Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T22:58:12.375Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“A Different Starting Point, a Different Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Iris Van Der Tuin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on “diffraction.” This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or “new materialist.”

Type
Original Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Winter 2011 , pp. 22 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ansell‐Pearson, Keith. 2007. Introduction to Henri Bergson, Mind‐energy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. xi–xli.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 1996. Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science, ed. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson and Nelson, Jack. Dordrecht: Kluwer Press, pp. 161–94.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2001. Re(con)figuring space, time, and matter. In Feminist locations: Global and local, theory and practice, ed. DeKoven, Marianne. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, pp. 75–109.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri. 1896/2004. Matter and memory, Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. 5th ed. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri. 1889/1913. Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness, Trans. F. L. Pogson. 3rd ed. London: George Allen.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri. 1907/1998. Creative evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri. 1934/2007. The creative mind: An introduction to metaphysics, Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Sexual difference as a nomadic political project. In Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 146–72.Google Scholar
Cohen, Richard A. 1999. Philo, Spinoza, Bergson: The rise of an ecological age. In The new Bergson, ed. Mullarkey, John. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, pp. 18–31.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1956/2002. Bergson's conception of difference. In Desert islands and other texts 1953–1974, ed. Lapoujade, David, Trans. Michael Taormina. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp. 32–51.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1966/1991. Bergsonism, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1980/1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1991/1994. What is philosophy?, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Douglass, Paul. 1999. Bergson and cinema: Friends or foes? In The new Bergson, ed. Mullarkey, John. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, pp. 209–27.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2000. Deleuze's Bergson: Duration, the virtual and a politics of the future. In Deleuze and feminist theory, ed. Buchanan, Ian and Colebrook, Claire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 214–34.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1992/2004. The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In The Haraway reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 63–124.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©_meets_oncomouse™: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hill, Rebecca. 2008a. Interval, sexual difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 23 (1): 119–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Rebecca. 2008b. Phallocentrism in Bergson: Life and matter. Deleuze studies 2 supplement. In Deleuze and gender, ed. Colebrook, Claire and Weinstein, Jami. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 123–36.Google Scholar
Kember, Sarah. 2006. Creative evolution? The quest for life (on Mars). Culture machine's interzone, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/235/216 (accessed August 12, 2009).Google Scholar
Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling flesh: The substance of the corporeal. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mullarkey, John. 1999. Introduction: La philosophy nouvelle, or change in philosophy. In The new Bergson, ed. Mullarkey, John. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–16.Google Scholar
Murphy, Timothy S. 1999. Beneath relativity: Bergson and Bohm on absolute time. In The new Bergson, ed. Mullarkey, John. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, pp. 66–81.Google Scholar
Olkowski, Dorothea. 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the ruin of representation. Berkeley, La.: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Olkowski, Dorothea. 2000. Introduction: What are feminist enactments? In Resistance, flight, creation: Feminist enactments of French philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
Smelik, Anneke. 2009. Lara Croft, Kill Bill, and feminist film studies. In Doing gender in media, art and culture, ed. Buikema, Rosemarie and van der Tuin, Iris. London: Routledge, pp. 178–92.Google Scholar
Van der Tuin, Iris, and Dolphijn, Rick. 2010. The transversality of new materialism. Women: A Cultural Review, forthcoming.Google Scholar