Suzanne Guerlac. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. | Vodiči, Projekti, Istraživanja od Filozofija

Time’s Books / KronoScope 12:1 (2012) 104-125 115

Suzanne Guerlac. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 230pp.

Henri Bergson’s philosophy has long stood for a strong plea for the primacy of

time. Bergson not only took time as the primary ‘object’ of his thought; he

also made time the subject or condition of his thought, and unfolded a meta-

physics predicated upon the difference that time makes (the latter phrase hav-

ing both figural and literal meanings). The title of Suzanne Guerlac’s lucid,

engaged reading of Bergson takes us right to the heart of the matter—the

attempt to ‘think time’ conceptually and physically necessarily entailed ‘think-

ing in time’. Bergson’s philosophy, Guerlac reminds us, responds to comple-

mentary questions fundamental to the study of time: How is thought changed

by thinking in time, as completely and rigorously as possible, and how does

the notion of time change as it is thought within a temporal metaphysics?

The substantive center of Guerlac’s book (chapters 3 and 4) is a detailed

explication and meticulous narration of Bergson’s ‘thinking in time’ in two

seminal early works, Time and Free Will (1888) and Matter and Memory

(1896). But Guerlac’s scope is ultimately much wider. The introduction to

Bergson’s method of thinking in time is framed by situating Bergson as a prod-

uct of his time (chapter 2, “From the Certainties of Mechanism to the Anxie-

ties of Indeterminism”), a thinker ahead of his time (chapter 6, “Current

Issues), and as an alternative to and/or resonant voice in the dominant French

philosophies of our time (chapter 5, “Channels of Current Reception”). Guer-

lac’s book, then, performs a complex double duty of discovery and recovery:

on the one hand, it purports to take up Bergson afresh, following his founda-

tional works in and on their own terms, in order to inform the reader of his

thought’s inner workings; on the other hand, its intent is revisionary, seeking

to resituate Bergson’s thought in the histories of French philosophy, twentieth-

century science, and ‘French theory’ as received and practiced in the North

American academic context.

Guerlac’s introduction to Bergson’s thought begins in conventional form.

Chapter 1, “Bergson and Bergsonisms,” asserts the essential premises of Berg-

son’s time philosophy, breezes through a brief overview of his works and their

seminal claims, and concludes with a truncated biography of his life and the

reception of his work in French and North American intellectual contexts.

Guerlac underscores from the outset that “Bergson thinks time as force” (2).

The full force, as it were, of thinking in time reveals in Guerlac’s account that

“thinking in time…will always be incommensurable with language, which

crushes duration through its very iterative structure.” Because Bergson thinks

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Suzanne Guerlac. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 230pp.

Henri Bergson’s philosophy has long stood for a strong plea for the primacy of time. Bergson not only took time as the primary ‘object’ of his thought; he also made time the subject or condition of his thought, and unfolded a meta- physics predicated upon the difference that time makes (the latter phrase hav- ing both figural and literal meanings). The title of Suzanne Guerlac’s lucid, engaged reading of Bergson takes us right to the heart of the matter—the attempt to ‘think time’ conceptually and physically necessarily entailed ‘think- ing in time’. Bergson’s philosophy, Guerlac reminds us, responds to comple- mentary questions fundamental to the study of time: How is thought changed by thinking in time, as completely and rigorously as possible, and how does the notion of time change as it is thought within a temporal metaphysics? The substantive center of Guerlac’s book (chapters 3 and 4) is a detailed explication and meticulous narration of Bergson’s ‘thinking in time’ in two seminal early works, Time and Free Will (1888) and Matter and Memory (1896). But Guerlac’s scope is ultimately much wider. The introduction to Bergson’s method of thinking in time is framed by situating Bergson as a prod- uct of his time (chapter 2, “From the Certainties of Mechanism to the Anxie- ties of Indeterminism”), a thinker ahead of his time (chapter 6, “Current Issues), and as an alternative to and/or resonant voice in the dominant French philosophies of our time (chapter 5, “Channels of Current Reception”). Guer- lac’s book, then, performs a complex double duty of discovery and recovery: on the one hand, it purports to take up Bergson afresh, following his founda- tional works in and on their own terms, in order to inform the reader of his thought’s inner workings; on the other hand, its intent is revisionary, seeking to resituate Bergson’s thought in the histories of French philosophy, twentieth- century science, and ‘French theory’ as received and practiced in the North American academic context. Guerlac’s introduction to Bergson’s thought begins in conventional form. Chapter 1, “Bergson and Bergsonisms,” asserts the essential premises of Berg- son’s time philosophy, breezes through a brief overview of his works and their seminal claims, and concludes with a truncated biography of his life and the reception of his work in French and North American intellectual contexts. Guerlac underscores from the outset that “Bergson thinks time as force” (2). The full force, as it were, of thinking in time reveals in Guerlac’s account that “thinking in time…will always be incommensurable with language, which crushes duration through its very iterative structure.” Because Bergson thinks

time concretely, the subject in Bergson “is primarily a subject of action, not of present consciousness or knowledge” (4). Guerlac thus reads Bergson’s work on time in terms of its response to mathematics and physics, rather than phi- losophy as such. After tracing the initial and sudden fame and fashion Berg- son’s thought enjoyed, Guerlac notes the subsequent “appropriations of his thought that occurred in relation to a wide range of ideological, esthetic, political, spiritual, and institutional agendas” (10), from his reception in America in the line of Emerson and Whitman to his stature in France as a philosopher of Symbolism. In Guerlac’s view, this “proliferation of Bergson- isms” created a tangled web around his work, to the point where “we could say that both too much and too little have been said about Bergson” (13). Guerlac seeks to rectify the situation by returning rigorously to his actual writings and then correcting the distortions his thought has undergone in its various interpretations. In chapter 2, “From the Certainties of Mechanism to the Anxieties of Inde- terminism,” Guerlac presents Bergson’s thought as emerging in response to and being shaped by developments in the scientific and psychological ideas of his time. On the one hand, the successes of mechanistic science induced “a sense of wonder at the efficacy of science and its visible mastery of the physical world,” and on the other hand, “a profound sense of crisis” emerges as science (read quantum mechanics) turns to indeterminism and “appears to have become unstuck from the world and to have left it to chaos” (17). Here, Guer- lac’s science-inflected account recapitulates in condensed form ground covered thoroughly in the volume Bergson and the Evolution of Physics , edited by P.A.Y. Gunter, (1969) and Milič Čapek’s Bergson and Modern Physics: A Re-interpre- tation and Reevaluation (1971). Guerlac’s quickly sketched history of ideas enables her to draw out key correlations between science and Bergson’s thought. At important times, the correlations become somewhat simple. For instance, she analogizes Bergson’s claim that duration is not susceptible to expression in conventional language to quantum theorists’ assertions that common sense language fails in describing quantum mechanics (40-41), and she implicitly (and even explicitly) attributes Bergson’s “irrationalism,” the quality of his work that led to many harsh criticisms and dismissals of it as a form of “mysticism,” to its engagement with the conceptions of matter in quantum theory that do not seem reducible to or expressible in rational forms of thought. In making these correlations, Guerlac seems to bracket temporar- ily the premise that Bergson’s subject is oriented towards action in the macro- scopic world—he is concerned, after all, with living beings, not subatomic particles. Nonetheless, Guerlac’s general conclusion that Bergson’s philosophy

English translation 1988) and Cinema 1 (published 1983, English translation

and Cinema 2 (published 1985, English translation 1989). In broad strokes, Guerlac asserts, Deleuze’s Bergsonism offered an alternative to the theoretical dead-ends reached in the reception of language-centered structur- alism and post-structuralism. Guerlac succinctly shows how the post-struc- tural discourse generated by and around Jacques Derrida erroneously dismissed Bergson as a phenomenologist, and how Bergson reenters theory discourse in Deleuze outside of a semiologically-centered philosophy. She then argues that Deleuze’s reading of Bergson is impoverished by its rationalism and its drain- ing of his work of its metaphysical foundations. This position, while productively contentious, does not seem to recognize sufficiently Deleuze’s premise that metaphysics was for Bergson a “method of thought” devoted to discerning the posing of “false problems” in philosophy— two aspects of Bergson’s thought central in Guerlac’s account of Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory. Guerlac also passes over Deleuze’s last chapter in Bergsonism that asserts the social function of the mystic, a tenet of Bergson’s thought she evokes repeatedly with approval. Finally, in an astutely suggestive turn, Guerlac contends that Deleuze’s reading of Bergson reintroduced the latter’s notion of the virtual at a cultural moment when a slippage in the term virtual occurred: the virtual moved from the spiritual realm of memory in Bergson to the material realm of virtual reality and informatics. Guerlac points approvingly to the treatment of the virtual in the work of Mark Hansen and Brian Massumi that recuperates Bergson’s emphasis on the affective dimen- sion, thus indicating how a post-Deleuze reception of Bergson ultimately returns to Bergson more properly. Guerlac’s final body chapter, “Current Issues,” evokes Bergson’s work in the context of time, chaos theory, and cybernetics. To be fair, the scope of this brief chapter would merit a book in itself—the extent to which Bergson’s work anticipates and has relevance for chaos theory and cybernetics is a subject of much debate. But Guerlac is highly and unnecessarily selective here: for instance, she only broaches chaos theory in relation to the problem of deter- minism through the lens of Stephen Kellert’s In the Wake of Chaos (1988) and, in passing, to the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, a limited win- dow on a larger discussion pursued by Deleuze, Manuel Delanda, Michel Serres, and Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Guerlac’s study serves as an excellent introduction to Bergson’s nuanced thinking in and about time. Its dual agenda of introducing Bergson’s philoso- phy and reintroducing it in several historical contexts makes her book a major landmark in recent Bergson studies and interdisciplinary work on time. When

she moves from explicating Bergson to assessing critically his reception in con- temporary theoretical discourse, she opens provocative avenues of inquiry, even if in an overly preliminary fashion. This book contributes richly to Berg- son studies, and it identifies central questions regarding how his work may and should be read now. It will serve as an important point of reference in dis- course on Bergson and time in years to come.

Paul Harris Loyola Marymount University

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