Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

XML Template (2011) [5.10.2011–6:06pm] [855–872]K:/CELE/CELE_A_626183.3d (CELE) [Invalid folder]

The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 855–872, 2011

Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in5 Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

GIUSEPPE BIANCO

ABSTRACT In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that

twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand,

we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as10 irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the

concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In order to account for this

division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavailles and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as

Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincare to Bergson. The latter was

presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ‘‘philosophy of experience’’ at the beginning of the15 twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses

this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of

oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On

the one hand a ‘‘mathematical Platonism’’ and on the other a ‘‘philosophy of vital interiority.’’ This

Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It20 was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of ‘‘empiricism.’’

Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer’s

and Nizan’s critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of

the Revue de metaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise

context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name25 ‘Bergson.’ By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French

philosophy, in both its ‘‘positive’’ and its ‘‘negative’’ aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into

account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavailles, Sartre, Merleau-

Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the

‘‘Bergson renaissance’’ in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the30 renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy.

GROUP PORTRAIT OF THE PHILOSOPHERS?

At the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault writes for the prestigious Revue de metaphysique

et de morale an essay on his doctoral supervisor, Georges Canguilhem. Some years later,

Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL United Kingdom.

Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/11/070855–18 � 2011 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2011.626183


this essay, slightly modified, is published again as an introduction to the English35 translation of The Normal and the Pathological. In this famous piece, ‘‘Life: Experience and

Science,’’ one can find his outline of twentieth-century French philosophy; a schematic

draft, which, nevertheless, we might claim to have heuristic value. According to Foucault,

a ‘‘dividing line’’ will have separated ‘‘a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the

subject,’’ like that of Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, from a ‘‘philosophy of knowledge, of40 rationality and of the concept,’’ like Jean Cavailles’s, Gaston Bachelard’s, Alexandre

Koyre’s, and Canguilhem’s own. Foucault, who was implicitly inscribing his work in this

latter lineage, did not forget to remind us of the concrete political engagement, both

during the Second World War, and then, during the 1960s, of the intellectuals belonging

to this second heritage. According to Foucault, the ‘‘philosophers of the concept,’’45 following the spirit of the Enlightenment, did not dissociate the ‘‘question of the basis of

rationality’’ from that of ‘‘an interrogation concerning the actual conditions of its

existence.’’ In the 1985 version of the essay, Foucault dates the division back to the

nineteenth century, to Jules Lachelier and Louis Couturat, to Pierre Maine de Biran and

Auguste Comte, and he poses, as inaugural figures, at the beginning of the twentieth50 century, Bergson and Poincare.1

We may ignore Poincare, who may be said not to belong to the philosophical field,

and whose work as a scientist had been instrumentalized, at the beginning of the century,

both by ‘‘Bergsonian’ philosophers (like Edouard Le Roy) and by neo-Kantians (like

Leon Brunschvicg), and let us take, as our point of departure, the role played by Bergson55 in this Manichean interpretation of an entire century of philosophy. Beginning with this

outline, I will try to give an account of the strategic importance which Bergson has in the

majority of the indigenous reconstructions of twentieth-century French philosophy.

By doing so, I will also try to assess the influence of his philosophy on the philosophical

field.60 Foucault’s interpretation of French philosophy has been transformed and repeated in

different contexts, and, in a way, it has by now gained a certain canonical status.2

Recently, in his book on Deleuze, in Logics of Worlds and on several other occasions,

Alain Badiou has proposed it again, though with some variations.3 Badiou displaces some

of the characters mobilized by Foucault’s mise-en-scene—for instance Canguilhem, and65 even Foucault, are placed on the ‘‘Bergsonian’’ side of the barricade—but he does

maintain Bergson as an inaugural figure of a tradition, which he names ‘‘vitalist

mysticism’’ or the ‘‘philosophy of the vital interiority,’’ which would have been deployed

during the twentieth century up until Deleuze. He opposes this tradition to that of

Brunschvicg’s ‘‘mathematism’’: Badiou implicitly considered himself as the last inheritor70 of this latter tradition, after Cavailles, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan.

On the one hand, Foucault’s and Badiou’s assessments have a certain heuristic value:

they provide us with some coordinates, allowing us to orientate ourselves in a huge

corpus of texts, and they situate French philosophy’s singularity in a broader European

context. But, on the other hand, they do not explain the reason why these two75 ‘‘traditions’’ maintained their singularity and continuity throughout an entire century.

How was it possible that several types of philosophical practice, which were completely

different one from the other (such as those of Sartre, Canguilhem, Foucault, and

Deleuze), could share the same Bergsonian ‘‘mystic vitalism’’? What would the principle

of this continuity be, given that the representation of philosophy and its practice changes

856 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


80 from one author to the other? The ‘‘Bergsonian’’ Deleuze was Sartreian, but, at the same

time, he was also firmly anti-phenomenological; he did not place at the center of his

work the history of scientific thought, but used it as a reservoir of figures and metaphors;

he supported a philosophy of the concept against all kinds of subjectivism, but his idea of

the concept was profoundly different from Cavailles’s and Canguilhem’s. Sartre, like85 Merleau-Ponty, was opposed, since The Transcendence of the Ego and The Imagination, to

Bergson’s ‘‘psychologistic realism’’ but, at the same time, he almost completely ignored

the history of the sciences, which he depicted in a very simplistic manner; nonetheless, if

we pay attention to his later texts, some of the ontological figures he used, like that of the

Open, omnipresent in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, seem to be secretly inspired by90 Bergsonism; Canguilhem’s trajectory—he who was considered a simple inheritor of

Bachelard’s historical epistemology since the second half of the 1950s—was formed by

the ‘‘intellectualist’’ anti-Bergsonian Alain Badiou, but, starting from the 1940s, he began

using concepts and analyses inspired by Bergson’s The Creative Evolution, even if his

conception of philosophical practice was irreducible to the one proposed by Bergson.95 Bergson himself conceived the progress of philosophy as inseparable from that of science.

The work of Jacques Derrida—who had given a number of seminars on Bergson at the

Sorbonne but had never been inspired by his work, having been formed inside Suzanne

Bachelard’s ‘‘epistemological’’ and phenomenological school—is, following Foucault’s

reading, inexplicable.4

100 All of a sudden, everything seems less clear than before. If we try to use ‘Bergson’ as

an key to discovering to which of the two supposed philosophical traditions various

philosophers belong, we are faced with a series of insurmountable difficulties and aporias.

Does this not mean that we should renounce using ‘Bergson’ as a key to our reading of

modern French philosophy? As I will show, it is in analyzing the history and the protocols105 of the fabrication of this complex picture that we will be able to discover something

about contemporary French philosophy and, consequently, about the influence of

Bergson and of ‘‘Bergsonism’’ on its development and structuration.

One methodological remark is needed. What do we mean by ‘‘philosophy’’ here?

Without entering into ontological and epistemological questions, philosophy can simply110 be defined as a discipline, which, in France, is taught at the university and in the last year

of secondary education (classe terminale; which would be just before English students enter

university). Philosophy consists of a series of practices and a series of texts that have a

market and a certain circulation, whose legitimacy and value is established by a

community and a series of institutions. Philosophy is structured as an autonomous field115 with its own laws; it exhibits a series of peculiarities in form (the social organization of the

field) and content (as a national tradition, French philosophy has a series of common

elements). Nevertheless, philosophy, as a discipline, is relativity permeable to the

dynamisms proper to other disciplinary fields and other intellectual worlds: it both reacts

to their transformation, and imports from them ideas and new styles of thought. If we120 want to map the influence of Bergsonism on twentieth-century French philosophy, we

have to keep in mind two aspects: on the one hand, the relative autonomy of the

philosophical field and, on the other hand, the interaction of philosophy with other

disciplines and fields. This remark is imperative, because, as I will show, the extreme

success of Bergson in the literary field determined his moderate success in the field of125 philosophy.

Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy 857


EXPLICATING THE PHILOSOPHICAL: MULTIPLES AND MULTIPLICITIES

In this analysis, I will start from what remains closer to the present, namely, the picture of

French philosophy proposed by Alain Badiou in his Deleuze. It goes without saying that

Deleuze is one of those responsible for the revival of interest in Bergson over the past130 fifteen years, though certainly, he was not the only reason for this Bergsonian ‘‘new

wave.’’ To understand why Bergson’s work has come under the spotlight in French

philosophy since the end of the 1990s, one has to take into account several heterogeneous

contributory causes: the use of Bergson’s model of irreversible temporality in Ilya

Prigogine’s and Isabelle Stengers’ work on dissipative systems, the success of the135 neurosciences, the crisis of phenomenology and the search for alternative philosophical

sources that has also resulted in a serious historical and exegetical analysis of Bergson’s

work, and many others. Nevertheless, it is absolutely certain that Deleuze’s work

functioned as a kind of catalyst and provoked the revival of the texts of a thinker, who, in

the wake of the criticism of phenomenology and structuralism, was treated as nothing140 more than a pitiful relic of antiquity.

Until the 1960s, however, Deleuze was known only as a historian of philosophy and

as the author of one of the most original books on Nietzsche and of the somewhat strange

book on Sacher-Masoch. His book on Bergsonism sank almost immediately into oblivion,

being remarked upon only within the relatively old-fashioned and reactionary milieus of145 Bergsonian studies.5 Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense—two works

exposing an original interpretation of structuralism and of Lacanian psychoanalysis

inscribed in a post-Kantian transcendental framework—were presented by Foucault in a

famous article published in Critique,6 and ‘‘privately’’ discussed by the Althusserians and in

Jacques Lacan’s seminar, who gives to his patient (student?) Felix Guattari the task of150 reviewing it, though Deleuze still occupies a relatively peripheral place in the intellectual

world at the time. The emergence of Deleuze as an important agent is rather tied to his

critiques of psychoanalysis, to the role he played in Nietzsche Studies, and to his political

activism, which Badiou called ‘‘ironical’’ and ‘‘distant.’’ The Anti-Oedipus certainly

deployed an ‘‘affirmative ontology’’ and some Bergsonian concepts (above all, that of155 virtual multiplicity), which Deleuze had appropriated, for precise reasons that I shall

expose later, during the 1950s and 1960s. But these concepts were neither fully

recognized as being inspired by Bergson, nor was Deleuze’s philosophy perceived as

being inspired by the Bergsonian way of posing problems and doing philosophy. At the

end of the 1970s, in Modern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes was the first to160 expound Deleuze’s anti-Freudian and anti-Lacanian theory of desire without lack, by

means of his anti-Hegelian Bergsonism.7 Deleuze’s Bergsonian borrowings—which offset

his singularity in the problematic space of the 1960s that was dominated by

phenomenology, structuralism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis—had to wait for

the 1980s and the publication of his books on cinema to be fully acknowledged. But even165 Cinema I and II provoked belated reactions; it is rather What is philosophy? that represented

a real milestone, not only because of its immediate effect on the philosophical field but

because of the following series of coincidences and reactions.

In 1988 Being and Event was published. During the 1960s, Badiou had been one of

the members of the Cahiers pour l’analyse, a journal published by a group of young170 students of the Ecole normale, who were working at the crossroads of structuralist

858 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


linguistics, logics, Bachelardian epistemology, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian

psychoanalysis. Struck by the events and the consequences of May 1968, Badiou had

provisionally shelved philosophy to dedicate himself full-time to Maoist militancy.

Chosen by Michel Foucault, he had joined—like Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and175 Francois Chatelet—the philosophy department of the ‘‘experimental center’’ of

Vincennes. However, some of the writings published at the time were also devoted to

the political fight against the ‘‘anarcho-desiring’’ version of Marxism and against

Vincennes university’s supposed reigning troika—of Francois Chatelet, Deleuze, and

Lyotard. This situation changed at the beginning of the 1980s: Lyotard’s philosophy180 underwent a sudden turn with the Postmodern Condition and later with The Differend,

heavily influenced by Wittgenstein. The idea of an end of all meta-discourses seemed to

support the idea of the end of ideals and of any radical project of universalism and

emancipatory politics. This situation was accompanied by the dissolution of the

communist front, and by the journalistic attacks of the ‘‘nouveaux philosophes’’ and of185 the anti-pensee 68. It is in this context that Badiou’s Being and Event and the Manifesto for

Philosophy were published. Badiou’s aim was to demonstrate—against ‘‘democratic’’

relativism, against the rhetoric of the ‘‘ends’’ (of philosophy, history, etc.), and against the

return to concepts such as the individual, consciousness, man and his rights—the

existence of universal truths, the possibility of philosophy and of an emancipatory politics;190 his objective, following Lacan, was to separate the figure of the subject from that of the

individual.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze had the same polemical targets as Badiou—although

for other reasons and following very different modalities—and could not ignore the

latter’s theoretical perspective.8 In a long note in What is philosophy?, he gave a personal195 interpretation of Being and Event, discussing it in terms of the relation between his own

theory of virtual multiplicities and Badiou’s concept of the multiple conceived as an

element of set theory. Since its publication, Badiou had devoted several sessions of his

seminar to Deleuze’s book.9 The fulcrum of the following dialogue between the two

philosophers—to which belong Deleuze’s posthumous article ‘‘The Actual and the200 Virtual’’—was precisely the problem of multiplicity, which would have shown at what

point Deleuze was Bergsonian. As a result, Badiou grouped Bergson with Deleuze and,

by doing so, he also inscribed Deleuze in a hypothetical Bergsonian heritage, thus

liberating Bergson from the dusty apologetic readings of the Catholic thinkers and

forgotten ‘‘moralists’’ like Vladimir Jankelevitch.205 In his 1992 preface to Conditions, Francois Wahl, a friend of Badiou’s, interpreted

the couple Badiou/Deleuze, starting with the couple Cantor/Bergson and their

respective treatment of the problem of multiplicity.10 In 1995, Eric Alliez, Deleuze’s

student, published two essays bearing the paradigmatic titles ‘‘Virtual Philosophy’’ and

‘‘Deleuze’s Bergsonism.’’11 And, in 1994, he published a book on contemporary French210 philosophy, The Impossibility of Phenomenology.12 Here, he criticized Ferry and Renaud’s

regression to Kantianism and the inquisitorial use of analytic philosophy, and, denouncing

the ‘‘theological turn’’ of phenomenology,13 he identified French philosophy’s main

tendency in the critique of universals. He isolated the essential expression of this tendency in

Deleuze’s and Badiou’s work, finding traces in Derrida’s deconstruction, and in Merleau-215 Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible with its Bergsonian anti-essentialism.14 Two years

later, the publication of Badiou’s portrait of Deleuze as an ‘‘involuntary Platonist’’



constituted a kind of explosion: Deleuzian scholars attacked Badiou in the pages of the

journals Futur anterieur and Multitudes and those polemics were followed, in 2000, by

Badiou’s answer, where he insisted on Deleuze’s Bergsonian heritage.15

220 Alliez’s and Badiou’s pictures of French contemporary philosophy and the polemics

which quickly occupied the center of the philosophical field had four important

consequences: (1) isolating ‘‘Bergsonism’’ as the key element in Deleuze’s philosophy;

(2) giving the author of Creative Evolution a crucial role in the interpretation of French

philosophy, thus reviving the cleavage established by Foucault fifteen years before;225 (3) isolating once again the idea of a double identity proper to French thought,

irreducible to phenomenology and analytical philosophy; and (4) dusting off Bergson,

who, all of a sudden, entered the philosophical scene alongside other alleged

‘‘philosophers of life’’ or ‘‘vitalists’ such as Canguilhem, Simondon, Deleuze, and

Foucault. Recently, thanks to the association of Deleuze’s ‘‘vitalism’’ with Foucault’s230 assumed ‘‘philosophy of life’’—as it is expressed in his lessons on biopolitics—Bergson’s

philosophy has even been invoked in bioethical and biophilosophical contexts.

On the basis of the first part of my analysis, we can conclude that not all of the

material operations that contributed to Badiou’s Manichean picture were visible; rather,

the legitimacy of his picture was reinforced by a series of invisible erasures: (1) the erasure235 of the different stages of the collective and polemical creation of this picture; (2) the

erasure of the operation of the erasures of the first aspects of Bergsonism on which the

critics had already insisted (Bergson as a spiritualist, petty-bourgeois, and irrational

philosopher); (3) the erasure of the problems that motivated the different receptions of

Bergson’s concepts; and (4) the erasure of the genealogy of Deleuze’s first encounter240 and its use.

We have to address the latter aspect before coming back to Foucault. Deleuze’s very

first interpretation and utilization of Bergson’s philosophy was inscribed in a very peculiar

strategic context, very different from that of the 1970s or 1980s, in which he published

the two tomes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia along with his books on cinema. After245 WWII, between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s, when Deleuze was a student at the

Sorbonne and an unknown high school teacher, Bergson and Bergsonism occupied a

peculiar place in philosophical discourse. On the one hand, since the 1930s, in the

philosophical avant-gardist milieus there were no positive references to Bergsonism

whatsoever. The work of Merleau-Ponty, of Sartre, and of French phenomenology,250 more generally, seemed to have condemned Bergson to oblivion once and for all, because

of his naıve psychologist realism. The influence of German existentialism,

Hegelianism, and philosophy of history—which begun penetrating French philosophy

in the 1930s—provoked the condemnation of Bergson’s theory of human temporality,

which was seen as a naıve theodicy devoid of a sense of lack, struggle, and tragedy, and255 therefore inadequate for explaining the general mood of the aftermath of the war. In the

1940s, philosophy’s ‘‘problematic space’’ was taken up by debates on dialectics—Hegelian

or Marxian—by the confrontation of Marxism and phenomenological existentialism

and, from the early 1950s, by debates on Husserl’s Krisis texts and on the later Heidegger.

In other words, the problems of human history dominated philosophical discourse.260 In a sense, what complicated the picture even more was the Heideggerian concept

of an onto-theology whereby human subjectivity was deprived of its central role in

history.

860 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


On the other hand, since the 1940-41 academic year, Bergson’s texts had been

included in the agregation programmes and his texts considered as classics, in the sense that265 they had become old-fashioned, mere objects of scholarly exercise. The entrance of

Bergsonism into the academic context had been preceded, during the 1930s, by its use

within psychology. After the Liberation, a few of Bergson’s successors and friends,

gathered together to form a group, the ‘‘Societe des amis de Bergson,’’ and founded the

journal, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes. This group worked on the ‘‘canonization’’ of Bergson’s270 work, making available, in three tomes, his essays, Ecrits et paroles, which had been out of

print, and organizing, in 1959, a huge centenary conference. The presence of Bergson’s

texts in the agregation programme,16 along with the activity of the Societe, obliged

prominent philosophers and historians of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem,

Martial Gueroult, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Etienne Gilson, Raymond275 Polin, and Raymond Aron, to confront Bergsonism once again, after almost twenty years

of summary judgments. This situation fostered the relative integration of Bergson into the

new problematic philosophical space: Aron admitted that the Bergsonian criticism of the

‘‘retrograde movement of truth’’ was compatible with his conception of history;

Merleau-Ponty, in his 1948-49 classes at the Ecole Normale and in his first lesson at the280 College de France, complicated Bergson’s concept of intuition and the idea of a simple

‘‘psychologism,’’ and stressed the usefulness of Bergson in helping us to surmount the

aporias of Husserl’s ‘‘ontology of the object’’; following a path similar to that of Merleau-

Ponty, Hyppolite compared Bergson with existentialism, phenomenology, and

Hegelianism. In his important Hegelian study Logic and Existence, dominated by a285 Heideggerian anti-humanism, he compared Hegel’s conception of dialectics with

Bergson’s conception of difference, although he judged the first superior to the second.

This book was a starting point for Deleuze, who, at the time, occupied a peripheral

position in philosophy—not being a Germanist, he could not join the phenomenological

circles. Deleuze found in Bergson a non-dialectical conception of difference, non-290 humanistic and non-teleological that could match the Heideggerian framework, but also

a potential adversary of phenomenology. Finally, some of Bergson’s concepts suggested to

him the notion of the transcendental capable of rivaling the criticism of Kant’s and

Husserl’s rigid and relatively unhistorical a priori conditions of experience.

EXPLICATING THE PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLICATIONS: EXISTENCE AND STRUCTURE

295 Let us return to Foucault’s picture of French contemporary philosophy, which was a

source of inspiration for both Alliez and Badiou. Our task now is to show to what extent

this picture is realistic or to what extent, contrariwise, it was only part of an intellectual

strategy in which the use of the name ‘Bergson’ was merely instrumental.

It has to be stressed that, just as with Badiou, Foucault’s interpretation of300 the structuration of twentieth-century philosophy was not his own original

creation: Foucault was inspired by a famous review of The Order of Things, written by

Canguilhem and published in 1967 in the journal Critique.17 Here, Canguilhem took up

the cudgels for Foucault against Sartre’s criticism of his work. This controversy—later

named ‘‘structuralist’’—first began with Claude Levi-Strauss’s 1961 book, The Savage305 Mind and was later fueled by Foucault in 1966, when it provoked Sartre’s reaction.18



This polemical confrontation posited on the side of Levi-Strauss and Foucault—

‘‘analysis,’’ ‘‘anti-humanism,’’ theory, and the human sciences, and, on the side of Sartre

and ‘‘existentialist phenomenology’’—dialectics, humanism, praxis, and philosophy.

Referring to the freshly published Words and Things, Sartre accused Foucault of ignoring310 temporality and human praxis, the real motor of history and the downright origin of

structures, and, finally, of constituting the ‘‘last barricade’’ of the bourgeoisie against

Marx.19 In answer to this, Canguilhem invoked the example of his friend Cavailles, a

logician and a partisan, who defended at one and the same time freedom against Nazi

barbarism and ‘‘the primacy of concepts, systems, or structures’’ against ‘‘the primacy of315 experienced or reflexive consciousness.’’20

What was the reason for associating Sartre with Bergson, one of his enemies in his

early, phenomenological, years? Why did Bergson appear here, seeing that he was not

even mentioned in Canguilhem’s review of The Order of Things? To answer this question

we need to go back to the original scene of the anti-Sartrean polemics, the publication of320 Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind.

In ‘‘History and Dialectics,’’ the book’s last chapter, Levi-Strauss attacked Sartre’s

Critique of Dialectical Reason from several angles: he was refuting the idea of the existence

of people without history, he was opposing Sartre’s instrumentalization of his own work,

he was criticizing Sartre’s privileging of history over the other human sciences, and,325 finally, on an epistemological level, he was opposing the structuralist paradigm of sense to

the one proper to phenomenology. According to Levi-Strauss, it was the ‘‘temporal

dimension,’’ essential to the phenomena treated by the discourse of history, that

motivated Sartre’s privileging of history over the other human sciences. Human

civilizations’ temporality, the object of history, was supposed to be analogous to that of330 the human subject’s, which was supposed to be irreducible to any intellectual operation

of ‘‘distribution in space’’ (etalement dans l’espace).21Although neither Levi-Strauss in The

Savage Mind nor Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason referred to Bergson, the expression

‘‘distribution in space’’ is a clear allusion to the author of Creative Evolution. Levi-Strauss

was implicitly comparing Bergson’s durational conception of life and mind to the Sartrean335 description of human history conceived as an open set. According to Bergson, the

durational essence of life is irreducible to scientific explication, while according to Sartre,

history is irreducible to the purely diachronic and ‘‘abstract’’ explication of anthropology.

In 1962, the year The Savage Mind was published, Levi-Strauss also mentions

Bergson in Totemism Today, crediting him for criticizing—in Morality and Religion—340 Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s idea of the essential difference between ‘‘primitive’’ thought and

that proper to ‘‘civilized’’ people.22 According to both Bergson and Levi-Strauss, totemic

thought is just another way of creating classes of things, a strategy analogous to the

‘‘civilized’’ man’s way of using intelligence. But Levi-Strauss’s praise was followed by

harsh words criticism: referring to Totemism Today, in ‘‘Categories, Species, Numbers,’’345 the fifth chapter of The Savage Mind, he went on to argue that, in spite of his legitimate

criticisms of Levy-Bruhl, Bergson was still attached to a subjective conception of

classification, intended as the process of creating codes, categories and species. In Creative

Evolution, the classificatory activity proper to intelligence consists in a purely pragmatic

operation of ‘‘distribution in space’’ that cannot but miss the creative and free temporal350 character proper to duration and to creative impetus. Contrary to this explanation, Levi-

Strauss argued that structuralism had shown that the classes that the mind produces have

862 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


an objective meaning: ‘‘concrete thought’’ (la pensee concrete)—of both the ‘‘primitive’’ and

the scientist—can grasp a code that is objectively inscribed into reality, as, for example, in

the objective and discontinuous division of animal species. Slowly, the link between355 Bergson and Sartre and, more generally, between Bergson and phenomenology, becomes

clearer.

During those very years, Louis Althusser, in the context of the structuralist

controversy, reinforced the analogy between Sartre and Bergson. Although the Marxist

philosopher had never had any contact with Levi-Strauss, at least not before the360 publication of the Savage Mind, he seized the occasion for a new strategic move. Like

other thinkers and ideologists of the French Communist Party (Georges Politzer, Paul

Nizan, Jean Kanapa, Henri Maugin, Auguste Cournu, and Lucien Seve23), Althusser saw

the history of French philosophy as following two lines: on the one hand a rationalist and

scientific lineage, close to dialectic materialism, and, on the other, an ideological, irrational365 and anti-scientific lineage. Bergsonism and, then, existentialism were the ultimate result of

this second lineage. Following up on the first article he published after joining the

Communist Party,24 in the renowned foreword to For Marx, Althusser stigmatized

‘‘French philosophy’s pitiful history’’ and, especially, its ‘‘spiritualist persistence’’ ‘‘from

Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson.’’25 One year later, in the conference ‘‘The370 Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research,’’ he included Merleau-

Ponty and Ricœur in this tradition, describing it as conservative, religious, and incapable

of understanding Cartesianism and Kantianism. ‘‘Pseudo-philosophers, downright

watchdogs of religious and reactionary political ideology,’’26 composed this group.

He opposed to it two traditions—to critical idealism and rationalistic empiricism, and375 to the ‘‘philosophy of science,’’ which included Auguste Comte, Antoine-Augustin

Cournot, Louis Couturat, Pierre Duhem, Jean Cavailles, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre

Koyre, and Georges Canguilhem.

Althusser’s harsh hostility towards Bergson had a double origin. The first, obviously,

was tied to the classical Marxist rejection of Bergsonism, conceived as bourgeois380 mystification, which had began with Georges Politzer’s 1928 pamphlet, La Fin d’une

parade philosophique: le bergsonisme. While before the First World War, Bergsonism had

influenced anarchist circles, such as that of Georges Sorel, after 1918, it had fallen into

oblivion. There were at least three reasons for this decline: (1) Bergson never took

seriously Sorel’s use of some of his concepts, and the Marxist syndicalist rapidly discarded385 him from his philosophical references; (2) after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Socialist

International imposed the Leninist version of Marxism on any communist movement or

party, through denunciation, censorship and exclusion; and (3) Bergson’s participation to

the First World War propaganda completely ruined his political reputation. In his 1928

pamphlet, Politzer treated Bergsonism as the expression of the irrational ideology of the390 decaying bourgeoisie, which treated human beings as things (yet, in fact, duration is

something) and, some years later, he described it as running, like a scarlet thread, through

ideological philosophy from Cousin to existentialism via Bergson.

The second reason for Althusser’s contempt for Bergsonism was more philosophical

and was related to the Bachelardian rejection of all ‘‘empiricisms.’’ During the 1950s,395 Althusser made his ‘‘communist’’ intervention into the philosophical field in the context

of the debate on the possible existence of a proletarian science neatly separated from that

of the bourgeoisie. To distinguish these two sciences, Althusser mobilized concepts



borrowed from his master Bachelard. Back in the 1930s Bachelard had attempted to

give an account of the scientific transformations that occurred in the wake of the relativity400 and quantum revolution, which had completely disrupted several philosophical

categories. According to Bachelard, a ‘‘genuine’’ science distinguishes itself from

common sense through an ‘‘epistemological break.’’ Science consists in putting aside

commonsensical evidence and in creating a series of abstract constructions and schemas—

what Bachelard calls a ‘‘problematic’’—that can produce an experience (a ‘‘phenomen-405 otechnics’’). Thereby the bigger ‘‘obstacle’’ for science is the ‘‘empiricist’’ and realist

attitude that presupposes that ‘‘immediate’’ lived experience is richer than mathematical

schemas and that knowledge emerges naturally from doubt. What Bachelard criticized in

Bergsonism was the concept of intuition as a philosophical method that placed scientific

knowledge in continuity with common sense; for, as a simple pragmatic operation of410 ‘‘spreading in space,’’ intuition could not seize the hidden durational aspect of reality.

Bachelard, in contrast, claimed that science was not pragmatic but a construction

of intelligence richer than any intuitive experience and even richer than philosophy,

whose concepts are often a source of epistemological obstacles. Moreover, had he not

misconstrued Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bergson would have realized how retrograde415 his own philosophy was.

Turning back to Althusser: starting in the 1950s, he began using the concept

of an epistemological break to distinguish the ‘‘real’’ science of historical materialism

from bourgeois ideologies that adhered to ‘‘empiricist’’ and ‘‘subjectivist’’ theories

denounced by Bachelard. In a series of implicit and explicit polemics with Paul420 Ricœur, Raymond Aron, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Althusser denounced any

approach that stressed subjective or relativist historical knowledge. Thus, because of

their ideological and empiricist fixation on subjective experience and their cult of

‘‘concreteness,’’ Althusser was placing Bergson, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur and

Aron and even Politzer and Levi-Strauss into the same box.27 But that was not all: in425 some of his unpublished texts of the time on the French philosophical Kampfplatz,

Althusser even placed Canguilhem on the ‘‘ideological’’ and ‘‘empiricist’’ side of the

barricade, in continuity with Bergsonism and existentialism, because of his ‘‘subjective’’

theory of pathology in The Normal and the Pathological.28 How, then, could Althusser

treat Canguilhem as a ‘‘subjectivist’’ and, less than ten years later, as a ‘‘philosopher430 of concept’’?

Canguilhem’s relation with Bergson is extremely complex. Canguilhem had never

been simply an epistemologist of the life sciences. As a student at the Ecole normale, he

was found himself at the crossroads of the Durkhemian sociologist Celestin Bougle and

the Cartesian, Kantian and ‘‘intellectualist’’ philosopher, Alain.29 In the 1920s, his essays435 first drew on Alain and, a little later, on Politzer for their harsh criticism of Bergsonian

realistic psychologism and irrational intuitionism.30 The momentous political and

economical crises of the 1930s seemed to destabilize both the republican conception of

politics and the philosophical framework it implied. At this point, Canguilhem

underwent a crisis that pushed him to study medicine: he distanced himself from440 Alain’s strict Cartesian dualism, his theory of the passions, his mechanistic physiology and

his Comtean theory of society. Canguilhem was faced with the problem of the nature of

pathology (both of living beings and of society) and of technology. The solutions that he

sketched were based on the organism conceived as the power of generating new norms.

864 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


These reflections were strongly influenced by Bergson, especially by Creative Evolution,445 to which Canguilhem devoted several conferences and classes at the University of

Strasbourg and, later on, at the Sorbonne. This influence can be read between the lines of

the essays he published from the end of the 1940s and during the following decade,

including Knowledge of Life, and ‘‘Note sur la situation faite en France a la philosophie

biologique.’’31 Far from presenting his theories in simple continuity with Cartesian450 rationalism, Canguilhem denounced its effects on the future of biological philosophy, and

implicitly criticized Bachelard on several points. In addition, his reflections bear certain

family resemblances (to borrow Wittgenstein’s term) with the constellation of concepts

deployed at the same time by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. So, finally, the right question to

pose is perhaps the following: how did it come about that Canguilhem was treated as an455 anti-Bergsonian philosopher of the concept?

To understand this, one has to turn back to The Savage Mind and, more precisely, to

the passage where Levi-Strauss criticizes Bergson’s theory of knowledge. Levi-Strauss,

who, since the 1950s, had been following the work of several American biologists,

nonchalantly added a comment: the/a structuralist theory of totemism conceived as460 coding was also verified by the biological theory of DNA, which, using ‘‘schemas which

look like those of the theory of communication’’ succeeded in reducing the immense

variety of species to a small number of codes objectively inscribed into each organism.32

These considerations grabbed the attention and interest of Canguilhem, who had

meanwhile become an epistemologist and historian of biological sciences, and was a good465 friend and reader of Levi-Strauss. Canguilhem was therefore compelled to update not

only his theory of pathology but also his theory of vital normativity, the framework in

which the former was inscribed.33 In a famous conference in 1966, ‘‘The Concept and

Life,’’ later published with the paradigmatic subtitle, ‘‘The New Knowledge of Life,’’

Canguilhem reiterated Levi-Strauss’s denunciation of Bergson’s pragmatic theory of470 knowledge and implicitly put into question his own theory of life. As he explains in

Matter and Memory, concepts are the simple ‘‘outcome of life’s tactics in its relation with

the environment [milieu];’’ they are nothing but the ‘‘human processing of experience,

which is artificial and selective.’’ In contrast, genetics had proved that the sense of the

organism, the code, objectively inscribed in its DNA, was a material a priori. Thus ‘sense’475 was not simply projected on the organism by the subject’s pragmatic activity of

‘‘distribution into space’’ or ‘‘fragmentation’’ (morcelement). Canguilhem presents genetics

as an anti-Bergsonian science insofar as it ‘‘accounts for the formation of the living species

thanks to the presence, in the matter, of . . . information, whose best model is constituted

by the concept.’’34

480 But Canguilhem’s essay was not just a simple denunciation of the anachronism of

Bergsonian metaphysical speculations on life: taking into account Bergson’s notion of the

concept from Matter and Memory to The Creative Mind, Canguilhem also showed that

Bergson himself had later admitted that the concept was not only the product of the

pragmatic tactic proper to the living being but that it was also the more or less exact485 reflection of life’s structure. If evolution consists in the process of fragmentation of the

vital impetus faced with material obstacles, then the knowledge of life is a process of

fragmentation. This process cannot grasp the totality or the essence of the vital process, but,

at least, it can understand its products. At the same time Canguilhem was not simply

abandoning his theory of biological normativity—which Althusser had condemned as



490 ‘‘subjective’’ and thus ideological—but was trying to update it, starting from the new

informational paradigm that dominated biology.35

Nevertheless, the new context of the ‘‘structuralist controversy’’ implied a new

configuration of the philosophical field and the formation of new ‘‘alliances.’’ During the

late 1940s and the early 1950s, following Politzer, Michel Foucault hesitated between495 Marxist orthodoxy and psychological phenomenology and around 1955 was profoundly

influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche.36 In the new strategic context of the 1960s,

Foucault and Althusser decided to ignore the broader context of Canguilhem’s writings,

seeing him simply as an ‘‘anti-Bergsonian’’ and ‘‘anti-phenomenological’ ‘‘philosopher of

the concept.’’37

500 One should not forget that both Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who played a

central role in the concept/intuition mise-en-scene, also belonged to Canguilhem’s

generation and had similar reactions to Bergsonism during the 1930s. Levi-Strauss’s initial

rejection of Bergsonism was more inspired by Politzer’s humanism and Marxist

psychology than by structural linguistics.38 The case of Lacan, who had always shown a505 merciless contempt for Bergson, is similar. As I pointed out, during the 1930s, Bergson’s

work had a minor success in the psychological field. His psychology was used to

syncretize the mutually exclusive currents of psychology (behaviorism, psychoanalysis,

positive psychology, etc.). Both Eugene Minkowski and Charles Blondel, for example,

borrowed several concepts from Bergson. But Lacan, from his 1932 dissertation on510 psychosis onwards, resolutely opposed the ‘‘Bergsonian’’ idea that the inner nature of the

human mind could be accessed through a silent act of intuition and that language could

not but betray this intuition.39 In opposition to this view, he argued, drawing on what

Politzer had extracted from Freudian psychoanalysis, that all states of mind, even the

unconscious, even dreams (described by Bergson as a ‘‘chaos’’), consist of a language that515 has to be interpreted. In this sense, the first twenty years of Lacan’s activity were

profoundly anti-Bergsonian.40

There is yet another element that we must take into account to fully grasp the

history of the construction of Foucault’s mosaic. In 1962, Jean Hyppolite was promoted

to a professorship in ‘‘The History of Philosophical Systems’’ at the College de France.520 Hyppolite had been the supervisor of Foucault’s secondary thesis on Kant and the former

supervisor of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. He was also a member of the

‘‘Association des amis de Bergson,’’ to which he had introduced Deleuze. From 1954 to

1963 he was the director of the Ecole normale superieure, where he worked closely with

Althusser. Hyppolite was also a very close friend of Merleau-Ponty, whom he in fact525 replaced at the College after the latter’s death. Thus, Hyppolite represented a key figure

in the French philosophical field. On 19 December 1963, in the immediate aftermath of

the first exchanges of the structuralist controversy, Hyppolite gave his first lecture at the

College de France.41 Following the tradition of all inaugural speeches, Hyppolite

mentioned his predecessors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martial Gueroult.42 He also530 mentioned Bergson, who had been professor at the College and whom Merelau-Ponty

and Gueroult had also mentioned in their own inaugural speeches. Hyppolite declared

that his philosophical position was situated somewhere between two tendencies of French

philosophy: between a philosophy of lived experience and a philosophy of the system,

between ‘‘existence and truth,’’43 which extremes, he said, Merleau-Ponty and Martial535 Gueroult represented. Hyppolite was following the protocol of inaugural addresses but,

866 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


at the same time, he was trying to pacify the polemics between the ‘‘existentialists’’ and

the ‘‘structuralists.’’ The very opposition of Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher who had been

working in psychology and Gueroult, a historian of modern philosophy, was entirely

rhetorical, given that the two had never actually confronted one another. The only540 confrontation that had ever occurred was between Gueroult and Ferdinand Alquie on the

interpretation of Descartes. Alquie conceived philosophy not only as a rational

construction but also as a human and affective lived experience, endowed with a

particular ‘‘existential’’ temporality. Gueroult, on the other hand, rejected all biographical

explanations of philosophy as no more than a concatenation of ‘‘reasons.’’ Alquie,545 however, had absolutely nothing to do with Bergsonism: he was always opposed to what

he saw as a simple irrational ‘‘pantheism.’’44

Nonetheless, six years later, after the death of Hyppolite, Foucault gave a

commemorative speech at the Ecole normale, in which he evoked the division between

concept and intuition once again, which later resurfaced in his essay on Canguilhem.45

550 So, is the comparison between French existentialist phenomenology and

Bergsonism merely artificial? Yes and no. Just like Levi-Strauss and Lacan, Canguilhem

and Hyppolite, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty also began their intellectual careers by

criticizing Bergson, by borrowing arguments from Politzer’s anthropological and

humanist project of a concrete psychology. Their harsh opposition to Bergson had555 several complex motivations that I can only briefly list here: (1) the huge generation gap

produced by WWI and the consequent individuation of a young generation neatly

separated from the previous generation; (2) the cultural stagnation of the 1920s that

compelled dozens of young philosophers to search for alternative inspirations

(Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, but also Freud and Marx); (3) Bergson’s engagement560 in WWI propaganda; (4) the massive ‘‘Bergsonization’’—partially real, partially

imaginary—of the literary field between 1900 and 1925 that lent Bergsonism a vague

ideological halo.

But, even though these young, angry people, born at the beginning of the twentieth

century, were affirming their own intellectual projects by first negating Bergson’s565 philosophy, they were, willy-nilly, influenced by the author of Creative Evolution. It is

impossible to describe this influence in a few lines, so I limit myself to two central factors.

As occurred in Germany some years earlier (between 1880 and 1910), we must consider

the professionalization of philosophy; however, after WWI, faced with the relative

sclerotization of the field, a small group of young individuals, newly trained in570 philosophy, were drawn to the literary model of philosophical activity, the literary field

providing alternative careers (journalist, novelist, critic or writer of the ‘‘prose of ideas’’).

Given the strong influence of Bergsonism on this field—very appealing for those among

them who had already acquired a good deal of intellectual capital—we may speculate that

some of the models and intellectual ‘‘postures’’ inspired by Bergsonism did in fact575 influence a great number of apprentice philosophers. Another reason for this

‘‘unconscious’’ influence is the French high school and university philosophy curricula,

which, since Victor Cousin’s reform, had included basic training in psychology.

As mentioned earlier, during the 1920s Bergsonism was relatively important in the field of

psychology.580 These, then, are some of the reasons why young phenomenologists like Sartre and

Merleau-Ponty were at first influenced by Bergson and later interiorized a series of



‘‘Bergsonian’’ intellectual habiti.46 At the beginning of the 1930s, after the publication of

Politzer’s pamphlet, it was almost impossible—at least in a left-wing atheist context—to

be, at one and the same time, a young intellectual and a ‘‘Bergsonian.’’47 But even in585 their rejection of Bergsonism, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were still strongly influenced by

it. The channels through which phenomenology spread in France in the 1930s followed

‘‘Bergsonian’’ modalities. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Emmanuel Levinas (who published

one of the first introductions to Husserl, which was itself oriented by Bergson insofar as it

proposed to integrate Bergson’s method with Husserl’s) were searching in phenomen-590 ology—first in Husserl’s, then in Heidegger’s—for a more ‘‘concrete’’ approach to

human experience, to corporeality, to human action in the world, and for a way to grasp

the ‘‘concreteness’’ of reality in an almost intuitive way. At the same time, they saw

Husserl’s phenomenology as the opposite to the abstract ‘‘intellectualism’’ of

Brunschivcg’s neo-Kantianism. As Florence Cayemaex has pointed out, both Sartre’s595 and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology follow the direction of a ‘‘Bergsonian’’ pragmatic

theory of consciousness that discards almost completely the problematic of constitution,

which was crucial for Husserl.48

In the final analysis, we can say that the most significant obstacle to Bergson’s

influence on the new generations after WWI, which marked him out as an ‘‘irrational’’600 philosopher of the subject, was precisely the incredible influence he had on the arts from

the beginning of the century.49 It is as though the tremendous influence of his concepts

outside of philosophy, and the resulting trivialization of his philosophy led to his

‘‘expulsion’’ from the academic milieu. His ostracism—strongly bound up with the

particular structuration of French philosophy around 1900—was aggravated by Bergson’s605 relatively marginal position inside the academic world: except for the two years he taught

at the Ecole normale, Bergson was never a professor at a university, that is, he never had

any students, as Leon Brunschvicg had, for example. Thus, he never had the opportunity

to establish a ‘‘school,’’ as Husserl had in Germany.

Francois Azouvi and, before him, Renzo Ragghianti have emphasized the extent to610 which, since the end of the nineteenth century, the philosophers gathered around the

Revue de metaphysique et de morale were hostile to Bergson’s philosophy, to his conception

of free will based on duration and, after the publication of ‘‘Introduction a la

metaphysique,’’ to his conception of intuition as a method in metaphysics.50 The

members of the journal’s editorial board (Emile-August Chartier, commonly known as615 ‘‘Alain,’’ Leon Brunschvicg, Celestin Bougle, Elie Halevy, Xavier Leon, Andre Lalande)

adhered to an original combination of Cartesian and neo-Kantian rationalism and

republican ideals and could not but be skeptical about some of the conclusions of

Bergsonian philosophy: they considered his philosophy too metaphysical and lacking in

argumentative proofs, and saw it as virtually irrational. As Xavier Leon wrote to Elie620 Halevy in 1902, the editorial board of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale was composed

of ‘‘resolute anti-Bergsonians.’’51

On the other hand, these philosophers also found in Bergson’s ‘‘spiritualist’’

philosophy a potential ally against the main enemy of their Revue: the old positivism and

empiricism of Renan and Taine and the new version of the same which formed the very625 backbone of Theodule Ribot’s Revue philosophique. Bergson’s conception of metaphysics

as knowledge based on the positive results of science, while aiming to provide a ground

for science (and going further than science), his will to defend philosophy from scientistic

868 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


reductionism, his conception of liberty, with the aim of protecting the mind from natural

causality—were all compatible with the aims of the Revue de metaphysique. Bergson630 published various essays in the journal, participated at the meetings of the Societe

francaise de philosophie and in the first international philosophical congresses, both of

which were promoted by members of the journal. Finally, he participated in the project

of the philosophical dictionary promoted by Andre Lalande, which engaged the entire

network surrounding the Revue. One can therefore say with reason, as Frederic Worms635 has done, that Bergson concretely contributed to the formation of a peculiar moment in

French philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, which moment was unified

by particular concepts or problems, and above all with the question of mind (or esprit).

But what we cannot say is that Bergson contributed to the formation of a real school: for

Brunschvig, Alain and their fellow-intellectuals, the only aspect of Bergsonian philosophy640 that was acceptable was its pars denstruens, namely, its criticism of dogmatic ‘‘positivism’’

(psycho-physical parallelism, atomism, etc.). But Bergson’s attempt to ground philosophy

in intuition, his rejection of Kantianism, his very conception of duration, and his attempt

at deducing categories—all these were rejected as unacceptable.

In conclusion, we can say that Bergson’s influence on contemporary French645 philosophy cannot be reduced to a simple question of school or lineage. To understand

the modalities of its presence in twentieth-century philosophical discourse as a whole,

one has to take into account the structuration of the philosophical field, its interaction

with the other fields, its development, the polemics that fracture it, and to inscribe the

whole picture within the larger socio-economic context of the twentieth century.

650 NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Life: Experience and Science’’ (1985), in Aesthetics, Method, andEpistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, et al., in The Essential Works ofMichel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2,

655 466, 467, 466.2. In a 1983 interview, Foucault opposed Canguilhem’s and Cavailles’ ‘‘concrete’’ resistance to

‘‘existentialists’’’ inactivity during the war. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘Politics and Ethics: AnInterview,’’ trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1991), 373–80.

660 3. See Alain Badiou, ‘‘The Adventure of French Philosophy,’’ New Left Review 35 (September–October 2005): 67–77.

4. See the only reconstruction of Derrida’s intellectual itinerary which is worthy of mention,Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Ph.D. diss., HarvardUniversity, 2009).

665 5. See Madeleine Barthelemy-Madaule, ‘‘Lire Bergson,’’ review of Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze,Etudes bergsoniennes 8 (1969): 85–120, which stresses Deleuze’s structuralist approach.

6. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Theatrum Philosophicum,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: SelectedEssays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 165–96.

670 7. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1980.

8. Badiou published a review of Deleuze’s Le Pli [The Fold] in 1989 in the Annuaire philosophique, butwas already quoting him in his 1982’s Theory of the Subject.



9. See the French transcription of his 1993 seminar ‘‘Theorie des categories,’’ http://675 www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm (accessed 1 August 2011).

10. Francois Wahl, ‘‘Le soustractive,’’ foreword to Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1991),9–54. ‘‘The parallel could seem bizarre,’’ Wahl writes, ‘‘Deleuze saves Bergson thanks toNietzsche, Badiou saves Plato through Cantor’’ (10).

11. Eric Alliez, ‘‘Virtual Philosophy,’’ in The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s680 Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004); Eric

Alliez, ‘‘Deleuze’s Bergsonism,’’ in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of LeadingPhilosophers, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 394–41. These essays wereoriginally published in French by the Synthelabo publishing house, which in 1997 alsopublished the proceedings of a conference on Bergson, Bergson et les neurosciences, ed. Philippe

685 Galois and Gerard Fortzy.12. Eric Alliez, De l’impossibilite de la phenomenologie. Sur la philosophie francaise contemporaine (Paris:

Vrin, 1995).13. Alliez is referring to Dominique Janicaud’s book, Le Tournant theologique de la phenomenologie

francaise (Combas: l’Eclat, 1991).690 14. Alliez, De l’impossibilite de la phenomenologie, 48.

15. Alain Badiou, ‘‘One, Multiple, Multiplicity,’’ in Number and Numbers, trans. RobinMackay(New York: Politis, 2008); originally published as ‘‘Un, multiple, multiplicite(s),’’ inMultiptudes 1.1 (2000): 195–211.

16. Regarding agregation’s importance for French philosophy, see Alan D. Schrift, ‘‘The Effects of695 the Agregation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,’’ Journal of the

History of Philosophy 46.3 (2008): 449–74.17. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?,’’ in The Cambridge

Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005).

700 18. See Foucault’s 1966’s interviews with Claude Bonnefoy and Marie Chapsal published in thefirst volume of his Dits et ecrits.

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Jean-Paul Sartre repond. Entretien avec Bernard Pingaud,’’ L’Arc 30(1966): 87.

20. Canguilhem, ‘‘The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?,’’ 617.705 21. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman

(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 256.22. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism Today, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin

Press, 1964).23. See: Georges Politzer’s articles published in La Pensee and later published in the first volume of

710 the Ecrits (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1973), such as ‘‘Dans la cave de l’aveugle – Chroniques del’obscurantisme contemporain’’; Paul Nizan, Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order(1932), trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Presses, 1971); Jean Kanapa,L’Existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947); Henri Maugin, LaSainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947), and the articles published in the war’s

715 immediate aftermath, in La Pensee (‘‘L’esprit encyclopedique et la tradition philosophiquefrancaise,’’ in La Pensee, October 1945 and April 1946) ; ‘‘Du bergsonisme a l’existentialisme,’’in L’activite philosophique contemporaine en France et aux Etats-Unis, ed. Marvin Farber (Paris: Puf,1950), vol. 2 ; the articles published in the Nouvelle critique during the 1950s and laterpublished in Lucien Seve, La Philosophie francaise contemporaine et sa genese de 1789 a nos jours

720 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962) ; Georges Politzer’s articles published in La Pensee and laterpublished in the first volume of Ecrits (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1973), such as ‘‘Dans la cave del’aveugle – Chroniques de l’obscurantisme contemporain.’’

24. Louis Althusser, ‘‘The Return to Hegel,’’ in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. FrancoisMatheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997).

725 25. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 25.26. Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–67), ed. Francois

Matheron, trans. Georges M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 5.

870 GIUSEPPE BIANCO


27. According to Althusser’s (mis)interpretation of Levi-Strauss, the ethnologist had argued that‘‘savage’’ thought was superior to ‘‘civilized’’ thought, because of its ability to think

730 secondary qualities, singularity, and thus concreteness. (‘‘On Levi-Strauss,’’ in The HumanistControversy, 30).

28. See Althusser’s ‘‘Texte sur la lutte ideologique’’ [Text on the ideological fight], of 1954 or1955, text read at a PCF meeting (Fonds Louis Althusser, Archives of the IMEC, Institut de lamemoire de l’edition contemporaine, ALT2 A42–02.11) and the manuscript, probably of

735 1958 (Fonds Louis Althusser, IMEC, ALT2. A58–04.04), entitled ‘‘Note sur les courants de laphilosophie contemporaine.’’ Here, Althusser names ‘‘the famous ‘existentialist’ current(Merleau, Sartre, Aron, Canguilhem etc.)’’ and denounces Canguilhem for proposing a‘‘subjective theory of the normal and the pathological.’’

29. See the first forthcoming volume of Georges Canguilhem’s Œuvres completes (Paris: Vrin,740 2012) and my forthcoming essay ‘‘Origins of Canguilhem’s ‘Vitalism,’’’ in Vitalism and the

Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010, ed. C. Wolfe and S. Normandin(London: Springer, 2012).

30. See my introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s Commentaire au IIIe chapitre de l’evolutioncreatrice, Annales bergsoniennes, tome 3, Bergson et la science, ed. Frederic Worms (Paris: PUF,

745 2007).31. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘Note sur la situation faite en France a la philosophie biologique,’’

Revue de metaphysique et de morale 3–4 (juillet–octobre 1947): 322–32.32. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 137.33. See the last essay published in the second edition of The Normal and the Pathological, entitled ‘‘A

750 New Concept in Pathology: The Error.’’ In this essay, Canguilhem shows the limits of histheory when faced with the new pathologies tied to DNA mutations: apparently thosepathologies have nothing to do with the diminished normative power of an organism placedin a new environment; on the contrary, they depend on an ‘‘objective’’ error linked to thetransmission of the genetic code.

755 34. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘Le concept et la vie,’’ in Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences(Paris: Vrin, 1983), 348, 341, 339.

35. Some authors have worked, from very different perspectives and in very different contexts, onthe hypothesis of the relative compatibility of Bergsonism and structuralism. See, for instance,Maria De Palo, ‘‘Breal, Bergson et la question de l’arbitraire du signe,’’ in Henri Bergson: esprit

760 et langage, ed. Claudia Stancati, Dom. Chirico, and F. Vercillo (Liege-Bruxelles: PierreMardaga, 2001); and Patrice Maniglier, ‘‘Bergson Structuralist? Beyond the FoucauldianOpposition between Life and Concept’’ (paper presented at the conference ‘‘Bergson andBergsonism,’’ Centre francais de culture, London, 5 April 2008).

36. I am not interested in developing this remark in this context, but a scarlet thread clearly runs765 from the lectures given at the Ecole Normale in 1954 and 1955, entitled ‘‘Problemes de

l’anthropologie,’’ to his Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s pragmatic anthropology and Words andThings.

37. Jacques Lautman, Canguilhem’s student during the 1960s writes that his professor was‘‘teaching the lack of confidence in the philosophies of existence’’ and ‘‘criticizing the

770 interpretations of Bergson as an existentialist manque’’ (see Jacques Lautman, ‘‘Un stoıcienchaleureux,’’ Revue d’histoire des sciences 53.1 [2000]: 38). But this antipathy for existentialistphenomenology was not followed by the structuralist dogmatism: ‘‘concept’s necessity’’ wasalways tied to the ‘‘fundamental reference to the subject who suffers and creates the norm.’’Thus, Canguilhem’s ‘‘philosophy of the concept is prior to that of existence, but it refuses

775 structuralism and it is tied to an anthropology’’ (41). Lautman concludes that, very strangely,in the 1960s ‘‘Althusserians and Structuralists who wanted to get rid of any thought linked tosubjectivism and hermeneutics, turned towards him . . . : the misunderstandings were huge onseveral topics and the dogmatism of those new encyclopedists made the master smile’’ (41–42).

38. Levi-Strauss’s intellectual trajectory was not rectilinear. In A World on the Wane he recounts780 that, during his philosophical apprenticeship, he hated the dogmatisms of Bergsonism and used

to counterattack it the Politzerian category of ‘‘sense.’’



39. Jacques Lacan, La psychose paranoıaque et ses rapports avec la personnalite (Paris: Seuil, 1998).40. The influence of Politzer on Lacan’s theory before ‘‘Rome’s speech’’ (namely, before his

fifties’ ‘‘Structuralist turn’’) is well known. The disappearance of Politzer’s name from785 psychoanalytical theory and, from political theory, thanks to Althusser, was caused by an essay

that the Lacanians Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire published in the July 1961 issue of theLes Temps Modernes, ‘‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,’’ trans. Patrick Coleman,Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 118–78). Here, following Lacan, they attack Politzer’s ‘‘concretepsychology’s’’ model of sense and its criticism of the notion of the unconscious.

790 41. In Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensee philosophique (Paris: Puf, 1991), 1003–28.42. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. John Wild and James

M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963); Martial Gueroult, Leconinaugurale, College de France, 1951.

43. Hyppolite, Figures de la pensee philosophique, 1028.795 44. See, for instance, Ferdinand Alquie, ‘‘Bergson et la Revue de metaphysique et de morale,’’ Revue

de metaphysique et de morale 48.4 (1941): 315–28.45. Foucault, ‘‘Jean Hyppolite. 1907–1968,’’ in Dits et ecrits, I.46. As Vincent de Coerebyter has shown, Sartre begun his philosophical career inspired by

Bergson. See his excellent Sartre avant la phenomenologie (Bruxelles: Ousia, 2005).800 47. Bergson was still enjoying some success in ‘‘non-conformist’’ Catholic milieus, such as that of

Emmanuel Mounier’s journal Esprit. His texts were also still used and praised by thinkers ofthe generation in between that of Bergson and of Sartre, like Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel, LouisLavelle, and Rene Le Senne.

48. Florence Cayemaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson. Les phenomenologie existentialistes et leur805 heritage bergsonien (Hildsheim: Olms, 2005).

49. See, for example, Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

50. Francois Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson (Paris: Puf, 2007); Renzo Ragghianti, Dalla fisiologia dellasensazione all’etica dell’effort. Ricerche sull’apprendistato filosofico di Alain (Florence: Le Lettere,

810 1993).51. Xavier Leon to Elie Halevy, 3–6 April 1902, in Lettere di Henri Bergson, ed. Renzo Ragghianti

(Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 34.

872 GIUSEPPE BIANCO

Documents

Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy