Suzanne Guerlac

"In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of his thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson, whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture.

During the 1960's and 1970's, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground. The author analyzes cultural and theoretical positions—pure art, automatism, engagement, and transgression—that structured the literary and critical field from the 1920's to the 1950's to show their strong impact on the formulation and elaboration of theoretical issues in more recent decades. Focusing on the question of relations between poetry and action, she reexamines these positions and uncovers proximities between them that significantly displace theoretical issues. These proximities emerge when a philosophical subtext of Bergson—antiphilosopher and nondialectical thinker—is revealed to operate alongside the more obvious subtext of Hegel. The discourse of Bergson shifts the category of action central to these literary polemics and revalues the visual register, suggesting a reconsideration of Surrealism. The book concludes by examining the ideological pressures associated with the eclipse of the discourse of Bergson as well as some of the effects of this erasure on our understanding of the modern as distinct from the postmodern.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 73-89 [Access article in PDF] Phantom Rights Conversations Across the Abyss (Hugo, Blanchot) Suzanne Guerlac —"The writer must save the world and be the abyss, justify existence and give speech to what does not exist...."1—Who is speaking?—Maurice Blanchot.—But this was already revealed to me by the Tables. How are what you call the "two sides [deux versants]" of literature to be distinguished from the "double ray [double rayon]" or the "double face" of the work of art, revealed to me by the voice of Death through the table—through the Winds of the Tomb—and which I recognized as the double furrow of the real and the ideal I had always inscribed through my writing?—What is in question at this point is not merely approaches to literature, or the mechanisms of what you call "genius," but literature itself, and with it, the very operations of the human mind. I asked the question "how is literature possible?" in response to Paulhan in 1942.2 A few years later the question returned differently: is literature possible... after Auschwitz?I have responded to the discourse of the death of art with a notion of writing as an art of death. Is this somehow the same as what the Winds of the Tomb revealed to you? Who knows? You have been dead for more than a century, I have been dying for what seems like ages. 1 "I wrote a book... of the cut off head... I stopped at the point where only you can continue."3 Victor Hugo is speaking, alluding to Le dernier jour d'un condamné, a novel written in a first-person voice which cuts off just before the guillotine drops. His remark acknowledges the commonplace that one cannot speak one's own death, not only because one does not live to tell it, but because one never really experiences it. Another literary figure to have given this matter a lot of thought (along with his friend Georges Bataille) is Maurice Blanchot, whose meditations on writing insist on questions of death and voice.In Hugo's remark, however, it is above all the address that arrests our attention and tempts us to engage Hugo in conversation with Blanchot. Hugo is speaking to André [End Page 73] Chénier, or rather to the spirit of Chénier, which ostensibly communicates to participants in séances conducted in Jersey in 1853-54 under the guidance of the celebrated psychic Mme. de Girardin. He addresses the voice of a dead poet, an absent voice that can only speak through a peculiar form of writing that spells out letters one by one through the tappings of a table. It is a voice that writes since it can no longer speak, having lost its head to the guillotine during the French Revolution. During the séances, Hugo asks Chénier to recount the experience of his death. Is it because Chénier is in the unusual position of speaking from beyond the grave that Hugo expects him to do the impossible, to go beyond the silenced voice of the condemned man, that is, beyond the reach of fiction? How are we to read this writing of the Tables, and what does it have to do with "literature"?The transcript dramatizes fundamental notions concerning writing, death, and relations between the two that Blanchot will theorize a century later in his critical writings. Here, Hugo demands Chénier's impossible account of his own death specifically in response to a demand of writing. What is at stake is not only the continuation of the narrative necessarily aborted in Hugo's novel —"I stopped at the point where only you can continue"—but also the continuation of the poetry of Chénier, interrupted by the poet's untimely death. Responding to Chénier's expressed concern, Hugo and his companions offer to assist Chénier in the completion of his poems. "André," Hugo begins:You desire, and we also desire, to see your oeuvre completed. We will gather piously, and with the respect due your...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)Suzanne Guerlac (bio)If there is a single term poststructuralism could not live without—at least within the intellectual circles associated with the review Tel quel—it is “transgression,” inherited from Bataille. “God-meaning,” Philippe Sollers writes in an early essay, “... is a figure of linguistic interdiction whereas writing—which is metaphoricity itself (Derrida)—transgresses... the hierarchic order of discourse and of the world associated with it” [“La science de Lautréamont” 808, my emphasis]. In their Dictionnaire des sciences du langage Ducrot and Todorov declare grandly that text “has always functioned as a transgressive field with respect to the system according to which we organize our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics and even our science” [443–44, my emphasis]. They describe the advent of poststructuralism as a “Copernican revolution,” and it became customary to characterize the before and after of this break by referring to Bataille’s distinction between “restrained” and “general” economies.An influential essay by Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), might be considered the opening move in what would become Tel quel’s appropriation of Bataille. Foucault’s essay examines Bataille’s L’érotisme (1955), a study that theorized transgression in a complex elaboration which articulated philosophical discourse (Hegel/Kojève) with a “sociological” discourse of the sacred (Caillois). Foucault’s reading of the text removes the transgression of eroticism from both these discursive horizons and moves it toward late Heidegger (an ontology of the limit) and Nietzsche. If one of Bataille’s most radical gestures was to insert the ethnographic distinction sacred/profane into philosophical discussion, Foucault’s analysis reinscribes transgression within the intertextual field of philosophy, radicalized, of course, through the inclusion of the “marginal” figure, Nietzsche, and the philosopher who announced the end of philosophy, Heidegger. Foucault’s rewriting of Bataille may read philosophy against itself, may even propose the transgression of philosophy; nevertheless, it is structured by the vicissitudes of philosophical discourse. Bataille on the other hand had confronted philosophy with something radically other—tout autre.In “Préface à la transgression,” Foucault defined transgression as “a gesture concerning the limit.” He presented it as a flash of lightning, an image that not only figures transgression but also emblematizes the move into what will become the philosophical register of poststructuralism. It traces a line, a line that figures the Heideggerian ontology of limitation, the coming into being (or appearance) of beings on the horizon of Being; it suggests the limit of the ontological difference between Being and beings.Anticipating Derrida through Heidegger, Foucault analyzed transgression as an event of difference, alluding to Blanchot’s “principe de contestation” and to a Nietzschean notion of affirmation. “Might not the instantaneous play of the limit and transgression be today the essential test of a thinking of ‘origin’ which Nietzsche bequeathed to us... a thinking that would be absolutely, and in the same movement, a Critique and an Ontology, a thinking that would think finitude and being?” [Foucault 759]. Transgression becomes identified with a “philosophy of eroticism” (which plays on Sade’s “philosophie dans le boudoir”), a gesture that transvalues philosophy from the realm of cognitive or rational activity to “an experience of finitude and of being, of the limit and of transgression.” The [End Page 6] “philosophy” of eroticism is thus a “test/ordeal [épreuve} of the limit,” one that “no dialectical movement, no analysis of fundamental laws [constitutions] and of their transcendental foundation [leur sol]” can help us think. Foucault then asks a rhetorical question that could be said to structure much of the discourse of theory in the next decade: “Would it be an exaggeration, to say,” he asks, “... that it would be necessary to find a language for the transgressive that would be what dialectic has been for contradiction?” [759].In this way Foucault established transgression as an alternative to the machine of dialectical contradiction. Attuned to the recent discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations between the subject and language (the subject is no longer considered master of his or her language but structured by it), Foucault announced that “the gesture of transgression replaces the movement of contradiction by plunging the...