Chapter 10 - Bergson, Colonialism, and Race

Summary

The chapter examines racist and colonialist assumptions in Bergson’s philosophy and outlines what is at stake in the various approaches to these assumptions that recent interpreters have taken. Focusing on two readers of Bergson, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Messay Kebede, the chapter shows how the Négritude movement deployed a Bergsonian epistemology to challenge the dominance and domination of a European conception of rationality, mobilizing instead what Senghor calls an “embracing reason.” Critically assessing recent identifications of racism, the racialization of bodies, and whiteness as a transcendental norm in Bergson’s philosophy, the author concludes that Bergson cannot altogether escape the charges, given that his central distinction between open and closed in Two Sources relies on a notion of “primitives” as an indispensable foil for the achievements of the mystics. The question then becomes to what extent Bergson’s thought can be mobilized to remedy the evils it cannot wholly be extricated from. In conclusion, the essay surveys contemporary appropriations of the conception of the open society and suggests that Senghor’s rearticulation of Bergson’s intuition as sympathetic "embracing reason" offers theoretical and practical ways to address racist and colonial discourses.