One of Deleuze's Bergsonisms

Abstract

In this article I attempt to reveal some continuities between the anti-psychoanalytic stance adopted by Gilles Deleuze in his later work and Henri Bergson's early philosophy. On account of these continuities I hope to provide a glimpse into what I believe is a century-old tangent of philosophical resistance to the methods and theories of Freudian psychoanalysis. In order to achieve this, I start with a brief meditation on the challenges and benefits of cross-generational inheritance and collaboration in philosophy. The purpose of this is twofold – to explore some general conditions for such collaboration and to tease out some of the implications of these conditions for the substantive argument my specific reading of Bergson via Deleuze occasions. I then expound on Bergson's theory of duration and some of the uses to which Deleuze puts it in the latter part of his career. In this I outline several fecund similarities between Bergson's critique of associationism and Deleuze's attack on Freud. Finally, I attempt a partial evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis from the joint, albeit naturally disjointed, perspective of my primary sources.