Beyond Bergson

Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson

Andrea J. Pitts, Mark William Westmoreland, Andrea J. Pitts, Mark William Westmoreland

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438473529, 9781438473512
• eBook ISBN: 9781438473536
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Examines Bergson's work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America.

Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson's social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson's writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson's work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine Bergson's influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson's writings-for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues.

Part I

Bergson on Colonialism, Social Groups, and the State

Chapter 1

Decolonizing Bergson

The Temporal Schema of the Open and the Closed

ALIA AL-SAJI

The remnants and legacies of colonialisms—from geographical and spatial orders to material exploitation and cultural imaginaries—often continue, in refracted modes, in postcolonial contexts. Underlying and sustaining these ways of knowing (and hence of constituting meaning) are temporal frameworks, economies of time, that persist largely unquestioned. The dichotomy of the open and the closed is one such schema; it not only plays a structuring role in colonial ways of knowing, but it also continues to be assumed in some theories of development in postcolonial settings. That colonized societies have a tendency to closure (being resistant to progress and to inclusivity and otherness) is taken to justify colonial and neocolonial paternalism.

In this chapter, I propose to attend to this well-worn temporal schema of open/closed by examining its elaboration in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and by critically parsing the possibilities his philosophy offers for its destabilization. Though Bergson wrote in a colonial context, this context barely receives acknowledgment in his work; at best, it could be read obliquely and ambiguously from his examples.¹ That Bergson was politically self-aware, having engaged in diplomatic missions and polemics for France during the First World War and having been instrumental in the establishment of the League of Nations, has been well documented.² His wide-ranging influence, including on the Négritude movement, means that this omission—or “colonial aphasia,” to borrow Ann Stoler’s term—must be attended to.³ For this masks the uncomfortable resonances between Bergson’s philosophy of time (especially in his late work, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, published in 1932) and the temporal narratives that accompany and justify French colonialism. This is doubly important given Bergson’s uptake by more recent French philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, and by contemporary feminist and political theorists, especially some who identify under the umbrella of “new materialism” (including such diverse thinkers as Elizabeth Grosz and William Connolly).

I mean for the project of this chapter—that of decolonizing Bergson—to have relevance both to Bergson studies, then, and to contemporary scholars of race and colonialism, who may wonder whether and how such questions could be addressed from within Bergson’s philosophy. Rather than attend simply to Bergson’s examples, I believe that a methodological approach can reveal how colonizing and racializing frames may be implicitly at work, no matter his explicit intentions. More importantly, I aim to show how questions about colonialism and racism are not simple afterthoughts, but can gain traction by attending to the structuring assumptions and methodologies of Bergson’s own texts. In this regard, I not only attend to Bergsonian philosophy critically, but I mine that philosophy for the critical resources and generative tools from which such decolonizing critique finds its impetus. Thus, I understand the project of decolonizing Bergson to have two sides—to be at once a critical and a creative reconfiguration of Bergsonian philosophy. What is at stake in decolonizing Bergson is, in my view, the very Bergsonian recognition of the weight of the past—the pressure it exerts on, and the difference it makes for, the present. Our pasts are structured by colonial durations and imperial formations. This is the past as a whole, the past as unconscious and multiplicitous, coexistent with the present. This past is not transcended and gone, but forms the invisible glue that makes itself felt in the present, even when selectively disregarded and unattended to in so-called postcolonial and postracial presents. I understand the past as atmospheric or thalassic; it can submerge us, buoy us up, or bog us down; it ebbs and flows. Without a critical mapping and recollection of this past, the weight of the past will only lead to confirmed and habitual routes being followed through. Creative reconfigurations of Bergson hence need this critical ground, but decolonizing critique of Bergson also requires a generative rereading of his philosophy. I aim to hold together both sides of this decolonizing project in my chapter, turning to Bergson’s last monograph in order to do so.

In Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Bergson theorizes social life through the lens of what he considers a grounding difference: between the open society, on the one hand, and closed societies, on the other.⁴ While the first aspires to include all human beings, linking them through love, the latter is based on need and obligation, defensively and antagonistically closing in on itself. Most contemporary critics of Bergson focus on the inclusiveness and “fraternity” of the open society, its borderless love and vision of humanity, finding there a justification for Bergson’s schema.⁵ In my view, however, it is the dichotomy of open/closed itself that is troubling. Though Bergson clarifies that these are tendencies, so that all existing societies are mixtures of openness and closure, the dichotomy nevertheless provides the tools for constructing a hierarchy of societies and a teleological vision of civilization. It is this logic that we see in contemporary cultural racism, where discrimination against so-called illiberal cultural-religious minorities (in particular, Muslims, but often also Hasidic Jews) is justified based on their supposed intolerance and closure to change.⁶ More precisely, this logic is often used to distinguish groups within a religion or a society, to mark out those who are tolerant or moderate from those who are fundamentalist.⁷ But what if we were to begin with a different conceptual schema, that of the “half-open or ajar [entr’ouvert]” (as Vladimir Jankélévitch suggests in his reading of Bergson)? Could we then theorize the mixture that is society as more than compromise and negation? Thus, a different way of seeing and understanding social life might emerge: one that attends to multiplicity and difference without opposition and hierarchy.

I will proceed in four steps. I begin with the recent resurgence of interest in Bergson, examining how Les deux sources has been taken up and what has been elided or made visible in those readings. Second, I look more closely at Les deux sources, asking how colonial formations may be on the horizons of this text and what hesitations they may call into being. Third, rather than focusing on particular examples, I ask what Bergson’s method is in Les deux sources and how the schema of open/closed—and more deeply, the couple of “primitive” and “mystic”—undergird this method. Finally, it is this question of method that will allow us to see the divergence between Les deux sources and the rest of Bergson’s philosophy; for Les deux sources not only introduces a new and definitive distinction into Bergson’s philosophy—that of open and closed—it also puts an end to the movement of that philosophy by defining its possibilities as if they had already been given. It is by turning the tools of Bergsonian critique onto Les deux sources that I aim to provide an alternative to the dichotomy of open/closed—that of the half-open or ajar—creating in this way the (uncertain) condition of possibility for its decolonization.

Reading The Two Sources

Suzanne Guerlac remarks that Les deux sources “can produce a distinct feeling of estrangement, even in admirers of Bergson’s earlier works.”⁸ I would describe this feeling as one of disappointment. The reception of the book at the time of its publication was mixed, but the disappointment that has been expressed around it has had to do, in large part, with Bergson’s appeal to Christian mysticism (taken as the actualization of the “pure” tendency to openness).⁹ On the one hand, this was because Bergson’s account of mysticism removed it from both theology and faith—making the mystic into an “auxiliary,” albeit a “powerful” one, of philosophy.¹⁰ On the other hand, the appeal to mysticism was taken to establish, once and for all, Bergson’s spiritualism and antirationalism (his affective and intellectual allegiance to Catholicism, despite being Jewish). Either way it was suspect. It is, hence, around the figure of the mystic that much prior critique has centered.

In contrast, at the limit of the closed tendency lies the figure of the “primitive.” While there have been a number of critical studies of Bergson’s use of this figure, these discussions have generally been limited to the French literature on Bergson and almost always pivot on Bergson’s critique of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.¹¹ Such a focus sheds some positive light on Bergson’s account, since Bergson argues against Lévy-Bruhl that there can be only differences of degree between “primitive” and “civilized” humanity, both sharing a common nature.¹² While the contrast with Lévy-Bruhl is significant for understanding Les deux sources, the lack of typology in Bergson’s account of humanity has often meant that other ways in which Bergson constructs the difference between “primitive” and “civilized” go unnoticed (see the section on “Open/Closed”). By comparison, Bergson’s “primitive” is rarely mentioned in the recent English-language resurgence of Bergsonism, so much so that it is a different Les deux sources that seems to be reflected back in these readings. Not only are large sections of Bergson’s text disregarded—in particular in the long second chapter of Les deux sources on static religion—avoiding the unease produced by, or the need to confront, Bergson’s secondhand stories of “primitives.” But it is sometimes Les deux sources as a whole that is avoided, as in for instance new materialist readings of Bergson. We stop with the methodological essays that later became La pensée et le mouvant (published in 1934, but the majority of which were written in the period 1903–23).¹³ I believe that the rest of my chapter will, at least indirectly, explain this avoidance.

But in case this seems like a facile criticism of contemporary Bergsonian interpretation, I want to include my own work in this self-critical gesture (having for some time avoided directly addressing the book). Les deux sources today tends to produce a form of discomfort that is not yet sufficiently self-reflective to call itself disappointment—an aphasia to recall Stoler’s term. In my view, this discomfort is not simply about the use of the term primitive in the text (which often designates, for Bergson, “the primitive [le primitif]” in humanity, and so what is “natural,” to be distinguished from “les primitifs”). It has to do, more broadly, with the way in which colonial formations seem to saturate the horizons and interstices of the text, while absent from the analysis. What runs across the contemporary literature on Bergson—whether English or French with a few exceptions—is an avoidance of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: The Hope for this Volume: Sympathy
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Creative Extensions
• Part I Bergson on Colonialism, Social Groups, and the State
• Part II Bergsonian Themes in the Négritude Movement
• Part III Race, Revolution, and Bergsonism in Latin America
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover