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November 23, 2006
In Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power Elizabeth Grosz has a first section of 3 essays under the title nature 'Culture and the Future.' They deal with the way that postructuralism presupposes nature to be static and fixed, with all change and movement coming from culture. A passive nature is what is transformed and dynamized by culture.
One of these chapters is on Deleuze's reading of Bergson's texts. It is entitled 'Deleuze, Bergson and the Virtual', and in it she reads Deleuze on Bergson in terms of the counter-history of philosophy ----one that veers off from the accepted traditions of philosophy to create something new and unexpected. She says that what Bergson offers is a philosophy of movement:
Bergson is above all a thinker of dynamic movement, action, change...What Bergson has to offer by way of understanding difference, becoming, duration, and life has yet to be effective.(p.94)
How does that veer off from the accepted traditions of philosophy? Hegel, for instance, was also a philosopher of dynamic movement, action, change. I can only presume that Grosz reads Hegel as a Platonist--dynamizes a static Idea. He had nothing to say about nature. Sure Hegel's philosophy of nature was pre-Darwinian and so had no concept of evolution, but he had a philosophy of movement in nature based on contradiction.
Grosz picks up on Bergson's vitalism and says that there is something in Bergson's vitalism that is wayward or unpalatable:
Or at least, Deleuze's reading of Bergson self-consciously aims at bringing out the monstrous and the grotesque in Bergson's work....Deleuze wants to bring out as well as produce a certain perversion of Bergson's writings, and in doing so, I believe, he brings us to the verge of a philosophy adequate to the task of the thinking the new, a philosophy for the future, a philosophy beyond Platonism, and thus beyond the phenomenon of negation and dialectic which have dominated Western thought since Plato.
This is fine as it goes. However, the idea of movement did not originate with Bergson. It goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle was not just a footnote to Plato. He was also a thinker of change, as was Hegel. Was there not an emphasis here on a theory of becoming in place of the Platonic emphasis on being?
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