no
exaggeration: Deleuze himself paints Bergson as an early philosopher of diffrence, or more
specifically, of Deleuze's notion of the differentiation of difference:
Duration is always the location and the environment of differences in kind;
it is even their totality and multiplicity. There are no differences in kind
except in duration - while space is nothing other than the location, the
environment, the totality of differences in degree.11

Whatever one's view of Deleuze's own philosophy, what he writes about Bergson here is no
distortion.12 In the 1889 Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience, homogeneous
space is defined as a principle of differentiation other than that of qualitative
differentiation,13

and Bergsons methodological essay Introduction la mtaphysique

from 1903 proposes that one of the objects of metaphysics, traditionally the preserve of
presence, should be to operate differentations as well as integrations.14 Part of the
philosophy of dure, then, is a philosophy of difference.
But this actualit of Bergson goes beyond an affinity with Deleuze alone. Martin Jay, for
example, see Bergson's critique of the spatialisation of time echoed in Derrida's work.15 More
8

broadly still, others think of Bergson's thought as an early attempt to articulate such various
postmodern ideas as Ricoeur's narrative self or Lvinas' proto-ethics.16

One recent

commentator has even gone so far as point to the convergence between Bergson's treatment
of the body and Foucault's account of power.17 Yet for all the connections perceived by the
commentators, it is rare for any of these thinkers themselves to acknowledge an influence
stemming from Bergson. Apart from Deleuze, only Lvinas has taken time to credit Bergson
with a significance for his thought, and even then, such disclosures have only appeared in
interviews rather than his primary works.18 Besides these two, whenever others mention
Bergson's name, it is almost always to damn it. This is even the case in treatments of subjectmatter where one might expect Bergson to receive a sympathetic hearing.

Throughout the

course of Ricoeur's Temps et rcit, for instance, Bergson, when referred to at all, meets with
unremitting hostility,19 while in Ousia et gramme, Derrida tows the Heideggerean line in
Sein und Zeit on the radicality of Bergson's analysis of time, which is to say that it has little or
none at all.20
So we must return to Deleuze for an example of a postmodern thinker with an avowed
Bergsonian influence. Having done so, what first ought to be noted is that Deleuze takes his
cue largely from Bergson's critique of the concept of nothingness.21 According to Deleuze,
Bergson's denigration of negativity automatically leads to the primacy of difference.
Deleuze's own argument is none too clear, but one reason why he might think this has been
unearthed by R.M. Gale in an analytic investigation of Bergson's critique.22 What first comes
to light in Gale's analysis is that Bergson espouses a redundancy theory of existence that
allows him to play on the fact that any attempted conceptualisation of nothingness will
necessarily represent it as existent and thereby fall flat on its face.23 But Gale believes that the
consequences of this thesis are no less devastating for Bergson's own assertions that
nothingness is derived from the act of negation and, that being so, that all negation is at base
a substitution.

If negation is a substitution then the nature of non-existence itself is

transformed to mean incompatibility. However:

Bergson's analysis of thinking that A is non-existent as thinking that A is
incompatible with some existent reality or actual reality in general not only
does not require (1) [the redundancy thesis] but is rendered absurd by it,
8

since every negative existential judgement would turn out to be necessarily

false.24

This is all the more interesting when one notes, as Gale states at the outset of his
examination, that the aim of Bergson's critique is not simply to deny the existence of the
concept of absolute Nothingness alone, but also to argue against partial or relative
nothings or privations.25 If partial nothings are denied then it is certainly not absurd but
actually consistent to conclude that every negative existential judgement should itself be
false.
But if one denies a denial (there can be nothing negative), what is the status of one's
own denial? There is something paradoxical about Bergson's critique of nothingness, for in
denying its existence he is himself attributing a nothingness to it.

The concept of

nothingness, it is said, is one of those negative factors against which [Bergson]...directs

nihilating arguments; yet negativity is, in his philosophy, denied.26 The answer to this riddle
comes with the realisation that the critique of nothingness, be it relative or absolute, really
bears on the scope of nothingness rather than on its existence simpliciter.

The real

conclusion of the critique is that negativity has a position only within the social sphere as a
corrective action: its primordial form is thou shalt not.27 Negation is a speech act; there is
no question of it gaining its remit from some transcendental region of ontology.
Here we see how the Bergsonian philosophy of difference emerges from his critique of
nothingness: its ultimate effect is to usurp the claims of every transcendental ontology; and
this is no less true of a positive ontology than it is of any negative one.

Just as absolute

Nothingness is a concept abstracted from individual social acts, so absolute Being is a

concept derived from the immanent realm of beings. As Jacques Maritain for one lamented,
Bergson's critique actually counters Being no less than Nothingness and consequently
strikes a blow at all metaphysics.28

There can be no ontological difference at play

between beings and Being here: Bergsonism may be a philosophy of plenitude but it is
certainly not a philosophy of L'Une.29 Deleuze himself states Bergson's case emphatically:
There are differences in being and yet nothing negative.30

Difference thus supersedes both Being and Nothingness.31 The working hypothesis in
every aspect of Bergson's philosophy is one of disunity and difference, be it of Being, self,
causality, or even science.32 In respect to the concepts of self and of causality, Bergson has
some particularly interesting points to make. In general, a persisting and subsisting subject is
given little space in Bergsonian texts:33
the "Ego" is only a sign by which one recalls the primitive intuition (a very
vague one at that) which furnished psychology with its object: it is only a
word, and the great mistake is to think that one could, by staying in the
same sphere, find a thing behind the word.34

The Bergsonian subject is spread across many planes and myriad versions; in a course given
on the concept of personality he goes so far as to liken it to the pathology of multiple
personality and to a series of possessions.35 Maritain noted with disfavour that [i]t
is...impossible, in the Bergsonian thesis, to say or to think I, while Merleau-Ponty bemoaned
the fact that in Bergson's philosophy [t]he subject dies.36 As Simon Clarke has noted in
Bergson's regard: The death of the subject...has roots that go back deep into French
philosophy.37
But the Bergsonian subject has not only been decentred, it has been put in motion to
such an extent that it now encompasses both what is with and what is without a centre.
Whether the ego is essentially and exclusively multiple or singular is not a valid issue for
Bergson, for all such imagery stems from the repudiated realm of homogeneous space.38 It is,
on the contrary, what Bergson calls a qualitative multiplicity: a unity that is multiple and a
multiplicity that is one.39
As for causality, according to Bergson, we should never speak of any such general notion
of causality at all, for there are as many causalities as there are different events causally
related.40 The rigidity of the relation between cause and effect actually admits of nuances,
degrees, and exceptions, each denoting a different proportional relationship between those
events we denominate cause and effect.
Any further traces of difference at play in Bergson's thought, however, will only come to
light if we adapt our analysis to what is strictly his own vocabulary, and by that I mean the
8

concept of dissociation, an idea which can be found in nearly every one of his texts. What
was a purely psychological term prevalent in the Nineteenth Century,41 is given a thoroughly
ontological bearing in Bergsonian thought.
The lan vital itself is one representation of dissociation. Life, he writes, proceeds by
dissociation and division.42 A living entity is not what has been composed from cells so
much as what has made the cells by means of [a] dissociation of itself.43 The import of
such dissociationism in Bergson's approach to biology is that each and every living entity has
its integral value recognised. Bergsonian evolutionism is radically non-hierarchical, positing
a discontinuous evolution which proceeds by bounds, obtaining at each stopping-place a
combination, perfect of its kind.44

Just as the earlier Essai argued for the ontological

integrity of experience, that the perception of grey, for example, is not a variation upon the
perception of white,45 so in the 1907 L'Evolution cratrice, neither humanity nor any other
species is treated as a variation upon a transcendental theme. Because life proceeds by
dissociation, the differences between species are more fundamental than the similarities. If
there are any hierarchies to be found, they are created immanently when each species freely
elects to fall into self-absorption and a disregard for almost all the rest of life.46 In that
dissociation, read as Bergson's own philosophy of difference, supersedes any
transcendental hierarchy, the very recognition of this fact carries a certain normative
significance along with itself. To think in terms of unfounded hierarchies is to fall into selfabsorption and with that form a well-founded hierarchy with oneself at the lowest point on
the scale. This is the great irony posited by Bergsonian vitalism, which has as much ethical
import as it has biological significance.
Bergson's treatment of epistemology also leans heavily on the notion of dissociation.
Our knowledge, he writes, far from being made up of a gradual association is the effect of
a sudden dissociation.

Understanding itself is also described as a certain faculty of

dissociating,47 while memory works by dissociating perceived similarities into rigid

conceptual differences.48

Even the Essai's analysis of Number explains counting as a

dissociation whereby a given qualitative multiplicity (an affective impression underlying a

particular number) is reduced to a homogeneous quantity (the abstracted number itself).49

In Bergson's last major work, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, dissociation
makes a final appearance in the guise of his Law of Dichotomy. This law describes the
movement by which every reality, understood in process terms as tendency,50 can be
shattered into two opposing tendencies (or realities) in and through the very act of being
represented.51

A revealing gloss on this is provided by the 1903 Introduction to

Metaphysics where Bergson writes that there is

...scarcely any concrete reality upon which one cannot take two opposing
views at the same time and which is consequently not subsumed under the
two antagonistic concepts. Hence a thesis and an antithesis that it would be
vain for us to try logically to reconcile....52

Twenty-nine years later in Les Deux sources, this dichotomous conceptuality is transposed
onto an ontological plane: the act of representing difference brings about a real difference or
dissociation. What is significant about these passages, therefore, is the connection revealed
within them between the concept of dissociation, here acting in the guise of a law of
dichotomy, and that of representation.
Having dealt as much as we can with how difference translates itself in Bergsonian
terms, the second part of this essay will turn to examine the relationship between difference
and another favourite theme of postmodern philosophy, the (im)possibility of perception.

II. The Impurity of Perception

If ever a book was wholly dominated by the theme of perception, it is Bergson's second and
most intimidating work, Matire et mmoire (published 1896). This becomes clear from the
introduction's first two pages when an ontology of images is announced as a strategy to
side-step every previous ontology that has opposed representation to the thing itself.53
Central to this philosophy of the image, however, and central also to a fundamental tension
within this text, is the treatment Matire et mmoire gives to the body. On account of the
privileged status of the body, each of the Bergsonian images enunciated at the outset is
able to exist in two distinct systems: one where each image exists for itself, a system
Bergson attributes to science, the other where the very same images exist for the one central
8

image of one's own body, a system he calls consciousness.54 It might seem that Bergson is
relapsing into a dualistic ontology of objective reality and subjective representation, his only
innovation being the role assumed by the body in the constitution of this dichotomy. Yet he
also describes the objective scientific image as no more than an ideal limit or schema,55
whose existence is not prior to its referral to the image of the body, but is actually created by
the pragmatic action of the body itself.

The apparently objective space (and time) that

science works with

express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division
which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a
fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting points for our operation,
in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic design of
our eventual action upon matter.56

The phrase eventual action is to be understood as the possible action of the body, as
Matire et mmoire clearly states: The objects which surround my body reflect its possible
action upon them.57 With this adage, what we previously understood as the objective reality
of science is now seen anew as a creation of the body.58
But there is a problem. Bergson seems to be simultaneously saying that:
1. there is an objective set of images that exists for itself, the system belonging to science,
which is independent of one's body but which can also be transformed into a world of
images oriented towards one's body; as well as that
2. the spatial reality we take to be external to ourselves, the one that science works with, is
the product of our diagrammatic design upon the moving continuity of the real.
It is the status of this system of objective images that has been problematised: does it exist for
itself and before my action upon it or is it a purely derivative product of my body's activity
upon a moving reality which evades the scientific gaze? I believe that the answer to this
riddle, a riddle not exclusive to Bergson but one that has haunted philosophy from the very
start, can be found in a thought experiment Bergson conducts in Matire et mmoire. The
rationale behind the experiment is to render the system of objective images as it is
experienced, not from the situation of either myself or my body, but from a thoroughly
8

objective stand-point, a veritable view from nowhere.

He calls such a view pure

perception.59
To create this pure perception, and with that get to the heart of the relationship between
self and world (be that self an embodied one or otherwise), Bergson attempts an exorcism of
all that might make perception subjective. He thus constructs a perception that belongs
neither to any subject, nor any body-subject, but instead to a supposed mathematical point
perfectly mirroring the universe surrounding it.60
perspective.

The body literally becomes a point

The objective state thus revealed would be an absorption in a timeless,

immediate present, a vision of the world where we are actually placed outside ourselves;
we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.61
Yet Bergson realises that even this anonymous perception will never achieve its desired
objectivity. What is given in this pure perception as a presence is still not the entirety of
the object. The present image or objective reality62 is never fully present, remaining
always partially obscured. All that is given is what interests our perspective, even though it is
a perspective constituted by a body without extension. Simply because it has to be located,
perception cannot fail to be perspectival and as such, cause the suppression of any supposed
objective reality. The images of objectivity may be fully present to each other, existing for
themselves, but they can only be known under pain of diminution. Pure perception itself is
consequently described as a type of representation, and it can never escape being
representation, as all perception entails the reduction of a presence. The coincidence with
the object desired can only ever be a partial coincidence.63
What do we learn from this in respect to our problem concerning the status of the
objective and scientific image? Surely not that it is an illusion: Bergson's respect for the
natural sciences was too great for him to have ever implied that, and he states explicitly that
an image may be without being perceived.64

On the contrary, whether or not the system

of objective images actually exists is really irrelevant, for the lesson we learn is that it can
never be given to any perspective, including the scientific one. This is surely the meaning of
Bergson's famous critique of simultaneity. The world can only be experienced piecemeal
through the succession of its various aspects, not all at once in a simultaneous vision.
Deleuze puts it as follows:
8

The Whole is never "given". [...] This is the constant theme of Bergsonism
from the outset: The confusion of space and time, the assimilation of time
into space, make us think that the whole is given, even if only in principle,
even if only in the eyes of God.65

Perhaps that is why Bergson, not without subsequent controversy,66 chose the word
image to designate every type of reality.

As far as our knowledge of the world is

concerned, we cannot escape from images: [w]e are always more or less in idealism.67
But Bergson is no idealist, the more or less, the desire to reach beyond to what a certain
system of images might signify is essential. It defines the difference between solipsism and
good sense. Objectivity exists, but it is not as we might think it to be: it is less an entity than
an aspiration, an attitude towards entities. Indeed, talk of a plurality of entities, images, and
presences is somewhat premature when discussing pure perception, for the intent behind the
hypothesis is to gain access to the moment before our actual perception has delineated any
discrete objects in the plural: In the movement-image, as Deleuze describes an image for
itself, there are not yet bodies or rigid lines.68 If there is something objective to pure
perception, it cannot be on account of a literally pure perception of objects.69
So the objectivity of science can never be given simply because there is no fixed image
behind the world that science can discover.

In the modern parlance, we are always

already immersed in images, there is no thing behind the image, no ontological ulterior
world, as Jeanne Delhomme puts it.70
Bergson may not dispel the concept of perception in toto, but, by positing the purest
perception as nonetheless representational, he explodes the notion of perception, in all its
forms, as a complete coincidence with the immediate present. Indeed, there are themes in
his writing which seem to lead us to a new view of not only perception, but of an immediate
objective present itself. The aim of the final part of this essay will be to bring to light
Bergson's dissipation of this notion of the present. In doing so we will see the down-fall of
the temporal dimension of presence, that other casualty of postmodern thought.

III. The Ambiguity of the Present

8

It is not that the present was ever safe in Bergsonian philosophy; since he criticised the
notion of simultaneity in his first work, it had always been under threat. From the moment
the Essai argued that there can be no apprehension of a pure now, a mainstay of so much
of the philosophy that had preceded was suddenly being challenged in the most radical
fashion.

Yet the response then could always have been that the Essai only outlaws

simultaneity from areas in which consciousness is implicated: the notion is nevertheless

retained in the category of pure space,71 and with that, a foothold is also salvaged for the
present.
Yet without going into the debatable status of space in the Essai,72 a cursory reading of
Bergson's other writings soon offers evidence indicating that the present as such also lies on
uncertain ground. Andr Robinet writes of the ambiguity of the present in Bergsonism,
while another critic refers to the Bergsonian present as an indefinite field or temporal
hole.73 Though Bergson can also refer in a rather matter-of-fact manner to the present as
the consciousness I have of my body or the very materiality of our existence,74 he also
shows us that the body can be seized at different levels and that material objects too can
be known in different ways, either superficially or profoundly.75 Even when Bergson says that
what I call my present has one foot in my past and another in my future,76 the very fact
that the meaning of future and past is relative to the meaning of the word present only
accentuates the difficulty he has brought to light. Bergson's present is problematised simply
because the singularity of its various co-referents, perception, the body, or the material
world, have themselves already been dispersed amongst a diverse range of forms.
But Bergson actually amplifies the issue even more with a number of puzzles concerning
the present. The first concerns the distinction between immediate and mediate memory.
Bergson finds it illegitimate. There can only be a difference of degree and not of nature
between the retention of the short-term and long-term past, for it would be no more
mysterious were we able to retain a life-time's experience of the past than it is to be able to
retain twelve seconds of it.

Bergson presents the (non-) difference between the two as

follows:

My present, at this moment, is the sentence I am pronouncing. But it is so

because I want to limit the field of my attention to my sentence. This
attention is something that can be made longer or shorter, like the interval
between two points of a compass. [...] ...an attention which could be
extended indefinitely would embrace, along with the preceding sentence, all
the anterior phrases of the lecture and the events which preceded the
lecture, and as large a portion of what we call our past as desired. The
distinction we make between our present and past is therefore, if not
arbitrary, at least relative to the extent of the field which our attention to life
can embrace.77

Yet by this last sentence which relativises the definition of the present, Bergson has also
shown that what is at issue need not necessarily be which portion of the past is being
retained, but rather which present is being attended. In the same location he subsequently
argues that the preservation of the past in the present is nothing else than the indivisibility of
change.78 In place of the indivisibility of change he also uses the phrase undivided
present.79

But we might ask in relation to both whether inferring the preservation of the

past from the indivisibility of the present is the most legitimate move open to Bergson. If he
can argue for the preservation of the past in virtue of its being automatically80 preserved
within the indivisible structure of the present, we might question in turn whether this
indivisible structure tells us as much of the ambiguous and polyvalent nature of the present
as it does of the mysterious immanence of the past. Indeed, it has been proposed that
Bergson's argument as regards the continuity of mediate and immediate memory actually
undercuts Matire et mmoire's dualism of memory and perception, and marks as a result
the abandonment of his hypothesis of the integral conservation of the past.81 We might
conclude ourselves that the differences highlighted by Bergson in respect of our varying
attention to life do not delineate different types of memory so much as different types of
perception, and with that, different forms of the present (which is really to say that they
delineate the fact that there is no present at all).
A recent commentary on Bergson has placed great emphasis on the importance of
particularity and situation in his thought.82

Movement and concrete extensity, feeling and

consciousness, all are defined by their particular situation or moment, by their place or level.
8

It is noteworthy in this regard that amongst the alterations made to the material that would
become the second chapter of Matire et mmoire (it had been published previously as an
article), Bergson qualifies a number of references to an impersonal perception by inserting a
possessive pronoun: la perception becomes ma perception.83 The same can be said of
the present as well: there are only new, individual and owned presents that may well have
qualities overlapping with others (and from which we can abstract something called the
present), but which nonetheless remain unique in toto. But again, if there is a range of
different presents given to particular perspectives, there is nothing corresponding to our
normal understanding of a singular present at all.
The appearance of such a disintegrated present in Bergsonism also comes to light in his
second enigma concerning this temporal dimension. As part of an argument challenging the
reduction of memory to its physiological basis, Bergson outlines the following problem. It is
a principle of the opposing view that when certain cells come into play there is perception,
and that the action of those cells has left traces so that, when the perception has vanished,
there is memory.84 But one might wonder when a perception is supposed to objectively
come to an end to allow for the creation of the memory corresponding to it:
What right have we, then, to suppose that memory...divides psychical life
into definite periods and awaits the end of each period in order to rule up its
accounts with perception? [...] ...this is to ignore the fact that the perception
is ordinarily composed of successive parts, and that these parts have just as
much individuality, or rather just as little, as the whole. Of each of them we
can as well say that its object is disappearing all along: how, then, could the
recollection arise only when everything is over?85

Bergson is here highlighting the materialist's constant switching between an objective system
of images, physiological mechanisms, traces, engrams and so on, and the subjective system
of images inscribed within conscious perception. Bergson believes that the only possible
answer is that the formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of perception; it
is contemporaneous with it.86 Though certain interpreters have taken this even more
puzzling response in earnest,87 Bergson himself abandoned it in a later treatment of the same

issue with an acknowledgement that before converting our perception into memory we
usually wait till our present is finished.88
But did Bergson need to abandon his earlier argument so completely? It may be that
Bergson's initial solution was only the other half of an antinomy concerning memory. On
the one hand, if there is any temporal lag between a perception and its memory, the
perception will not have been remembered in its entirety.

But as any part lost of a

perception is itself a perception, this is as much as to say that certain consciously perceived
experiences not only will not but cannot ever be remembered. As far as we know, however,
there is no evidence to believe that this is true, or even could be true. On the other hand, to
avoid such an outcome one must suppose that memory is formed simultaneously with
perception. Yet if this is the case, then the present must have the mysterious ability to
duplicate itself at once into both a perception and a memory of the present.89 However, both
sides of this Bergsonian antinomy assume that there is one simple thing called the present,
another simple thing called the past, and that perception pertains as exclusively to the first as
memory pertains exclusively to the second. Bergson himself admits in the course of the
analysis that one way out of this antinomy would be to assume that the present leaves no
trace in memory.90

But virtually as much follows from the interpretation of Bergson's

thought that highlights the impurity of pure perception, or in other words, that acknowledges
that the Bergsonian present is inherently ambiguous.

IV. Conclusion
Though Bergson does not forsake the language of presence entirely, it is so transformed in his
hands as to have lost nearly all of what counts officially as its modernist significance. Of
course, the terminology Bergson uses of pure perception, the present, and objectivity will
never ease the way for a postmodern interpretation of his thought such as the one sketched
above. It is of little matter, it will be said, that his philosophy tacitly inscribes a polyvalent
understanding of perception and the present; what counts is whether Bergson knew that it
did, whether he was fully consciousness of the strategies he employed (and whether they
were strategies), and whether this is reflected in the content and complete control he
exercised over his writing (even if this writing should be arguing for the impossibility of such
8

control). Yet when we look to this content, what do we find? Talk of pure perception and
presence, even though we all now know that pure perception does not exist.91 In speaking
of purity, Bergson betrays his modernist nature.

Bergsonism must be transparently and

intentionally postmodern if it is to be postmodern at all.

This, however, is but one conception of the postmodern, that of a philosophy which is
inherently aware of its own metaphilosophical situation;92 if we reject this (thoroughly
modern) equation between metatheoretical consciousness and postmodernity (here read as
a number of new developments to old questions), then ample room is left for us to
acknowledge the value of philosophies, equally modern and radical, which are guided less
by intention than, if this word will be permitted, intuition. Bergson's is clearly one of them.

I will not attempt to define postmodernity or postmodernism from the postmodern perspective, be it as
an incredulity towards metanarratives or a devotion to irony and contingency, to list just two attempts at a
definition. The association of the term postmodern with a range of philosophers, post-structuralist,
hermeneutic, and otherwise radical, is enough to convey the fact that it probably has more to do with a
certain set of shared philosophical interests than some single over-arching metaphilosophical position.
See Edouard LeRoy, Une Philosophie nouvelle: M.Henri Bergson: I La Mthode. II La Doctrine,
in Revue des deux mondes, 7 (1912).
3
See R.C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press,
1988); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
4
Much more so than Kierkegaard, for example, who has been welcomed into the fold: see on this, Michael
Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994).
5
The one major exception to this is Gilles Deleuze, as we will see.
2

An engagement with Bergson's attitude towards truth might also have been on our agenda if demands of
form and limitations of space did not restrict the discussion to these three areas. The formal issue is the fact
that Bergson rarely writes about truth in any sustained fashion, so his views would have to be reconstructed
with the aid of materials whose significance is very much implicit and not wholly unambiguous either.
7
Paul Douglass, Deleuze and the Endurance of Bergson, in Thought, 67 (1992): 56.
8
See Joseph N. Riddel, Modern Times: Stein, Bergson, and the Ellipses of "American" Writing, in Frederick
Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.341.
9
See Gilles Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam as Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988); Cinma 1: L'Imagemouvement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983), translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam as
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London: Athlone, 1986); and Cinma 2: L'Image-temps (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1985), translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta as Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London:
Athlone, 1989).
10
Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp.87-108;
Vincent Descombes Modern French Philosophy, translated by L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.26; see also, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Berkeley: Bishop or Buzby?
Deleuze on Cinema, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds., Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional
Aesthetics (London: Philosophical Forum/Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991).
11
Deleuze, Bergsonism, p.32; see also, pp.31, 38, 93.
12
As has been remarked (Douglass, pp.48-9), it may be a creative reading, but it is not a twisted one.
Bergson wrote of differentiation before Deleuze makes him speak of it.
13
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of consciousness, (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1910), p.95. Translated by F.L. Pogson from Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la
conscience, in Oeuvres, edited by Andr Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p.64. All
references to Bergson's work will be to the English translations with the pagination of the French text (in
Oeuvres) henceforth in square brackets after the English pagination.
14
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Philosophical Library,
1946), p.226/191 [p.1423]. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison from Le Pense et le mouvant: Essais et
confrences, in Oeuvres, pp.1249-482. (Page references for both the English paperback and hardback
editions of The Creative Mind are given as their paginations are different: the paperback reference will follow
the hardback after a slash.)
15
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), pp.207-08, 498.
16
See Mark Muldoon, Henri Bergson and Postmodernism, in Philosophy Today, 34 (1990); Pierre
Trotignon, Autre voie, mme voix: Lvinas et Bergson, in Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour, eds.,
Emmanuel Lvinas (Paris: Editions de l'Herne, 1991), pp.287-93.
17
See Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1991), pp.11, 45.
18
See the interview with Lvinas in Richard Kearney, ed., Dialogues with Contemporary Continental
Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.49. Lvinas does give something like a
sustained philosophical treatment of Bergson in Richard A. Cohen's translated edition of Lvinas' Time and
the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), but this still amounts to only one small part of a
lesser work.
19
See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et rcit (Paris: Seuil, 1983-1985). This was not always the case: Ricoeurs earlier
work, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1966) in particular, was more even-handed in its evaluation of Bergsons significance It was written,
however, at a time when not all philosophers felt the need to condemn their immediate philosophical
progenitors.
20
Jacques Derrida, Ousia et Gramme, in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1982), pp.57, 59, 62n36.
21
For confirmation, see Douglass: 51.
22
See R.M. Gale, Bergson's Analysis of the Concept of Nothing, in The Modern Schoolman 51 (19731974).

23

See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp.300-02 [pp.736-37]. Translated by
Arthur Mitchell from L'Evolution cratrice, in Oeuvres, pp.487-809.
24
Gale: 287.
25
Ibid: 272. See for example, Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.305 [p.739].
26
P.A.Y. Gunter, Bergson and Sartre: The Rise of French Existentialism, in Burwick and Douglass, p.240.
27
See Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.304 [p.739].
28
Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, translated by Mabelle L. Andison and J. Gordon
Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968) p.316.
29
Jeanne Delhomme, Vie et conscience de la vie: Essai sur Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1954), p.5.
30
Deleuze, Bergsonism, p.46.
31
It was Sartre's work which tried to reverse the Bergsonian ordering of negation over nothingness; see Being
and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (London:
Methuen, 1958), p.11.
32
See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp.204-10 [pp.660-64].
33
See Muldoon, as well as Muldoon's later essay, Time, Self, and Meaning in the Works of Henri Bergson,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur, in Philosophy Today, 35 (1991): 255-57, for a recent discussion
of the Bergsonian self in both a modern and postmodern context.
34
Bergson, The Creative Mind, p.203/172 [p.1405]. In Creative Evolution, speaking of the manner in which
we segment the fluid mass of our whole psychical existence into discrete states, Bergson notes: as our
attention has distinguished and separated them artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by an artificial
bond. It imagines, therefore a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic
states which it has set up as independent states.
35
Henri Bergson, Mlanges, edited by Andr Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p.858.
36
Maritain, p.231; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'Union de l'ame et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et
Bergson: Notes prises au cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty L'Ecole Normale Suprieure 1947-1948,
recueillies et rdiges par Jean Deprun (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin, 1968) p.83.
37
Simon Clarke, The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique of Lvi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement
(Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981), p.16.
38
See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp.271-72 [pp.713-14]; The Creative Mind, pp.193, 194/164, 165
[pp.1397-98, 1399].
39
Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.272 [p.714]. The subject is decentred by its very own self-perception or
introspection: see Bergson Mlanges, p.1060. This notion of multiplicity is central to Bergsons thought
both thematically and methodologically: see the authors article Bergsons Method of Multiplicity
forthcoming in Metaphilosophy.
40
Bergson, Mlanges, p.438; see also, p.515n1.
41
The notion has currently fallen into disuse; see Charles Rycroft, Dissociation of the Personality, in R.L.
Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.197-98.
42
Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.94 [p.571]; see also, ibid., pp.106, 272 [pp.581, 714]; Georges Mourlos,
Bergson et les niveaux de ralit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), p.150; Andr Robinet,
Bergson et les mtamorphoses de la dure (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1965), p.103.
43
Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.274 [p.715].
44
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame Press, 1977),
p.127 [p.1082]. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton from Les Deux sources de la morale
et de la religion, in Oeuvres, pp.979-1247.
45
See Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp.50-72 [pp.36-50]; Bergson, The Creative Mind, p.234/198 [p.1430].
46
Bergson,Creative Evolution, p.135 [p.604].
47
Bergson,The Creative Mind, p.161/137 [p.1372]; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1911), p.236 [p.318]. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W.Scott Palmer from
Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps avec l'esprit, in Oeuvres, pp.159-379.
48
See Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.215 [p.304].
49
See Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp.75-90 [pp.51-61]. What is given in the French [p.59] as dissocie
and dissociation in the description of counting is misleadingly translated into English (p.87) as separate
and separation respectively.
8

50

For Bergson, all reality is...tendency, if we agree to call tendency a nascent change of direction (The
Creative Mind, p.222/188 [p.1420]).
51
See Bergson, The Two Sources, pp.296-300 [pp.1227-31].
52
Bergson, The Creative Mind, p.208/176-7 [p.1409].
53
See Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp.xi-xii [p.161].
54
Ibid., pp.14, 12 [pp.177, 176]. He also calls images for themselves matter, and images for the body the
perception of matter at MM, p.8 [p.173].
55
See Bergson Creative Evolution, pp.11, 213-14 [pp.502-503, 666-67].
56
Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.280 [p.345].
57
Ibid., pp.6-7 [p.172].
58
See ibid., pp.185-86 [pp.285-86]. For a thorough examination of Bergsons philosophy of the body in
Matter and Memory and other works, see the authors Duplicity in the Flesh: Bergson and Current
Philosophy of the Body, in Philosophy Today, 38 (1994).
59
See ibid., pp.24-38 [pp.183-92].
60
See ibid., pp.26, 32, 310 [pp.184-85, 188-89, 363]; see also, Bergson, Mlanges, p.646, as well as
Bergson's Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp.95-6
[p.873]. Translated by H.Wildon Carr from L'Energie spirituelle: Essais et confrences, in Oeuvres, pp.811977. Despite describing the body of pure perception as a mathematical point at Matter and Memory, p.310
[p.363], elsewhere in the same work (p.83 [p.221]) Bergson's concentration lapses and pure perception is
described in terms of organs and nerve centres. Perhaps we should read these lapses as representative of
a purer perception (its manifestly subjective elements still being held in abeyance), if not a perfectly pure
perception.
61
MM, p.84 [p.222].
62
Ibid., p.28 [p.186].
63
Ibid., p.297 [p.356].
64
Ibid., p.27 [p.185].
65
Deleuze, Bergsonism, p.104. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp.39-41 [pp.526-28], where Bergson
reproaches those who believe that all is given.
66
See Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp.90-1/77 [p.1318].
67
Bergson, Mind-Energy, p.248 [p.970].
68
Deleuze, Cinema 1, p.60.
69
See the authors article, Bergson and the Language of Process (forthcoming in Process Studies), on the
ontological integrity of subjective images in Bergson's theory of perception.
70
Delhomme, p.172.
71
Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp.95, 206, 227 [pp.64, 135, 148-9].
72
Whereas the depiction of space in Time and Free Will does often equate it with a purely homogeneous
realm and therefore the primary agency through which relations of simultaneity are constituted, there are
many passages which characterise such a homogeneous realm as only an abstraction quite distinct from real
concrete space; see Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp.96, 236, 91 [pp.64, 154, 62].
73
Robinet, pp.26-38; Mourlos, pp.230, 232.
74
Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp.177, 178 [p.281].
75
Augustin Fressin, La Perception chez Bergson et chez Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Socit d'Edition
d'Enseignement Suprieure, 1967), p.109.
76
Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.177 [p.280].
77
Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp.178-79/151-52 [p.1386], my italics; see also, Bergson, Mind-Energy,
pp.69-70 [p.857].
78
Bergson,The Creative Mind, p.183/155 [p.1389].
79
Ibid.., p.180/152 [p.1387].
80
Ibid., p.180/153 [p.1387]; Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.5 [p.498].
81
See Edgar Wolff, Mmoire et dure, in Actes du Xe Congrs des Socits de Philosophie de Langue
Franaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1959), pp.335, 337, and the same author's La Thorie de la mmoire
chez Bergson, in Archives de Philosophie, 20 (1957).

82

See Alain de Lattre, Bergson: Une Ontologie de la Perplexit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1990), pp.137, 139, 141, 149-150, 158-59.
83
See Bergson,Oeuvres, pp.239 L6, L11, 252 L4. The English translation at pp.110 and 130 does not
preserve the first and last of these distinctions. See also, Andr Robinet Le Passage la conception
biologique: De la perception, de l'image et du souvenir chez Bergson, in Etudes Philosophiques, 15 (1960):
381n2.
84
Bergson, Mind-Energy, p.158 [p.913].
85
Ibid., p.159 [pp.913-14].
86
Ibid., p.157 [p.913].
87
See Mourlos, pp.130-31; Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.78-83.
88
Bergson, Mlanges, p.1067.
89
Which is exactly what Bergson first argued; see Bergson, Mind-Energy, p.160 [p.914].
90
Bergson, Mind-Energy, p.160 [p.914].
91
Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p.226. And this itself leaves aside the question of whether there
has ever been any perception' at all; see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on
Husserl's Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1973), p.103.
92
According to some interpretors, if it is possible to inaugurate the era of postmodernity, it is only through
realising our own philosophical entrapment within modernity; self-consciousness is the key: My central
question, Derrida tells us, is how can philosophy as such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can
interrogate and reflect upon itself in an original manner? (Interview with Richard Kearney, in Kearney, p.98.
See also see David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Humanities Press, 1989),
pp.285-6, on the particular constitutional self-consciousness of Derrida's post-structuralism.) Amongst other
characteristics, Madan Sarup (Introductory Guide to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, second edition
(Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)) points to the continuous references to...self-referentiality that
typify postmodernist writings.