Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as interpreters of Henri Bergson

In this essay I concentrate on the relation between Deleuze's philosophy and Merleau-Ponty's. I examine the question of whether their philosophical projects are as widely divergent as Deleuze wants the reader to believe. Since explicit references to Merleau-Ponty in the work of Deleuze are rather rare, I take the detour of examining their interpretations of Henri Bergson, a philosopher they both recognized as an important source of inspiration. More specifically, I study the references to Bergson in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze that deal with difference and immanence. I show that Merleau-Ponty merely reads Bergson as a difference thinker, whereas Deleuze stresses Bergson's immanentism. However, these two positions do not exclude one another. First of all, there are many similarities with respect to which Bergsonian concepts both authors focus on and how they interpret them. Secondly, as Deleuze's own philosophy illustrates, a philosophy of difference is not incompatible with immanentism. However, there is one passage in Cinema I. The Movement-Image in which Deleuze states that there is a fundamental difference between the battle against dualism as it is fought by Bergson on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. Since Deleuze's search for an immanent philosophy relies heavily on concepts introduced by Bergson, this passage can help to indicate to what degree the aforementioned similarities between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's immanentism hold

The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film

In this contribution, I would like to examine the way in which Bakhtin, in the two essays dedicated to the chronotope, lays the foundations for a theory of literary imagination. […] His concept of the chronotope may be interpreted as a contribution to a tradition in which Henri Bergson, William James, Charles Sander Peirce and Gilles Deleuze have been key figures. Like these four authors, Bakhtin is a philosopher in the school of pragmatism. His predilection for what Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson have called “prosaics” puts him right at the heart of a philosophical family that calls forth multiplicity against metaphysical essentialism, and prefers the mundane to the universal. It seems wise to proceed carefully in the attempt to reconstruct Bakhtin’s theory of imagination. In this contribution to the debate, I choose to develop a philosophical dialogue between Bakhtin and the above-mentioned philosophical family. More specifically, it seems to me that the ideal point of departure for examining the way in which Bakhtin attempts to get to the bottom of the mysteries of literary imagination is Gilles Deleuze’s synthesis of Bergson’s epistemological view on knowledge as “the perception of images”, as well as Peirce’s theory of experience based on a typology of images. In the following, I show that Bakhtin’s view of the temporal-spatial constellations in literature demonstrates a strong affinity to the Bergsonian view that perception of the spatial world is colored by the lived time experienced by the observer. Based on this observation, I then develop a typology of images which places the concept of the chronotope in a more systematic framework

Memory transition between communicating agents

Abstract: What happens to a memory when it has been externalised and embodied but has not reached its addressee yet? A letter that has been written but has not been read, a monument before it is unveiled or a Neolithic tool buried in the ground – all these objects harbour human memories engrained in their physicality; messages intended for those who will read the letter, admire the monument and hold the tool. According to Ilyenkov’s theory of objective idealism, the conscious and wilful input encoded in all manmade objects as the ‘ideal’ has an objective existence, independent from the author, but this existence lasts only while memories are shared between communicating parties. If all human minds were absent from the world for a period of time, the ‘ideal’, or memories, would cease to exist. They would spring back to existence, however, once humans re-entered the world. Ilyenkov’s analysis of memories existing outside an individual human consciousness is informative and thorough but, following his line of thought, we would have to accept an ontological gap in the process of memory acquisition, storage and transmission. If there is a period, following memory acquisition and receding its transmission, when memories plainly do not exist, then each time a new reader, spectator or user perceives them, he or she must create the author’s memories ex nihilo. Bergson’s theory of duration and intuition can help us to resolve this paradox. This paper will explore the ontological characteristics of memory passage in communication taken at different stages of the process. There will be an indicationof how the findings of this investigation could be applicable to concrete cases of memory transmission. In particular, this concerns intergenerational communication, technological memory, the use of digital devices and the Internet

The limits of process: On (re)reading Henri Bergson

This article offers a reading of the work of Henri Bergson as it pertains to organizations through the lens of ideas drawn from critical realism. It suggests an alternative to interpretations based on a stark division between process and realist perspectives. Much of the existing literature presents a rather partial view of Bergson’s work. A review suggests some interesting parallels with themes in critical realism, notably the emergence of mind. Critical realism has a focus on process at its heart, but is also concerned with how the products of such processes become stabilized and form the conditions for action. This suggests that attention might usefully be paid to the relationship between organizational action and the sedimented practices grouped under the heading of ‘routines’. More attention to Bergson’s account of the relationship between instinct, intuition and intelligence provides a link to the social character of thought, something which can be mapped on to Archer’s work on reflexivity and the ‘internal conversation’. This suggests that our analyses need to pay attention to both memory and history, to building and dwelling, rather than the one-sided focus found in some process theory accounts

Douglass, Malcolm Paul

University of California, Los Angeles, English, Ph.D. 1981 Claremont Graduate University, Education, MA 1976 Amherst College, English, BA 1974https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/erfa_bios/1288/thumbnail.jp

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Bergson's theory of time seen through the work of Gilles Deleuze

In this article I examine the relation between the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze by looking at the way they refer to the time theory of Henri Bergson. It appears that, although Merleau-Ponty copies some fundamental Bergsonian insights on the nature of time, he presents himself as a critical reader of the latter. I will show that Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Bergson differs fundamentally from the one by Deleuze, but that Merleau-Ponty's 'corrections' to Bergson fit Deleuze's reading of Bergson very well. This indicates a similarity with respect to what is at stake in the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. The critical reference that Deleuze makes to Merleau-Ponty's conception of cinema and thus of movement is hence not justified, but the result of a selective and prototypical reading of the early Merleau-Ponty

Rhizomatic Time and Temporal Poetics in American Beauty

This essay deals with the temporality of film through an examination of narrative, structure and image in Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (2000), referring to both Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson‘s work on time. I argue that the repetition of formal elements (images, settings, colours, shapes, and textures) creates a kind of internal rhyme that is suggested appeals to human aesthetic rhythmic sensibilities and invites the spectators imaginative interplay. This temporal pattern speaks of a particularly human rhythmic design, and provides an escape from the ‘standardised, context free, homogeneous’ clock time ‘that structures and times our daily lives’.</jats:p