Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze's Lecture Course

Beyond the Human Condition:

An Introduction to Deleuze's Lecture Course

Introduction

Deleuze's 1960 lecture course at l'Ecole Supérieure de Saint-Cloud on chapter three of Bergson's Creative Evolution is of interest to us today for a number of reasons. The course can be read in the light of Deleuze's attempt from 1956 to 1966 to demonstrate Bergson's importance for philosophy (what we might call "the Bergsonian Revolution"). But it also provides a set of revealing insights into the development of Deleuze's own philosophical project. Not only does it display Deleuze's tremendous gifts as a pedagogue, it also contains in embryonic and germinal form some of the essential modes of thought that characterize his contribution in the development of philosophy in post-war France. My intention in this introduction is not to provide a commentary on the lecture course. Instead I want to illuminate two topics that occupy an important place in the Bergsonian revolution and which inform and shape Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson, both in the lecture course and in his published writings on Bergson: Bergson's relation to Kant, and the endeavour to think beyond the human condition.

Before examining these topics, however, let me note some significant and revealing features of the lecture course. By the time of the lecture course, Deleuze's main publications were his book on Hume published in 1953, an extraordinarily fresh and original study of empiricism and subjectivity, and an article published in 1956 on the concept of difference in Bergson.² In 1959-60 he had begun to give lecture courses on Nietzsche as well as Bergson, and one of the most interesting aspects of the present lecture course is that it shows there was a brief moment in post-war thought when Bergson was posited alongside Nietzsche as an ally in the overcoming of metaphysics. Bergson, Deleuze notes in the lecture of 28 March 1960, participates in the Nietzschean moment of philosophy. This consists in the abolition of the intelligible world, an abolition that signals the end of metaphysics (the division into real or true and apparent worlds), or what Nietzsche calls in Twilight of the Idols the moment of "the shortest shadow." However, there are some crucial differences: where Nietzsche tells the history or story of how the "true world" finally became a fable, which is also a story of the devaluation of the highest values and the advent of nihilism, Bergson seeks to reorient metaphysics, to bring science and philosophy into a new rapport, with the ultimate aim of re-connecting human thought and existence to, as Deleuze puts it, the "universal consciousness" of the Whole (le Tout). Perhaps the crucial difference is that while the Nietzschean can only invert Platonism and parody metaphysics, the Bergsonian has found a different path, one that is able to articulate a philosophy of pure becoming that enables thought to think beyond the human condition. As Deleuze points out in the lecture course, for Bergson, metaphysics begins not with Plato but with Zeno.³

As is well known, while Nietzsche's thinking has assumed an extraordinary importance for us today, Bergson's work has fallen into serious neglect. The manner in which Deleuze is able to demonstrate Bergson's importance for the future of philosophy – the lecture course is admirable in this regard – shows the injustice of this neglect. Perhaps the most significant feature of Deleuze's work on Bergson overall is its ability to see with tremendous clarity, and to pinpoint with accuracy, the significance of Bergson's project for philosophy. We see this in the very opening of the lecture course, where Deleuze indicates precisely where Bergson's importance lies, namely in the effort to radicalize the post-Kantian project commenced by Solomon Maimon and J. G. Fichte: the need to pass from a transcendental philosophy to a genetic one (Deleuze spells out the details of this move...