Thursday, February 14, 2019

Deleuze, Bergson, Bryant, Derrida

See this post of Deleuze on Bergson. Of particular note for now: 
4.3. Critique of Presentism:

1. We tend to confuse being with being-present.


2. The present is precisely what is not, what is always moving outside itself, always in the process of falling beyond itself, always caught in the act of presentation.

However Bergson viewed intuition and analysis as the absolute versus the relative way of knowing. The former is "a method that aims at getting back to and knowing the things themselves, in all their uniqueness and ineffable originality." This could indeed be Deleuze's criticism of Bergson's metaphysics of presence?
Bryant, L. (2008). Difference and Givenness. On the method of intuition:

"We ought not to assume that by 'intuition' Deleuze means the direct and immediate apprehension by a knowing subject of itself, of its conscious states, of other minds, of an external world, of universals, of values, or of rational truths. […] Strangely, then, intuition, for Deleuze, is mediated insofar as it involves a plurality of acts of cognition. […] It must be practiced and performed, that it requires a discipline and 'training,' rather than being an immediate given. In this respect, it is much closer to phenomenological methods of analysis than traditional appeals to intuition. […] What we seek is not difference as it manifests itself between two things, but difference in itself, difference differing from itself, difference as it can only be contained within duration or time unfolding itself" (53-4).
And of course Bryant's later work reiterates many of the same themes.

"Repeating a line of thought that can already be found in Bergson’s Matter and Memory as well as Deleuze’s subsequent appropriation of Bergson’s thought, Derrida thus argues that the passage of the now necessarily requires a split within presence, such that presence is never purely present but is always already 'contaminated' from within by absence. […] With Derrida’s resolution to the aporia of succession we thus get the beginnings of an account of the ontological grounds of withdrawal" (4).



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