Iris Van Der Tuin - The Untimeliness of Bergson's Metaphysics - Reading Diffractively

13.
The Untimeliness of
Bergson’s Metaphysics:
Reading Diffractively
IRIS VAN DER TUIN
Monday morning, the first semester of the academic year. I hear the
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English table clock in my living room strike 7:30. I put on my glasses,

get up, switch on the radio, feed my cat, take a shower. At ten minutes
past eight I hit the road in order to take the train to the university. An
hour later I am in front of the students, waiting for them to unpack
their bags. My thoughts are lingering and I realise that I am wearing my
acetate glasses. Why did I wear these and not my other pair? Searching
for answers I come to realise that at home, ‘I [was] a conscious automa-
ton, and I [was] so because I [had] everything to gain by being so.’1 I
start with my lecture.
Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will makes use of the seemingly
trivial event of waking up in the morning so as to conceptualise the
difference between habitual and free activity. Getting ready for work
in automaton-mode does not allow for one’s thoughts to linger. In
such a state, the striking of the clock ‘merely stirs up an idea which
is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attend-
ing to my usual occupations’.2 The impression of the clock hour has
coupled with a fixed idea, and the consequential act follows the impres-
sion ‘without the self interfering with it’.3 This ‘interference’ should
be read as virtual and is not actualised when getting up is habitually
done. We rarely change our mind in automaton-mode. And in equally
seldom cases we can trace back why we have done something the way
we did it during the morning chores. Bergson argues that this does
not imply the correctness of associationist or determinist philoso-
phies of the self. Both these theories have taken their exemplars from
Copyright 2013. Edinburgh University Press.
‘acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant’.4
Associationism and determinism alike make ‘retrograde movements’,
and ‘from this results an error which vitiates our conception of the
past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occa-
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The Untimeliness of Bergson’s Metaphysics 233
sion’.5 Bergson invites us to start from other acts for philosophical

purposes.
Distinguishing acting freely from automaton-mode, Bergson hints at
interference patterns or ‘diffraction’ as a tool to think with. In physical
terms, such patterns describe how waves react when they encounter
each other or an obstacle. Having said that, Donna Haraway and Karen
Barad have introduced diffraction to feminist studies in an attempt to
invent a novel methodology of relating to texts; their productive dimen-
sion should not be undone (as in a subjective comparison, for example).6
Taking full advantage of diffraction for feminist philosophy, they did
not refer to Bergson. In this chapter I will unearth where diffraction
appears in the work of Bergson, so as to bring it together with dynamic
ontology and feminist epistemology. Furthermore, reading the work
of Haraway and Barad through Bergson demonstrates how Bergson’s
philosophy can be made productive for feminism, and leads to insights
into the work of these more contemporary theorists. Following diffrac-
tion and the practice of ‘reading diffractively’, our discussion will hinge
on the temporality of dynamic onto-epistemology. I will argue that,
while diffraction disrupts the spatialised interpretation of time that
Bergson’s oeuvre labours over (in order to realise a conceptualisation
of ‘duration’), it can also disrupt any linear reception. The latter break-
through is advantageous. The contemporary feminist interpretation of
Bergson is, at times, unnecessarily narrow. This does a disservice to the
movement that is constitutive of Bergson’s philosophy and the critical
creativity of feminist thought.
DIFFRACTION AND INTERFERENCE PATTERNS

IN BERGSON
Let me extend Bergson’s example. On Saturday mornings I may allow
myself to stay in bed for a while. Eyes closed, no glasses. I hear the bus
pass by. I stumble upon a conversation I had last night. I am anxious
about the trip to the North that I will have to make later in the weekend.
Hearing the clock strike 7 a.m., ‘I might receive this impression [with
my entire soul] as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused
mass of impressions which fill my mind.’7 On a Saturday, the sound of
seven does not hit a solidified coupling with an established idea. But
in this situation, hearing the clock strike the familiar hour of 7:30 will
‘disturb . . . my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the
water of a pond’.8 Staying put on Saturday mornings, I experience my
deepest self. But the possibility of the habitual morning routine is now
interfering because clock time does not determine me to act in this case.
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234 Bergson and the Art of Immanence
Bergson affirms ‘that we generally perceive our own self by refraction

through space, that our conscious states crystallize into words, and
that our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust
of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and
consequently fixed’.9 The actuality of this most common self-perception
conceals our conception of the free act as much as it disguises our sense
of self. And here we find that each singular Bergsonian dislocation
(durational temporality over spatialised time, inner states over lan-
guage, and process over aggregation) is at work in the now-significant
event of getting up freely.
It has been argued that one stone falling into the water of a pond
does not make an interference pattern.10 The stone produces a single
series of waves circling into infinity. Even in this picture, however, dif-
fraction is at work and we can be most certain that, at some point, the
pattern of circling waves will be disturbed by a fixed or floating object
(a fountain in the middle of the pond, a dead leaf floating on its surface)
or it will hit another pattern of waves (generated by the leaf that has
just fallen off a tree). Still quivering because of the sound of 7:30, I can
now be repeatedly disturbed: by hearing the loud horn of the bus, or by
the tender smell of coffee. It is in this way that we can read Bergson’s
famous circles of memory as an interference pattern. And indeed, also
in Time and Free Will, Bergson alludes to such a pattern when suggest-
ing that a dynamic approach to reality embraces a certain complexity
as simple:
[Contrary to mechanism] dynamism is not anxious so much to arrange the
notions in the most convenient order as to find out their real relationship:
often, in fact, the so-called simple notion – that which the believer in mecha-
nism regards as primitive – has been obtained by the blending together of
several richer notions which seem to be derived from it, and which have
more or less neutralized one another in this very sense of blending, just as
darkness may be produced by the interference of two lights.11
It is the latter use of diffraction that informs my reading of the circles
of memory, albeit that the example of darkness has become stuck to the
determinacy paradigm of classical physics. What is important here is
that a dynamic ontology (complexity) does not allow for a retrograde
movement to be made because it positions itself before a representa-
tion (or a simple notion) has captivated us. We are no longer obliged
to believe in the instantaneous truth of the sentence ‘it is dark’. We are
to inquire whether two light beams might be out of phase, producing a
sense of darkness in their interference. Quantum physics would unpack
this notion further; there are deeper oscillations at work not allowing
themselves to be captured by such a one-and-one-is-two scenario.
Bergson opens his discussion of the circles of memory in Matter and

Memory by discussing the work of Théodule Ribot. The work of this
French psychologist is as useful as it is in need of ‘rewriting’.12 Bergson
takes up Ribot’s work in order ‘to define attention as an adaption of
the body rather than of the mind’.13 But since Ribot describes attention
along the lines of the negative, stating that attention implies ‘an inhibi-
tion of movement, an arresting action’,14 Bergson extends attention to
the positive, concentrating on the fact that ‘upon this general attitude,
more subtle movements will soon graft themselves, . . . all of which
combine to retrace the outlines of the object perceived’.15 Positioning
himself according to this particular embodied a priori, attention is
‘continued by memories’.16 Attention does not involve a zooming in of
the perceiving mind that comes to a standstill, implying the perception
of a fully delineated object outside of itself, but a careful attending of
the body, working out ‘a solidarity between the mind and its object,
. . . a circuit so well closed, that we cannot pass to states of higher
concentration without creating, whole and entire, so many new circuits
which envelop the first and have nothing in common between them but
the perceived object’.17 These circuits include diffractions that have a
productive effect:
reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the
perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an
electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its
way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always find its way back
to the object whence it proceeds.18
Perception, then, is reflective precisely because, though seemingly
external, it instantly motivates memory to reflect upon the perception
of its image, memory-images of the same kind, or deeper, more distant
regions of memory.19 This is a process that stretches out into infinity,
since every doubling of the perception evokes new memories, allowing
pure memory to grow, that is, to be the storehouse of an ever growing
repertoire of images. I must note that the many perceptions that are
made habitually, for instance during the morning chores, do not make
it to this storehouse. They are not ‘the projection, outside ourselves, of
an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on
which it comes to mould itself’.20 This is why I only notice in class that
I wear my acetate glasses and not my other pair. In class, and not at
home, these glasses produce a stir, which sets the machinery of attentive
perception in motion.
Bergson’s discussion of the circles of memory continues with a
discussion of the memory cone. This discussion makes the distinction
between habitual and free actions precise; it affirms that there are two
interconnected memories. The first (habit) consists of ‘nothing else but

the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure
the appropriate reply to the various possible demands’, thus, ‘it acts
our past experience but does not call up its image’.21 The second (pure
memory) is ‘truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever
renewed present’.22 The seeming disjunction between the two and the
movement that is constitutive of the second can explain why I am so
disturbed by the sound of 7:30, the horn of the bus, or the smell of
coffee on Saturday morning. Experiencing my deepest self, these unre-
alised images have a localising effect, whereas
this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call
my body, constitutes at every moment . . . a section of the universal becom-
ing. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown
back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me
and the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor
phenomena.23
The summit S of the inverted cone of memory, which is ‘the image of
the body’, coincides with the ever-moving plane P ‘of my actual repre-
sentation of the universe’.24 There is an unceasing traffic between the
summit and the base of the cone (AB), which is ‘the totality of the recol-
lections accumulated in my memory’, also continually in movement.25
This memory cone demonstrates how true memory is the base of habit,
too, as ‘it is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory
responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action
that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life’.26 (See Figure
10.3 in Simon O’Sullivan’s chapter, ‘A Diagram of the Finite-Infinite
Relation’, for an illustration of the memory cone.)
Again working from an embodied a priori rather than allowing for
a retrograde movement to be made, Bergson gives this bidirectional
traffic between the two memories priority; ‘within the cone so deter-
mined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and
the base AB’.27 Bergson laments ideas that are not ‘incorporated in the
fluid mass of our conscious states’, ideas that ‘float on the surface, like
dead leaves on the water of a pond’.28 These are the ready-made social
ideas that we are obliged to function with, just like we are sometimes
obliged to get up at a certain hour. The discussion of these ideas has
an important bearing on diffraction. And indeed, in the case of ‘an idea
which is truly ours [that] fills the whole of ourself’,29 ‘we are not in fact
dealing here with an idea, but with a movement of ideas, with a struggle
or with an interference of ideas with one another’,30 as Bergson contin-
ues in the essay ‘Intellectual Effort’ collected in Mind-Energy.
DIFFRACTION AND DIFFRACTIVE READING IN

HARAWAY AND BARAD
Haraway was the first to specify the potentials of diffraction for
feminist theory and methodology. Her seminal book on feminist and
technoscientific practices – Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium –
adds diffraction to the toolbox of semiotics (which consists of syntax,
semantics and pragmatics) in order to affirm how ‘interference patterns
can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived’.31 Taking
further advantage of the utopian dimension of her work on ‘cyborgs’
and ‘situated knowledges’, Haraway invents diffraction as a tool for a
past-present-future relationality around the theme of difference which
is not linear or spatialised, thus approaching the Bergsonian theme of
the temporality of free (and bound) acts as well as social (here: power-
laden) ideas. Working with the paintings and expository words of Lynn
Randolph, Haraway affirms that ‘diffraction is a narrative, graphic,
psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making conse-
quential meanings’.32 With this, Haraway comes close to Bergson’s phi-
losophising about self-perception and his dynamic ontology as a whole.
According to Randolph, ‘every woman’ is situated on a brink that is
constantly on the move. This image of a singular woman, itself made
up of ‘multiple selves’ whilst being ‘one body’, travels through time in
a state of being marked by ‘the screened memory of a powerful male
figure’. This screened memory ‘marks a place where change occurs’.
This change is a diffraction ‘occur[ing] at a place at the edge of the
future, before the abyss of the unknown’.33 The image of woman as
metaphorically material is for once confirmed with the tool of diffrac-
tion.34 Qualitatively shifting the feminist critique of the denigrating,
sexist gesture of naturalising women by making sure that they are
and will remain their bodies only, bodies that have to live up to social
images of beauty,35 this body is no longer the body that is successfully
administered by patriarchy, where process installs the powerful male
figure as a mental origin that oppresses woman through sexist imagery
and the woman as a physical origin that gives birth to and arouses men.
The body as itself an image incorporates images of patriarchy, repro-
duction and male lust, of feminism, generativity and female desire as
constantly changing ‘with age and psychic transformations’.36
Whereas Bergson does not explicitly start from woman as an image,
the body or matter, for him too, is ‘an aggregate of “images” ’ whereby
images are at the same time more than representations and less than
things.37 Transversing thingification and representationalism, both acts
of spatialising time, Bergson defines ‘that which is given’ as ‘the totality
of the images of the material world, with the totality of their internal
elements’.38 These images have an inner working; the workings-on-
matter, for instance the patriarchal administering of sexist imagery,
are fundamentally deceptive. In the words of Bergson: ‘The reality of
matter consists in the totality of its elements and of their actions of
every kind. Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible
action upon bodies: it results from the discarding of what has no inter-
est for our needs, or more generally for our functions.’39 What we find
here is a dynamic ontology of images that become-with one another.
Dorothea Olkowski neatly formulates its working:
All [images] function without ever producing a single representation of the
material universe. Rather, external images influence the ‘body’ image by
transmitting movement to it. The body image responds by bringing about
changes in its surrounding images and giving back movement to them,
choosing how it returns what it receives.40
This leads us to question: where does the interference pattern come in?
The pattern that is so important for both Randolph and the argument
of this chapter? Let us first look closely at the philosophy-physics of
Barad in order to understand what diffraction can do.
In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad is explicit about the double
role of diffraction. Diffraction is ‘a physical phenomenon that lies at
the center of some key discussions in physics and the philosophy of
physics’ and ‘also an apt metaphor for describing the methodological
approach . . . of reading insights through one another in attending to
and responding to the details and specificities of relations of differ-
ence and how they matter’.41 The physical phenomenon features in
classical and quantum understandings, implying that the phenomenon
is immediately entangled with ‘the shortage of words’42 that character-
ised the turmoil in physics in Bergson’s time. Additionally, the current
intellectual landscape, which features Barad as a prominent player, is
likewise on a cusp, searching for alternatives, most pertinently alterna-
tives to what Bergson has called ‘the power of negation’43 or the dia-
lectical stance that ‘leads to contrary philosophies; it demonstrates the
thesis as well as the antithesis of antinomies’.44 It appears as important
for the philosophy of Bergson to affirm explicitly what Barad hints at
with the proposed methodology of reading primary texts closely and
through one another:
divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short, between
the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great masters. But would
one find them as clear-cut between the masters themselves? Something here
dominates the diversity of systems, something, I repeat, simple and definite
like a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the
bottom of a same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very
different materials. It is on these materials that disciples normally work: in
that is the role of analysis. And the master, in so far as he formulates, devel-
ops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his
own disciple. But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which
hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that of
analysing. This is by very definition intuition.45
Alongside Bergson echoing his circles of memory and the memory cone
by affirming the discipleship of the master that works on his or her own
thought, bringing this process to the surface is what Barad seems to
attempt with the methodology that this chapter picks up on.46
Barad opens her Harawayian account of diffraction by stating that
‘diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference’.47 Difference
as a relation, or rather, as a relating, has nothing to do with essences
(Being), but it does not shy away from ‘understand[ing] diffraction
patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the
fundamental constituents that make up the world’.48 Diffraction, we
can say, is at the very heart of Barad’s ‘onto-epistemology’, which
affirms that ontology changes with epistemology (which would be a
Kuhnianism), just as much as epistemology is obliged to attend very
closely to the windings of reality. Therefore, we have to continue by
asking what diffraction is in classical and quantum physics so as to
tune diffraction for the precise purposes of the problematic here at hand
(which concerns diffraction in Bergson and the divergent trends in the
contemporary feminist reception of dynamic ontology).
The classical understanding of diffraction pertains to ‘the way waves
combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading of
waves that occurs when waves encounter an obstruction’.49 Noting that
classical physics considers particles (that are in one location at a given
time) and waves (that superimpose and are in and out of phase) as two
paradigms, it must be concluded that ‘from the perspective of classical
physics, diffraction patterns are simply the result of differences in (the
relative phase and amplitudes of) overlapping waves’50 and that parti-
cles do not produce them. Quantum physics has, with the help of the
famous two-slit experiment, been developed on the basis of the research
finding that, under certain circumstances, particles, and even single
particles, can produce diffraction patterns. This does not cancel out the
possibility of particles not producing diffractions or light (classically a
wave) behaving like a particle.51 These puzzling empirical results from
the 1920s have constituted the wave-particle duality paradox and form
the backbone of quantum physics. It is important to note that quantum
physics can understand classical physics, but that classical physics has
nothing to say to quantum physics based on their understandings of

position and momentum. In addition, quantum physics embraces the
key role of the physical research set-up in all this, which has comple-
mentary epistemological and ontological consequences that form the
basis of Barad’s onto-epistemology. What we find is that the traditional
correspondence theory of truth which stands at the basis of classical
physics (that the researcher is positioned outside of her research object
and the instrument is but a neutral mediator) is being reworked along
the lines of a co-responsive theory that allows for researcher, instru-
ment and researched to be active and entangled agents.52 This is just
like Bergson’s affirmation of a solidarity between mind and object, and
‘advocates [for] different types of reality (static and mobile) and so dif-
ferent types of concept to correspond with these realities’.53
Without going into the curious and ambiguously received discus-
sion between Bergson and Albert Einstein about (the philosophy of)
physics,54 it is important to be aware of the fact that Bergson produced
his works from the brink of classical and quantum physics with Barad’s
main interlocutor Niels Bohr, among others, playing a key role in the
debate. This debate, as a whole, ‘forced into discussion a number of
philosophical questions (concerning causality, indeterminacy, and the
limits of knowledge) that Bergson had raised philosophically through
the notion of duration since the late 1880s’.55 In addition, we must
see that ‘today, if one accepts the analysis of [Isabelle] Stengers and
[Ilya] Prigogine, whose collective work comes close to the work of
Barad, Bergson’s conception of time has won out in the debate among
physicists’.56
So where does the interference pattern come in? Twice in this chapter
we have encountered the image of ‘the water of a pond’. First, this
image was evoked very positively, as an image of my whole conscious-
ness being disturbed by a certain impression. The positivity, here, stems
from what such an image can do: it allows us to reach the faculty of
intuition. In the second instance, Bergson wrote in an almost mournful
manner about ‘dead leaves on the water of a pond’. This lamentation
stems from ideas that block methodological intuition: ideas received
in ready-made format cannot but effect the retrograde movement that
forms the basis of analysis. The fragment from Time and Free Will that
features the dead leaves nevertheless also features diffraction. Let me
provide a lengthy quotation from it:
the impulsive zeal with which we take sides on certain questions shows how
our intellect has its instincts – and what can an instinct of this kind be if not
an impetus common to all our ideas, i.e. their very interpenetration? The
beliefs to which we most strongly adhere are those of which we should find
it most difficult to give an account, and the reasons by which we justify them
are seldom those which have led us to adopt them . . . they do not take in our
minds that common looking form which they will assume as soon as we try
to give expression to them in words; and, although they bear the same name
in other minds, they are by no means the same thing. The fact is that each
of them has the same kind of life as a cell in an organism: everything which
affects the general state of the self affects it also. But while the cell occupies
a definite point in the organism, an idea which is truly ours fills the whole of
ourself. Not all our ideas, however, are thus incorporated in the fluid mass
of our conscious states. Many float on the surface, like dead leaves on the
water of a pond: the mind, when it thinks them over and over again, finds
them ever the same, as if they were external to it.57
This fragment makes use of the differentiation we have already stum-

bled upon in the discussion of the paradigms of classical and quantum
physics. Bergson makes use of the two paradigms and the confusion
surrounding them in an attempt to make the life of ideas precise.
Associationism, he claims, does not reach the inner life of ideas; by
seeing ideas as cells and thus making epistemological use of position (a
spatialisation), it is at most able to speak of ideas that affect the deepest
self and the deepest self that affects ideas. This thinking is structurally
related to what classical physics is capable of. Displacing association-
ism in his own work, Bergson sees ideas that are truly ours as ‘fill[ing]
the whole of ourself’ and as ‘incorporated in the fluid mass of our
conscious states’. Working his way around the classical problem of the
disjunction between waves and particles, Bergson allows for certain
circumstances to be in need of particle images (ready-made concepts,
social ideas) and for others to necessitate wave metaphors (fluid con-
cepts, our own ideas). Associationism, like certain ways of life, is an
apparatus in the Baradian sense: it is part of the reality with which we
are entangled. Exemplars, retrograde movements, intuitive metaphys-
ics, the psychologist, the philosopher are entangled.
BERGSON AS UNTIMELY
How to pick up on the strengths of diffraction for the feminist reception
of Bergson, so as to push Bergson’s thinking in time and feminism’s
critical creativity to the limit? This question has a particular relevance
in light of the often-affirmed timeliness of Bergson’s metaphysics (for
instance, in the suggestion that ‘Bergson is the first contemporary,
and our epoch is Bergsonian’58). But doesn’t this ascribe to a progres-
sive linearity that does not comply with Bergson’s thought? In this
final section I will develop the claim that diffractive reading provides
us with a durational thought and with an apparatus that can help
us see kindred ties to today’s contradictory feminist reception of

Bergson.
The contemporary feminist reception of the philosophy of Bergson
demonstrates two trends. First, scholars like Olkowski and Elizabeth
Grosz read Bergson closely and affirmatively. In Time Travels, in
particular, Grosz explains that this way of reading entails ‘a mode of
assenting to rather than dissenting from those “primary” texts’.59 Grosz
explicates how a critical rendering of texts, a gesture that is an analyti-
cal distancing act Bergson has argued, functions ‘as a form of dismissal
of texts, rather than as an analysis of the embeddedness of critique in
that which it criticizes’.60 Reading closely and affirmatively does not
allow for leaving a text unaffected, it requires a text’s readers to engage
with the transformation.61 In other words, assenting to philosophical
texts does not mean that the texts are solely celebrated. It is a moving
away from the tendencies to either critique Bergson or to read his work
only celebratorily – the two sides of the same analytical coin. Grosz’s
methodology is innovative. In her own affirmative readings of Bergson,
however, a disjunction between Bergson and feminism is still found.
It is only after Bergson has been discussed in depth that the reading is
affirmatively applied to feminist theory and politics.
Secondly, there is Rebecca Hill, who, in two recent articles, has
commented on the phallocentrism (and Eurocentrism) that, she claims,
is constitutive of the philosophy of Bergson. Bergson, in her reading,
offers a phallocentric philosophy because ‘his intuition of the enduring
self is elaborated within restrictively masculine parameters’.62 First,
she sees his work as dualist, whereas the sexist hierarchy that admin-
isters all dualism is not addressed. Second, she argues that ‘Bergson’s
celebrated monistic integration of the divergent tendencies of life and
matter maintains this sexed hierarchy’.63 In doing so, Bergson’s work
is said to propose yet another ‘hypermasculine theory of life and cor-
responding devaluation of matter as feminine’.64 Even though Hill
asserts that ‘this is not a binary hierarchy because Bergson’s concepts of
life and matter are never actualised as pure activity and pure space’,65
she does claim that ‘we would do better to reconsider the life-matter
relation beyond dualism’.66 Most Bergson scholars, including feminist
ones, argue that this is what Bergson does, not by repeating dualism,
but by having ‘pushed dualism to an extreme’.67
Hill is also critical of the feminist reception of Bergson offered by
Grosz and Olkowski. They are said to have affirmed the feminist ben-
efits of Bergson much too fast on the basis of links between Bergson and
sexual difference theory, found because Bergson and Luce Irigaray both
theorise ‘duration’ and ‘the interval’, the former being non-spatialised
time and the latter the shifting of a utilitarian relationality between

living beings and things.68 Hill asserts that a complicating move is
necessary, and she makes use of the work of Irigaray to try to alter
Bergson’s presumed phallocentrism, in turn, making Bergson poten-
tially valuable to Irigaray scholarship. Whereas this move sounds dif-
fractive rather than critical, Hill’s conclusions show the text of Bergson
left untouched, as she concludes by ascribing a failure to qualitatively
shift spatialisation to Bergson69 on the basis of a residual, sexed hierar-
chy. Obviously, this leads her to conclude that Bergson’s metaphysics
is not monistic.
What can diffraction do in order to help make up our minds about
contemporary feminism and the admittedly disconcerting work of
Hill? First, diffractive reading embarks on Grosz’s call for running
with the transformation of texts. Going with this flow is Bergsonian, as
Bergson has suggested, and, as noted above, ‘it is not enough to deter-
mine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must engender
them’.70 Hill’s call of phallocentrism, therefore, appears as a stale-
mated category and does not bring feminist philosophy any further.
Hill’s analysis comes out as strangely disconnected from the persistent
gendering of an intuitive metaphysics which has been connoted as
feminine based on its anti-Cartesianism and supposed spiritualism.71 It
cannot be overemphasised that Hill also attacks an older generation of
feminist philosophers, which leaves her pretty much empty-handed.72
Second, diffraction comes in as useful as it makes Bergson’s work
precise. Bergson makes use of metaphors of ‘reflection’, metaphors that
Haraway and Barad have argued convincingly are dualist and not living
up to the expectations of Bergson’s own ‘fluid concepts, capable of fol-
lowing reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement
of the inner life of things’.73 Whereas Bergson has argued consistently
and convincingly against representationalism, ‘reflective perception’ is
a suggestive concept for which diffraction has a lot to offer. Bergson’s
work, which works on the instantaneity of perception, memory and
object, gains by making explicit that it does not suggest ‘hold[ing] the
world at a distance’.74
NOTES
1. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, 3rd edn (London: George Allen,
1913), p. 168.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. M. L. Andison (Mineola: Dover, 2007), p. 11.
6. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_
Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007).
7. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 168.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 167.
10. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 80–1.
12. For the methodology of rewriting, see Jean-François Lyotard, The
Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer
(Mineola: Dover, 2004), p. 121.
14. Ibid., p. 122.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 127.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 123.
20. Ibid., p. 124.
21. Ibid., p. 195.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 196.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 197.
27. Ibid., p. 210.
29. Ibid.
30. Henri Bergson, ‘Intellectual Effort’, in Mind-Energy, trans. H. W. Carr
(Hampshire and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), p. 179.
31. Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 14.
32. Ibid., p. 273.
33. In ibid.
34. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993).
35. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against
Women (London: Vintage, 1991).
36. In Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 273.
37. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. vii.
38. Ibid., p. 30.

39. Ibid.
40. Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 96.
41. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 71.
42. Bernard Pullmann cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An
Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2006), p. 40. See Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and
Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime
Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2010),
p. 252.
43. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 89.
44. Ibid., p. 115.
45. Ibid., p. 168.
46. See Iris Van der Tuin, ‘ “A Different Starting Point, A Different
Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively’, Hypatia: A
Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2011), pp. 22–42;
and Aud Sissel Hoel and Iris van der Tuin, ‘The Ontological Force of
Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively’, Philosophy &
Technology (forthcoming).
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 74.
50. Ibid., p. 80.
51. Ibid., p. 83.
52. See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of
Materials’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012), pp. 427–42.
53. John Mullarkey, ‘Introduction: la philosophy nouvelle, or Change in
Philosophy’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 11.
54. Many Bergson scholars have affirmed that Einstein remained within the
classical understanding of linear time and causal determinacy (see for
example Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm
on Absolute Time’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 70; and Guerlac,
Thinking in Time, p. 40 n. 83).
55. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, p. 38.
56. Ibid., p. 199.
57. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 134–5.
58. Richard A. Cohen, ‘Philo, Spinoza, Bergson: The Rise of an Ecological
Age’, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, p. 22.
59. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 2.
62. Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri
Bergson’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1
(2008), p. 119.
63. Rebecca Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson: Life and Matter’, Deleuze
Studies, Vol. 2 (2008), Supplement, p. 124.
64. Ibid., p. 132.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 133.
67. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 236.
68. Hill, ‘Interval, Sexual Difference’, pp. 120–1, 130, n. 1.
69. Ibid., p. 129.
70. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover,
1998), p. 207.
71. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, pp. 13, 22.
72. In the end, Hill seeks her recourse in Manuel DeLanda, whose work is
said to be able to highlight that ‘ “inert” [feminine] matter is capable of
organising itself and acting in ways that exceed mathematical prediction’
(Hill, ‘Phallocentrism in Bergson’, p. 135).
73. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 160.

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13.

English table clock in my living room strike 7:30. I put on my glasses,

sion’.5 Bergson invites us to start from other acts for philosophical

DIFFRACTION AND INTERFERENCE PATTERNS

Bergson affirms ‘that we generally perceive our own self by refraction

Bergson opens his discussion of the circles of memory in Matter and

interconnected memories. The first (habit) consists of ‘nothing else but

DIFFRACTION AND DIFFRACTIVE READING IN

nothing to say to quantum physics based on their understandings of

This fragment makes use of the differentiation we have already stum-

us see kindred ties to today’s contradictory feminist reception of

time and the latter the shifting of a utilitarian relationality between

38. Ibid., p. 30.

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