Downplaying space in favour of time

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.
In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' (Foucault 1994-1:576), cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark : 'I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself (Jay 1993:191-208, 430).

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor



Bookmark this on Delicious