Leonard Lawlor

This essay attempts to reflect on Bergson’s contribution to the reversal of Platonism. Heidegger, of course, had set the standard for reversing Platonism. Thus the question posed in this essay, following Heidegger, is: does Bergson manage not only to reverse Platonism but also to twist free of it. The answer presented here is that Bergson does twist free, which explains Deleuze’s persistent appropriations of Bergsonian thought. Memory in Bergson turns out to be not a memory of an idea, or even of the good, which is one, but a memory of multiplicity. Therefore Bergson’s memory is really, from a Platonistic standpoint, forgetfulness or, even, a counter-memory.

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.

The question confronting thought today is: what is a suicide bomber? But this question is a sign of a greater problem: the problem of the worst, which is apocalypse, complete suicide. Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida have given us the philosophical concepts to formulate this problem with more complexity and precision. Deleuze and Guattari have defined our current situation in terms of the post-fascist figure of the war machine, a figure that is worse, more terrifying, than fascism itself. Similarly, Derrida has defined our epoch in terms of a holocaust that is worse than any holocaust seen in the Bible. The problem of the worst then is so bad today that it requires that we make every effort to find a solution. The essay that follows constructs the beginnings of a solution to the problem of the worst. The solution will consist in a hyperbolic or even revolutionary gesture of inclusiveness that opens out onto an “elsewhere” that still needs a name. As we shall see however, no solution will ever be enough, no solution will ever be sufficient. There will never be enough done, said, or written in the name of what prevents the worst.