Experience vs. Concept The Role of Bergs PDF

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The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 855–872, 2011
Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in

5 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 as
10 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 Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was
presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ‘‘philosophy of experience’’ at the beginning of the
15 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. It
20 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 métaphysique 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 name
25 ‘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, Cavaillès, 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 the
30 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 métaphysique
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: g.bianco@warwick.ac.uk
ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/11/070855–18 ß 2011 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2011.626183
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856 GIUSEPPE BIANCO
this essay, slightly modified, is published again as an introduction to the English

35 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, of
40 rationality and of the concept,’’ like Jean Cavaillès’s, Gaston Bachelard’s, Alexandre
Koyré’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 twentieth
50 century, Bergson and Poincaré.1
We may ignore Poincaré, 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 Édouard Le Roy) and by neo-Kantians (like
Léon Brunschvicg), and let us take, as our point of departure, the role played by Bergson
55 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-scène—for instance Canguilhem, and
65 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 inheritor
70 of this latter tradition, after Cavaillès, Lévi-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 two
75 ‘‘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
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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 Cavaillès’s and Canguilhem’s. Sartre, like
85 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 by
90 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 protocols
105 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 simply
110 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 field
115 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 we
120 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 of
125 philosophy.
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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 past
130 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 the
135 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 nothing
140 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 of
145 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?) Félix Guattari the task of
150 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 of
155 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 to
160 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 even
165 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 young
170 students of the École normale, who were working at the crossroads of structuralist
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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-François Lyotard, and
175 Francois Châtelet—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 François Châtelet, Deleuze, and
Lyotard. This situation changed at the beginning of the 1980s: Lyotard’s philosophy
180 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 of
185 the anti-pensée 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 personal
195 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 the
200 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 Jankélévitch.
205 In his 1992 preface to Conditions, François 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, Éric 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 French
210 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’’
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constituted a kind of explosion: Deleuzian scholars attacked Badiou in the pages of the
journals Futur antérieur 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’s
230 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 erasure
235 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 encounter
240 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. After
245 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 naı̈ve 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 naı̈ve theodicy devoid of a sense of lack, struggle, and tragedy, and
255 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.
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On the other hand, since the 1940-41 academic year, Bergson’s texts had been
included in the agrégation programmes and his texts considered as classics, in the sense that
265 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 ‘‘Société des amis de Bergson,’’ and founded the
journal, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes. This group worked on the ‘‘canonization’’ of Bergson’s
270 work, making available, in three tomes, his essays, Écrits et paroles, which had been out of
print, and organizing, in 1959, a huge centenary conference. The presence of Bergson’s
texts in the agrégation programme,16 along with the activity of the Société, obliged
prominent philosophers and historians of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem,
Martial Gueroult, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Etienne Gilson, Raymond
275 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 École Normale and in his first lesson at the
280 Collège 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 a
285 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 of
300 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 Lévi-Strauss’s 1961 book, The Savage
305 Mind and was later fueled by Foucault in 1966, when it provoked Sartre’s reaction.18
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This polemical confrontation posited on the side of Lévi-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 ignoring
310 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 Cavaillès, 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 of
315 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 of
320 Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind.
In ‘‘History and Dialectics,’’ the book’s last chapter, Lévi-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 Lévi-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 of
330 the human subject’s, which was supposed to be irreducible to any intellectual operation
of ‘‘distribution in space’’ (étalement dans l’espace).21Although neither Lévi-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. Lévi-Strauss
was implicitly comparing Bergson’s durational conception of life and mind to the Sartrean
335 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, Lévi-Strauss also mentions
Bergson in Totemism Today, crediting him for criticizing—in Morality and Religion—
340 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s idea of the essential difference between ‘‘primitive’’ thought and
that proper to ‘‘civilized’’ people.22 According to both Bergson and Lévi-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 Lévi-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 Lévy-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 temporal
350 character proper to duration and to creative impetus. Contrary to this explanation, Lévi-
Strauss argued that structuralism had shown that the classes that the mind produces have
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an objective meaning: ‘‘concrete thought’’ (la pensée 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 between
355 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 Lévi-Strauss, at least not before the
360 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 Sève23), 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, irrational
365 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 ‘‘The
370 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, and
375 to the ‘‘philosophy of science,’’ which included Auguste Comte, Antoine-Augustin
Cournot, Louis Couturat, Pierre Duhem, Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre
Koyré, 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 bourgeois
380 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 discarded
385 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 the
390 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
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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 relativity
400 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 of
410 ‘‘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 retrograde
415 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 Paul
420 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 Lévi-Strauss into the same box.27 But that was not all: in
425 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 ‘‘philosopher
430 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 École normale, he
was found himself at the crossroads of the Durkhemian sociologist Céléstin Bouglé and
the Cartesian, Kantian and ‘‘intellectualist’’ philosopher, Alain.29 In the 1920s, his essays
435 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 from
440 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.
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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 à la philosophie
biologique.’’31 Far from presenting his theories in simple continuity with Cartesian
450 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 an
455 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 Lévi-Strauss criticizes Bergson’s theory of knowledge. Lévi-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 as
460 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 good
465 friend and reader of Lévi-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 Lévi-Strauss’s denunciation of Bergson’s pragmatic theory of
470 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’’ (morcèlement). 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 exact
485 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
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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 between
495 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 Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who played a
central role in the concept/intuition mise-en-scène, also belonged to Canguilhem’s
generation and had similar reactions to Bergsonism during the 1930s. Lévi-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 a
505 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 Eugène Minkowski and Charles Blondel, for example,
borrowed several concepts from Bergson. But Lacan, from his 1932 dissertation on
510 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 that
515 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 Collège 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 École normale supérieure, where he worked closely with
Althusser. Hyppolite was also a very close friend of Merleau-Ponty, whom he in fact
525 replaced at the Collège 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
Collège de France.41 Following the tradition of all inaugural speeches, Hyppolite
mentioned his predecessors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martial Gueroult.42 He also
530 mentioned Bergson, who had been professor at the Collège 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 Martial
535 Gueroult represented. Hyppolite was following the protocol of inaugural addresses but,
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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 only
540 confrontation that had ever occurred was between Gueroult and Ferdinand Alquié on the
interpretation of Descartes. Alquié 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.’’ Alquié,
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 École 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 Lévi-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 had
555 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 engagement
560 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’s
565 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 in
570 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 fact
575 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
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‘‘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 in
585 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’s
595 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’s
605 relatively marginal position inside the academic world: except for the two years he taught
at the École normale, Bergson was never a professor at a university, that is, he never had
any students, as Léon Brunschvicg had, for example. Thus, he never had the opportunity
to establish a ‘‘school,’’ as Husserl had in Germany.
François Azouvi and, before him, Renzo Ragghianti have emphasized the extent to
610 which, since the end of the nineteenth century, the philosophers gathered around the
Revue de métaphysique et de morale were hostile to Bergson’s philosophy, to his conception
of free will based on duration and, after the publication of ‘‘Introduction à la
métaphysique,’’ to his conception of intuition as a method in metaphysics.50 The
members of the journal’s editorial board (Émile-August Chartier, commonly known as
615 ‘‘Alain,’’ Léon Brunschvicg, Céléstin Bouglé, Elie Halévy, Xavier Léon, André 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 Léon wrote to Elie
620 Halévy in 1902, the editorial board of the Revue de métaphysique 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 very
625 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
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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 métaphysique. Bergson
630 published various essays in the journal, participated at the meetings of the Société
française 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 André Lalande, which engaged the entire
network surrounding the Revue. One can therefore say with reason, as Frédéric Worms
635 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 philosophy
640 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 French
645 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, and
Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, et al., in The Essential Works of
Michel 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 Cavaillès’ ‘‘concrete’’ resistance to
‘‘existentialists’’’ inactivity during the war. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘Politics and Ethics: An
Interview,’’ 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., Harvard
University, 2009).
665 5. See Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, ‘‘Lire Bergson,’’ review of Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze,
Études bergsoniennes 8 (1969): 85–120, which stresses Deleuze’s structuralist approach.
6. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Theatrum Philosophicum,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays 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, but
was already quoting him in his 1982’s Theory of the Subject.
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870 GIUSEPPE BIANCO
9. See the French transcription of his 1993 seminar ‘‘Théorie des categories,’’ http://
675 www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm (accessed 1 August 2011).
10. François Wahl, ‘‘Le soustractive,’’ foreword to Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1991),
9–54. ‘‘The parallel could seem bizarre,’’ Wahl writes, ‘‘Deleuze saves Bergson thanks to
Nietzsche, Badiou saves Plato through Cantor’’ (10).
11. Éric Alliez, ‘‘Virtual Philosophy,’’ in The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s
680 Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004); Éric
Alliez, ‘‘Deleuze’s Bergsonism,’’ in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 394–41. These essays were
originally published in French by the Synthélabo publishing house, which in 1997 also
published the proceedings of a conference on Bergson, Bergson et les neurosciences, ed. Philippe
685 Galois and Gerard Fortzy.
12. Éric Alliez, De l’impossibilité de la phénoménologie. Sur la philosophie française contemporaine (Paris:
Vrin, 1995).
13. Alliez is referring to Dominique Janicaud’s book, Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie
française (Combas: l’Éclat, 1991).
690 14. Alliez, De l’impossibilité de la phénoménologie, 48.
15. Alain Badiou, ‘‘One, Multiple, Multiplicity,’’ in Number and Numbers, trans. Robin
Mackay(New York: Politis, 2008); originally published as ‘‘Un, multiple, multiplicité(s),’’ in
Multiptudes 1.1 (2000): 195–211.
16. Regarding agrégation’s importance for French philosophy, see Alan D. Schrift, ‘‘The Effects of
695 the Agrégation 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: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
700 18. See Foucault’s 1966’s interviews with Claude Bonnefoy and Marie Chapsal published in the
first volume of his Dits et écrits.
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Jean-Paul Sartre répond. Entretien avec Bernard Pingaud,’’ L’Arc 30
(1966): 87.
20. Canguilhem, ‘‘The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?,’’ 617.
705 21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 256.
22. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism Today, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin
Press, 1964).
23. See: Georges Politzer’s articles published in La Pensée and later published in the first volume of
710 the Écrits (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1973), such as ‘‘Dans la cave de l’aveugle – Chroniques de
l’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, La
Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947), and the articles published in the war’s
715 immediate aftermath, in La Pensée (‘‘L’esprit encyclopédique et la tradition philosophique
française,’’ in La Pensée, October 1945 and April 1946) ; ‘‘Du bergsonisme à l’existentialisme,’’
in L’activité 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 later
published in Lucien Sève, La Philosophie française contemporaine et sa genèse de 1789 à nos jours
720 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962) ; Georges Politzer’s articles published in La Pensée and later
published in the first volume of Écrits (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1973), such as ‘‘Dans la cave de
l’aveugle – Chroniques de l’obscurantisme contemporain.’’
24. Louis Althusser, ‘‘The Return to Hegel,’’ in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. Francois
Matheron, 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. François
Matheron, trans. Georges M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 5.
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27. According to Althusser’s (mis)interpretation of Lévi-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 Lévi-Strauss,’’ in The Humanist
Controversy, 30).
28. See Althusser’s ‘‘Texte sur la lutte idéologique’’ [Text on the ideological fight], of 1954 or
1955, text read at a PCF meeting (Fonds Louis Althusser, Archives of the IMEC, Institut de la
mémoire de l’édition 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 la
philosophie 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 complètes (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’évolution
créatrice, Annales bergsoniennes, tome 3, Bergson et la science, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: PUF,
745 2007).
31. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique,’’
Revue de métaphysique et de morale 3–4 (juillet–octobre 1947): 322–32.
32. Lévi-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 his
theory when faced with the new pathologies tied to DNA mutations: apparently those
pathologies have nothing to do with the diminished normative power of an organism placed
in a new environment; on the contrary, they depend on an ‘‘objective’’ error linked to the
transmission of the genetic code.
755 34. Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘Le concept et la vie,’’ in Études 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, on
the hypothesis of the relative compatibility of Bergsonism and structuralism. See, for instance,
Maria De Palo, ‘‘Bréal, Bergson et la question de l’arbitraire du signe,’’ in Henri Bergson: esprit
760 et langage, ed. Claudia Stancati, Dom. Chiricò, and F. Vercillo (Liège-Bruxelles: Pierre
Mardaga, 2001); and Patrice Maniglier, ‘‘Bergson Structuralist? Beyond the Foucauldian
Opposition between Life and Concept’’ (paper presented at the conference ‘‘Bergson and
Bergsonism,’’ Centre français de culture, London, 5 April 2008).
36. I am not interested in developing this remark in this context, but a scarlet thread clearly runs
765 from the lectures given at the École Normale in 1954 and 1955, entitled ‘‘Problèmes de
l’anthropologie,’’ to his Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s pragmatic anthropology and Words and
Things.
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 manqué’’ (see Jacques Lautman, ‘‘Un stoı̈cien
chaleureux,’’ Revue d’histoire des sciences 53.1 [2000]: 38). But this antipathy for existentialist
phenomenology was not followed by the structuralist dogmatism: ‘‘concept’s necessity’’ was
always 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 to
subjectivism and hermeneutics, turned towards him . . . : the misunderstandings were huge on
several topics and the dogmatism of those new encyclopedists made the master smile’’ (41–42).
38. Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual trajectory was not rectilinear. In A World on the Wane he recounts
780 that, during his philosophical apprenticeship, he hated the dogmatisms of Bergsonism and used
to counterattack it the Politzerian category of ‘‘sense.’’
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872 GIUSEPPE BIANCO
39. Jacques Lacan, La psychose paranoı̈aque et ses rapports avec la personnalité (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 from
785 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 the
Les Temps Modernes, ‘‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,’’ trans. Patrick Coleman,
Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 118–78). Here, following Lacan, they attack Politzer’s ‘‘concrete
psychology’s’’ model of sense and its criticism of the notion of the unconscious.
790 41. In Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée 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, Leçon
inaugurale, Collège de France, 1951.
43. Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique, 1028.
795 44. See, for instance, Ferdinand Alquié, ‘‘Bergson et la Revue de métaphysique et de morale,’’ Revue
de métaphysique et de morale 48.4 (1941): 315–28.
45. Foucault, ‘‘Jean Hyppolite. 1907–1968,’’ in Dits et écrits, 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 of
the generation in between that of Bergson and of Sartre, like Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel, Louis
Lavelle, and René Le Senne.
48. Florence Cayemaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson. Les phénoménologie existentialistes et leur
805 héritage 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. François Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson (Paris: Puf, 2007); Renzo Ragghianti, Dalla fisiologia della
sensazione all’etica dell’effort. Ricerche sull’apprendistato filosofico di Alain (Florence: Le Lettere,
810 1993).
51. Xavier Léon to Elie Halévy, 3–6 April 1902, in Lettere di Henri Bergson, ed. Renzo Ragghianti
(Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 34.

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XML Template (2011) [5.10.

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

Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in

GROUP PORTRAIT OF THE PHILOSOPHERS?

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

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this essay, slightly modified, is published again as an introduction to the English

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EXPLICATING THE PHILOSOPHICAL: MULTIPLES AND MULTIPLICITIES

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

860 GIUSEPPE BIANCO

EXPLICATING THE PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLICATIONS: EXISTENCE AND STRUCTURE

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

864 GIUSEPPE BIANCO

These reflections were strongly influenced by Bergson, especially by Creative Evolution,

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868 GIUSEPPE BIANCO

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