Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

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The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 855872, 2011
Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in

Twentieth-Century French Philosophy
GIUSEPPE BIANCO
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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
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 Cavaille`s and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincare to Bergson. The latter was
presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the philosophy of experience at the beginning of the
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
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 Politzers
and Nizans critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of
the Revue de metaphysique 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
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, Cavaille`s, Sartre, MerleauPonty, 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
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 metaphysique
et de morale an essay on his doctoral supervisor, Georges Canguilhem. Some years later,
Department of Philosophy,
Email: g.bianco@warwick.ac.uk
University
of
Warwick,
Coventry,
CV4
7AL
United
Kingdom.
ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/11/07085518 2011 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2011.626183
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this essay, slightly modified, is published again as an introduction to the English

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 Sartres and Merleau-Pontys, from a philosophy of knowledge, of
rationality and of the concept, like Jean Cavaille`ss, Gaston Bachelards, Alexandre
Koyres, and Canguilhems 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,
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
century, Bergson and Poincare.1
We may ignore Poincare, 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 Edouard Le Roy) and by neo-Kantians (like
Leon Brunschvicg), and let us take, as our point of departure, the role played by Bergson
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.
Foucaults 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 Foucaults mise-en-sce`nefor instance Canguilhem, and
even Foucault, are placed on the Bergsonian side of the barricadebut 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
Brunschvicgs mathematism: Badiou implicitly considered himself as the last inheritor
of this latter tradition, after Cavaille`s, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan.
On the one hand, Foucaults and Badious 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 philosophys singularity in a broader European
context. But, on the other hand, they do not explain the reason why these two
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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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 Cavaille`ss and Canguilhems. Sartre, like
Merleau-Ponty, was opposed, since The Transcendence of the Ego and The Imagination, to
Bergsons 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
Bergsonism; Canguilhems trajectoryhe who was considered a simple inheritor of
Bachelards historical epistemology since the second half of the 1950swas formed by
the intellectualist anti-Bergsonian Alain Badiou, but, starting from the 1940s, he began
using concepts and analyses inspired by Bergsons The Creative Evolution, even if his
conception of philosophical practice was irreducible to the one proposed by Bergson.
Bergson himself conceived the progress of philosophy as inseparable from that of science.
The work of Jacques Derridawho had given a number of seminars on Bergson at the
Sorbonne but had never been inspired by his work, having been formed inside Suzanne
Bachelards epistemological and phenomenological schoolis, following Foucaults
reading, inexplicable.4
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
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
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
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
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
philosophy.
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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
fifteen years, though certainly, he was not the only reason for this Bergsonian new
wave. To understand why Bergsons 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 Bergsons model of irreversible temporality in Ilya
Prigogines and Isabelle Stengers work on dissipative systems, the success of the
neurosciences, the crisis of phenomenology and the search for alternative philosophical
sources that has also resulted in a serious historical and exegetical analysis of Bergsons
work, and many others. Nevertheless, it is absolutely certain that Deleuzes 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
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
Bergsonian studies.5 Deleuzes Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sensetwo works
exposing an original interpretation of structuralism and of Lacanian psychoanalysis
inscribed in a post-Kantian transcendental frameworkwere presented by Foucault in a
famous article published in Critique,6 and privately discussed by the Althusserians and in
Jacques Lacans seminar, who gives to his patient (student?) Felix Guattari the task of
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
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 Deleuzes 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
expound Deleuzes anti-Freudian and anti-Lacanian theory of desire without lack, by
means of his anti-Hegelian Bergsonism.7 Deleuzes Bergsonian borrowingswhich offset
his singularity in the problematic space of the 1960s that was dominated by
phenomenology, structuralism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysishad to wait for
the 1980s and the publication of his books on cinema to be fully acknowledged. But even
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 lanalyse, a journal published by a group of young
students of the Ecole 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 joinedlike Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
Francois Chateletthe 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 universitys supposed reigning troikaof Francois Chatelet, Deleuze, and
Lyotard. This situation changed at the beginning of the 1980s: Lyotards philosophy
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
the anti-pensee 68. It is in this context that Badious Being and Event and the Manifesto for
Philosophy were published. Badious aim was to demonstrateagainst 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 rightsthe
existence of universal truths, the possibility of philosophy and of an emancipatory politics;
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 Badioualthough
for other reasons and following very different modalitiesand could not ignore the
latters theoretical perspective.8 In a long note in What is philosophy?, he gave a personal
interpretation of Being and Event, discussing it in terms of the relation between his own
theory of virtual multiplicities and Badious concept of the multiple conceived as an
element of set theory. Since its publication, Badiou had devoted several sessions of his
seminar to Deleuzes book.9 The fulcrum of the following dialogue between the two
philosophersto which belong Deleuzes posthumous article The Actual and the
Virtualwas 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 Jankelevitch.
In his 1992 preface to Conditions, Francois Wahl, a friend of Badious, interpreted
the couple Badiou/Deleuze, starting with the couple Cantor/Bergson and their
respective treatment of the problem of multiplicity.10 In 1995, Eric Alliez, Deleuzes
student, published two essays bearing the paradigmatic titles Virtual Philosophy and
Deleuzes Bergsonism.11 And, in 1994, he published a book on contemporary French
philosophy, The Impossibility of Phenomenology.12 Here, he criticized Ferry and Renauds
regression to Kantianism and the inquisitorial use of analytic philosophy, and, denouncing
the theological turn of phenomenology,13 he identified French philosophys main
tendency in the critique of universals. He isolated the essential expression of this tendency in
Deleuzes and Badious work, finding traces in Derridas deconstruction, and in MerleauPontys The Visible and the Invisible with its Bergsonian anti-essentialism.14 Two years
later, the publication of Badious 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 anterieur and Multitudes and those polemics were followed, in 2000, by
Badious answer, where he insisted on Deleuzes Bergsonian heritage.15
Alliezs and Badious 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 Deleuzes 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;
(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 Deleuzes vitalism with Foucaults
assumed philosophy of lifeas it is expressed in his lessons on biopoliticsBergsons
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 Badious Manichean picture were visible; rather,
the legitimacy of his picture was reinforced by a series of invisible erasures: (1) the erasure
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
Bergsons concepts; and (4) the erasure of the genealogy of Deleuzes first encounter
and its use.
We have to address the latter aspect before coming back to Foucault. Deleuzes very
first interpretation and utilization of Bergsons 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
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,
more generally, seemed to have condemned Bergson to oblivion once and for all, because
of his nave psychologist realism. The influence of German existentialism,
Hegelianism, and philosophy of historywhich begun penetrating French philosophy
in the 1930sprovoked the condemnation of Bergsons theory of human temporality,
which was seen as a nave theodicy devoid of a sense of lack, struggle, and tragedy, and
therefore inadequate for explaining the general mood of the aftermath of the war. In the
1940s, philosophys problematic space was taken up by debates on dialecticsHegelian
or Marxianby the confrontation of Marxism and phenomenological existentialism
and, from the early 1950s, by debates on Husserls Krisis texts and on the later Heidegger.
In other words, the problems of human history dominated philosophical discourse.
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, Bergsons texts had been
included in the agregation programmes and his texts considered as classics, in the sense that
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 Bergsons successors and friends,
gathered together to form a group, the Societe des amis de Bergson, and founded the
journal, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes. This group worked on the canonization of Bergsons
work, making available, in three tomes, his essays, Ecrits et paroles, which had been out of
print, and organizing, in 1959, a huge centenary conference. The presence of Bergsons
texts in the agregation programme,16 along with the activity of the Societe, obliged
prominent philosophers and historians of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem,
Martial Gueroult, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Etienne Gilson, Raymond
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 Ecole Normale and in his first lesson at the
Colle`ge de France, complicated Bergsons concept of intuition and the idea of a simple
psychologism, and stressed the usefulness of Bergson in helping us to surmount the
aporias of Husserls ontology of the object; following a path similar to that of MerleauPonty, Hyppolite compared Bergson with existentialism, phenomenology, and
Hegelianism. In his important Hegelian study Logic and Existence, dominated by a
Heideggerian anti-humanism, he compared Hegels conception of dialectics with
Bergsons 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 philosophynot being a Germanist, he could not join the phenomenological
circles. Deleuze found in Bergson a non-dialectical conception of difference, nonhumanistic and non-teleological that could match the Heideggerian framework, but also
a potential adversary of phenomenology. Finally, some of Bergsons concepts suggested to
him the notion of the transcendental capable of rivaling the criticism of Kants and
Husserls rigid and relatively unhistorical a priori conditions of experience.
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THE
PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLICATIONS: EXISTENCE
AND
STRUCTURE
Let us return to Foucaults 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, Foucaults interpretation of
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 Sartres criticism of his work. This controversylater
named structuralistfirst began with Claude Levi-Strausss 1961 book, The Savage
Mind and was later fueled by Foucault in 1966, when it provoked Sartres reaction.18
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This polemical confrontation posited on the side of Levi-Strauss and Foucault

analysis, anti-humanism, theory, and the human sciences, and, on the side of Sartre
and existentialist phenomenologydialectics, humanism, praxis, and philosophy.
Referring to the freshly published Words and Things, Sartre accused Foucault of ignoring
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 Cavaille`s, 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
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 Canguilhems 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
Levi-Strausss The Savage Mind.
In History and Dialectics, the books last chapter, Levi-Strauss attacked Sartres
Critique of Dialectical Reason from several angles: he was refuting the idea of the existence
of people without history, he was opposing Sartres instrumentalization of his own work,
he was criticizing Sartres privileging of history over the other human sciences, and,
finally, on an epistemological level, he was opposing the structuralist paradigm of sense to
the one proper to phenomenology. According to Levi-Strauss, it was the temporal
dimension, essential to the phenomena treated by the discourse of history, that
motivated Sartres privileging of history over the other human sciences. Human
civilizations temporality, the object of history, was supposed to be analogous to that of
the human subjects, which was supposed to be irreducible to any intellectual operation
of distribution in space (etalement dans lespace).21Although neither Levi-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. Levi-Strauss
was implicitly comparing Bergsons durational conception of life and mind to the Sartrean
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, Levi-Strauss also mentions
Bergson in Totemism Today, crediting him for criticizingin Morality and Religion
Lucien Levy-Bruhls idea of the essential difference between primitive thought and
that proper to civilized people.22 According to both Bergson and Levi-Strauss, totemic
thought is just another way of creating classes of things, a strategy analogous to the
civilized mans way of using intelligence. But Levi-Strausss praise was followed by
harsh words criticism: referring to Totemism Today, in Categories, Species, Numbers,
the fifth chapter of The Savage Mind, he went on to argue that, in spite of his legitimate
criticisms of Levy-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
character proper to duration and to creative impetus. Contrary to this explanation, LeviStrauss argued that structuralism had shown that the classes that the mind produces have
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an objective meaning: concrete thought (la pensee concrete)of both the primitive and
the scientistcan 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
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 Levi-Strauss, at least not before the
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 Se`ve23), 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
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 philosophys pitiful history and, especially, its spiritualist persistence from
Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson.25 One year later, in the conference The
Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research, he included MerleauPonty and Ricur 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 traditionsto critical idealism and rationalistic empiricism, and
to the philosophy of science, which included Auguste Comte, Antoine-Augustin
Cournot, Louis Couturat, Pierre Duhem, Jean Cavaille`s, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre
Koyre, and Georges Canguilhem.
Althussers harsh hostility towards Bergson had a double origin. The first, obviously,
was tied to the classical Marxist rejection of Bergsonism, conceived as bourgeois
mystification, which had began with Georges Politzers 1928 pamphlet, La Fin dune
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 Sorels use of some of his concepts, and the Marxist syndicalist rapidly discarded
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) Bergsons 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
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 Althussers contempt for Bergsonism was more philosophical
and was related to the Bachelardian rejection of all empiricisms. During the 1950s,
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
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 problematicthat can produce an experience (a phenomenotechnics). 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
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 Einsteins theory of relativity, Bergson would have realized how retrograde
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
Ricur, 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, Ricur and
Aron and even Politzer and Levi-Strauss into the same box.27 But that was not all: in
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
of concept?
Canguilhems relation with Bergson is extremely complex. Canguilhem had never
been simply an epistemologist of the life sciences. As a student at the Ecole normale, he
was found himself at the crossroads of the Durkhemian sociologist Celestin Bougle and
the Cartesian, Kantian and intellectualist philosopher, Alain.29 In the 1920s, his essays
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
Alains 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,

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 a` la philosophie
biologique.31 Far from presenting his theories in simple continuity with Cartesian
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 Wittgensteins 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
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 Levi-Strauss criticizes Bergsons theory of knowledge. Levi-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
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
friend and reader of Levi-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 Levi-Strausss denunciation of Bergsons pragmatic theory of
knowledge and implicitly put into question his own theory of life. As he explains in
Matter and Memory, concepts are the simple outcome of lifes 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
was not simply projected on the organism by the subjects pragmatic activity of
distribution into space or fragmentation (morce`lement). 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
But Canguilhems essay was not just a simple denunciation of the anachronism of
Bergsonian metaphysical speculations on life: taking into account Bergsons 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
reflection of lifes 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 normativitywhich Althusser had condemned as
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subjective and thus ideologicalbut 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
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 Canguilhems writings,
seeing him simply as an anti-Bergsonian and anti-phenomenological philosopher of
the concept.37
One should not forget that both Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who played a
central role in the concept/intuition mise-en-sce`ne, also belonged to Canguilhems
generation and had similar reactions to Bergsonism during the 1930s. Levi-Strausss initial
rejection of Bergsonism was more inspired by Politzers humanism and Marxist
psychology than by structural linguistics.38 The case of Lacan, who had always shown a
merciless contempt for Bergson, is similar. As I pointed out, during the 1930s, Bergsons
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 Euge`ne Minkowski and Charles Blondel, for example,
borrowed several concepts from Bergson. But Lacan, from his 1932 dissertation on
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
has to be interpreted. In this sense, the first twenty years of Lacans 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 Foucaults mosaic. In 1962, Jean Hyppolite was promoted
to a professorship in The History of Philosophical Systems at the Colle`ge de France.
Hyppolite had been the supervisor of Foucaults secondary thesis on Kant and the former
supervisor of Deleuzes 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 Ecole normale superieure, where he worked closely with
Althusser. Hyppolite was also a very close friend of Merleau-Ponty, whom he in fact
replaced at the Colle`ge after the latters 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
Colle`ge de France.41 Following the tradition of all inaugural speeches, Hyppolite
mentioned his predecessors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martial Gueroult.42 He also
mentioned Bergson, who had been professor at the Colle`ge 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
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
confrontation that had ever occurred was between Gueroult and Ferdinand Alquie on the
interpretation of Descartes. Alquie 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. Alquie,
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 Ecole normale, in which he evoked the division between
concept and intuition once again, which later resurfaced in his essay on Canguilhem.45
So, is the comparison between French existentialist phenomenology and
Bergsonism merely artificial? Yes and no. Just like Levi-Strauss and Lacan, Canguilhem
and Hyppolite, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty also began their intellectual careers by
criticizing Bergson, by borrowing arguments from Politzers anthropological and
humanist project of a concrete psychology. Their harsh opposition to Bergson had
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) Bergsons engagement
in WWI propaganda; (4) the massive Bergsonizationpartially real, partially
imaginaryof 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 Bergsons
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
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 fieldvery appealing for those among
them who had already acquired a good deal of intellectual capitalwe may speculate that
some of the models and intellectual postures inspired by Bergsonism did in fact
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 Cousins reform, had included basic training in psychology.
As mentioned earlier, during the 1920s Bergsonism was relatively important in the field of
psychology.
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
Politzers pamphlet, it was almost impossibleat least in a left-wing atheist contextto
be, at one and the same time, a young intellectual and a Bergsonian.47 But even in
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 Bergsons method with Husserls) were searching in phenomenologyfirst in Husserls, then in Heideggersfor 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
Husserls phenomenology as the opposite to the abstract intellectualism of
Brunschivcgs neo-Kantianism. As Florence Cayemaex has pointed out, both Sartres
and Merleau-Pontys 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 Bergsons
influence on the new generations after WWI, which marked him out as an irrational
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 ostracismstrongly bound up with the
particular structuration of French philosophy around 1900was aggravated by Bergsons
relatively marginal position inside the academic world: except for the two years he taught
at the Ecole normale, Bergson was never a professor at a university, that is, he never had
any students, as Leon Brunschvicg had, for example. Thus, he never had the opportunity
to establish a school, as Husserl had in Germany.
Francois Azouvi and, before him, Renzo Ragghianti have emphasized the extent to
which, since the end of the nineteenth century, the philosophers gathered around the
Revue de metaphysique et de morale were hostile to Bergsons philosophy, to his conception
of free will based on duration and, after the publication of Introduction a` la
metaphysique, to his conception of intuition as a method in metaphysics.50 The
members of the journals editorial board (Emile-August Chartier, commonly known as
Alain, Leon Brunschvicg, Celestin Bougle, Elie Halevy, Xavier Leon, Andre 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 Leon wrote to Elie
Halevy in 1902, the editorial board of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale was composed
of resolute anti-Bergsonians.51
On the other hand, these philosophers also found in Bergsons 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
backbone of Theodule Ribots Revue philosophique. Bergsons 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
causalitywere all compatible with the aims of the Revue de metaphysique. Bergson
published various essays in the journal, participated at the meetings of the Societe
francaise 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 Andre Lalande, which engaged the entire
network surrounding the Revue. One can therefore say with reason, as Frederic Worms
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
that was acceptable was its pars denstruens, namely, its criticism of dogmatic positivism
(psycho-physical parallelism, atomism, etc.). But Bergsons attempt to ground philosophy
in intuition, his rejection of Kantianism, his very conception of duration, and his attempt
at deducing categoriesall these were rejected as unacceptable.
In conclusion, we can say that Bergsons influence on contemporary French
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.
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 19541984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2,
466, 467, 466.
2. In a 1983 interview, Foucault opposed Canguilhems and Cavaille`s 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), 37380.
3. See Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, New Left Review 35 (September
October 2005): 6777.
4. See the only reconstruction of Derridas intellectual itinerary which is worthy of mention,
Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 19451968 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, 2009).
5. See Madeleine Barthelemy-Madaule, Lire Bergson, review of Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze,
Etudes bergsoniennes 8 (1969): 85120, which stresses Deleuzes 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), 16596.
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 Deleuzes Le Pli [The Fold] in 1989 in the Annuaire philosophique, but
was already quoting him in his 1982s Theory of the Subject.
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9. See the French transcription of his 1993 seminar Theorie des categories, http://
www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm (accessed 1 August 2011).
10. Francois Wahl, Le soustractive, foreword to Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1991),
954. The parallel could seem bizarre, Wahl writes, Deleuze saves Bergson thanks to
Nietzsche, Badiou saves Plato through Cantor (10).
11. Eric Alliez, Virtual Philosophy, in The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattaris
Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004); Eric
Alliez, Deleuzes Bergsonism, in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 39441. These essays were
originally published in French by the Synthelabo publishing house, which in 1997 also
published the proceedings of a conference on Bergson, Bergson et les neurosciences, ed. Philippe
Galois and Gerard Fortzy.
12. Eric Alliez, De limpossibilite de la phenomenologie. Sur la philosophie francaise contemporaine (Paris:
Vrin, 1995).
13. Alliez is referring to Dominique Janicauds book, Le Tournant theologique de la phenomenologie
francaise (Combas: lEclat, 1991).
14. Alliez, De limpossibilite de la phenomenologie, 48.
15. Alain Badiou, One, Multiple, Multiplicity, in Number and Numbers, trans. Robin
Mackay(New York: Politis, 2008); originally published as Un, multiple, multiplicite(s), in
Multiptudes 1.1 (2000): 195211.
16. Regarding agregations importance for French philosophy, see Alan D. Schrift, The Effects of
the Agregation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, Journal of the
History of Philosophy 46.3 (2008): 44974.
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).
18. See Foucaults 1966s interviews with Claude Bonnefoy and Marie Chapsal published in the
first volume of his Dits et ecrits.
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre repond. Entretien avec Bernard Pingaud, LArc 30
(1966): 87.
20. Canguilhem, The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?, 617.
21. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 256.
22. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism Today, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin
Press, 1964).
23. See: Georges Politzers articles published in La Pensee and later published in the first volume of
the Ecrits (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1973), such as Dans la cave de laveugle Chroniques de
lobscurantisme contemporain; Paul Nizan, Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order
(1932), trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Presses, 1971); Jean Kanapa,
LExistentialisme nest pas un humanisme (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947); Henri Maugin, La
Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947), and the articles published in the wars
immediate aftermath, in La Pensee (Lesprit encyclopedique et la tradition philosophique
francaise, in La Pensee, October 1945 and April 1946) ; Du bergsonisme a` lexistentialisme,
in Lactivite 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 Se`ve, La Philosophie francaise contemporaine et sa gene`se de 1789 a` nos jours
(Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962) ; Georges Politzers articles published in La Pensee and later
published in the first volume of Ecrits (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1973), such as Dans la cave de
laveugle Chroniques de lobscurantisme 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).
25. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 25.
26. Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (196667), ed. Francois
Matheron, trans. Georges M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 5.
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27. According to Althussers (mis)interpretation of Levi-Strauss, the ethnologist had argued that
savage thought was superior to civilized thought, because of its ability to think
secondary qualities, singularity, and thus concreteness. (On Levi-Strauss, in The Humanist
Controversy, 30).
28. See Althussers Texte sur la lutte ideologique [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
memoire de ledition contemporaine, ALT2 A4202.11) and the manuscript, probably of
1958 (Fonds Louis Althusser, IMEC, ALT2. A5804.04), 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 Canguilhems uvres comple`tes (Paris: Vrin,
2012) and my forthcoming essay Origins of Canguilhems Vitalism, in Vitalism and the
Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 18002010, ed. C. Wolfe and S. Normandin
(London: Springer, 2012).
30. See my introduction to Georges Canguilhems Commentaire au IIIe chapitre de levolution
creatrice, Annales bergsoniennes, tome 3, Bergson et la science, ed. Frederic Worms (Paris: PUF,
2007).
31. Georges Canguilhem, Note sur la situation faite en France a` la philosophie biologique,
Revue de metaphysique et de morale 34 (juilletoctobre 1947): 32232.
32. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 137.
33. See the last essay published in the second edition of The Normal and the Pathological, entitled A
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.
34. Georges Canguilhem, Le concept et la vie, in Etudes dhistoire 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, Breal, Bergson et la question de larbitraire du signe, in Henri Bergson: esprit
et langage, ed. Claudia Stancati, Dom. Chirico`, and F. Vercillo (Lie`ge-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 francais de culture, London, 5 April 2008).
36. I am not interested in developing this remark in this context, but a scarlet thread clearly runs
from the lectures given at the Ecole Normale in 1954 and 1955, entitled Proble`mes de
lanthropologie, to his Ph.D. dissertation on Kants pragmatic anthropology and Words and
Things.
37. Jacques Lautman, Canguilhems student during the 1960s writes that his professor was
teaching the lack of confidence in the philosophies of existence and criticizing the
interpretations of Bergson as an existentialist manque (see Jacques Lautman, Un stocien
chaleureux, Revue dhistoire des sciences 53.1 [2000]: 38). But this antipathy for existentialist
phenomenology was not followed by the structuralist dogmatism: concepts necessity was
always tied to the fundamental reference to the subject who suffers and creates the norm.
Thus, Canguilhems philosophy of the concept is prior to that of existence, but it refuses
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 (4142).
38. Levi-Strausss intellectual trajectory was not rectilinear. In A World on the Wane he recounts
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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39. Jacques Lacan, La psychose paranoaque et ses rapports avec la personnalite (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
40. The influence of Politzer on Lacans theory before Romes speech (namely, before his
fifties Structuralist turn) is well known. The disappearance of Politzers name from
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): 11878). Here, following Lacan, they attack Politzers concrete
psychologys model of sense and its criticism of the notion of the unconscious.
41. In Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensee philosophique (Paris: Puf, 1991), 100328.
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, Lecon
inaugurale, Colle`ge de France, 1951.
43. Hyppolite, Figures de la pensee philosophique, 1028.
44. See, for instance, Ferdinand Alquie, Bergson et la Revue de metaphysique et de morale, Revue
de metaphysique et de morale 48.4 (1941): 31528.
45. Foucault, Jean Hyppolite. 19071968, in Dits et ecrits, 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).
47. Bergson was still enjoying some success in non-conformist Catholic milieus, such as that of
Emmanuel Mouniers 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 Rene Le Senne.
48. Florence Cayemaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson. Les phenomenologie existentialistes et leur
heritage 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. Francois Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson (Paris: Puf, 2007); Renzo Ragghianti, Dalla fisiologia della
sensazione alletica delleffort. Ricerche sullapprendistato filosofico di Alain (Florence: Le Lettere,
1993).
51. Xavier Leon to Elie Halevy, 36 April 1902, in Lettere di Henri Bergson, ed. Renzo Ragghianti
(Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 34.

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The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 855872, 2011