Hisashi Fujita

If all the conceptual devices involved in what Bergson calls “the planes of consciousness,” from the persistence of pure memory to perception and action, concern the relation between two different realms of existence, mind-memory and body-matter, Matter and Memory is then a work that attempts to rethink the problem of imagination and schematism. This is why we can legitimately claim that Heidegger’s challenge in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics to read transcendental imagination as primordial temporality can be interpreted as being on the way to a Bergsonian philosophy of immanence that sees the transcendental as the folds and folding of experience. In other words, corresponding to Bergson’s theory of image, Heidegger’s challenge does not reach at pure memory and its power of idleness im-plicated under the form of the inverted cone diagram of consciousness. It is Kant in the Critique of Judgment who comes to the rescue of Heidegger, who has stopped in the middle of his path. Why is the sublime important? Because it exposes, within experience, the limits of the transcendental imagination, of the transcendental schematism, and thus of the Heideggerian interpretation. And it is Bergson in his analysis of the panoramic vision that reveals, through the difference between the tension of attention to life and the tension of conversion, an imagination backlit by the movement of what overflows from the system of memory and perception represented in the diagram of the inverted cone. Especially, his third analysis of panoramic memory is so valuable that, in contrast to the other two analyses, it suggests, through the philosophical gesture of looking-back, that time is not external to experience, as in the sublime, but time is itself a re-living of the past.

Dans 'les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion', Bergson évoque rarement le Japon. Et pourtant dans le quatrième chapitre du même texte, intitulé Remarques finales 'Mécanique et mystique', c'était lui qui a bien prévu Hiroshima avec ces mots testamentaires: ' Il faut que tous se battent contre tous, comme firent les hordes des premiers temps. Seulement on se bat avec les armes forgées par notre civilisation, et les massacres sont d'une horreur que les anciens n'auraient même pas imaginée. Au train dont va la science, le jour approche où l'un des adversaires, possesseur d'un secret qu'il tenait en réserve, aura le moyen de supprimer l'autre'. Ainsi se pose la question de savoir comment envisager les Deux Sources, à travers les relations assez particulières de ce philosophe avec le Japon. À partir de cette interrogation, PBJ (Projet Bergson au Japon) a organisé, aux 5-8 novembre 2013, à Paris, un colloque qui s'intitule Remarques finales : autour des Deux sources de la morale et de la religion de Bergson. Le présent volume présente les actes de ce colloque ellipsoïdal dont les centres étaient Bergson et le Japon"--Back cover.

The possibility of a Derridian theory of the university lies not in the discussion of the “as if” in “The University without Condition” but, rather, in a theoretical crack that Derrida's book promised to elucidate—between the “as if” and the “perhaps,” the performative and the event, transcendence and immanence. Moreover, we see a kind of rupture between this book and numerous texts from the 1970s and 80s, which are collected and published under the title of Right to Philosophy. Here lies a real philosophical stake. We see between the early Derrida and the later Derrida not only an ethico-political turn but also, so to speak, a radical transition from the problematic of institution or case law (jurisprudence) to the axiomatic of law (loi) by aggravation of the transcendental

Often illustrated with the examples of melody, Bergson’s key concept of durée is best known for its qualitative, heterogeneous, and thus immeasurable multiplicity. However, the examples he gives in Time and Free Will—such as “the regular oscillations of a pendulum” or “the successive strokes of a distant bell”—suggest rather periodic phenomena that would require another perspec­tive in terms of rhythm. When we “get into a rhythm,” we perceive a numerical quality without counting. Rhythm makes glimpse “Otherwise than Measuring”. Focusing on the “rhythmic organization of the whole” within duration could reveal the secret of Bergson’s enigmatic phrase: “this heterogeneity contains number only potentially.” This paper reexamines the theoretical scope of rhyth­measure in two ways. First, it shows how this image médiatrice we forged is going to be renewed by recent studies emphasizing duration-number (Miravete) or multi-time scale theory (Hirai). Second, it explores the ethico-political impli­cations of rhythmeasure. Bergson, in his last book Two Sources of Morality and Religion, multiplies images of “a justice (…) which no longer evokes ideas ofrelativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute”. The very ambiguity of démesuré revitalizes the famous opposition of “the closed/the open”. Keywords: Duration. Rhythm. Number. Ethics. Démesure.