Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands of Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Sylvére Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004), p.33. As Deleuze says ‘The notion of difference promises to throw light on the philosophy of Bergson and inversely, Bergsonism promises to make an inestimable contribution to a philosophy of difference’ Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, p.32. They are the two short papers, originally published in 1956, gathered together in Desert Islands (‘Bergson, 1859–1941’; and ‘Bergson's Conception of Difference’); and his full‐length study Bergsonism [1966], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988). I have in mind here, not only Derrida and Lyotard, but also Irigaray and Kristeva, whose conceptions of difference, including sexual difference, must be closely allied with Derrideanism and his critique of binary structures. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). While many feminists, such as Alice Jardine, in Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Rosi Braidotti, in Patterns of Dissonance (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), and even Irigaray herself believed Deleuze deflected from a feminist focus on sexual difference, more recent feminist texts have seen the possibility of a more fruitful and productive interchange between Deleuzian thought and feminist theory. See Tamsin Lorraine's Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Dorothea Olkowski's Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Claire Colebrook's Understanding Deleuze (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002), Braidotti's later work, including Nomadic Subjects (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), as well as Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds, Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000). Deleuze, Desert Islands, pp.26–27. Deleuze, Desert Islands, pp.45–47. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp.129–132. Bergson, The Creative Mind, pp.206–207. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p.147. Deleuze understands this dual movement from one side as a double foundation, and from the other, as a founding repetition. See Deleuze, Desert Islands, pp.23–24. See, for example, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (London: Harper Collins, 1984), and Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1997). ‘[…] Life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions along which its impetus is divided.’ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p.99. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.55.