OSH 2031: Darwin, Bergson and Deleuze on the Question of Time and Unpredictability
3 November 2003 — 7 November 2003
Old Main 403 Canisius College from 5pm — 8pm Daily
| Instructor: | Elizabeth Grosz Professor II Department of Women’s and Gender Studies Rutgers University |
This course will explore three related theoretical and conceptual frameworks which each posit the specific set of relations between time and matter - those developed by Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who form not only an historically continuous strand of materialism, but who also actively engage with the work of each other as predecessors. Each provides an understanding of time as an active open-ended force, instead of, as is more common in Western thought, the passive counterpart of space; each provides an account of life as the dynamic intrication of matter and time; and each develops an understanding of time which privileges the place of the future rather than the past in time’s functioning. In this sense, each must be understood as a theorist of becoming. This course will concentrate on the understanding of time and becoming that each of these thinkers offers to present-day theoretical and political concerns.
Topic One: Darwin and Evolution
An analysis of the concept of time, and evolutionary becoming, from Darwin’s own writings. The place of continuity and discontinuity, the transformations effected in how science is understood, will be discussed.
Reading: Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, especially chs. 1-6 & 15
Topic Two: Nietzsche and Darwin
Nietzsche considered Darwin too ‘English’, though in many respects his work is strongly influenced by Darwin’s conception of life as continual self-overcoming. Here we explore Nietzsche’s critique of Darwin’s notion of science, and his attempts to link science to both ethics and physics.
Reading: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book 3
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, especially the second essay
Topic Three: Bergsonian Duration
Bergson presents the first serious philosophical reading of Darwinism, and of its relations to physics and mathematics. He links matter to the manipulation and control of space, while he links life, as Darwin did, to the flow of time. In doing so, he claims that mathematization can never capture the continuity of duration, which always escapes it.
Reading: Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, especially chs. 3, 4 and the conclusion
Topic Four: Bergson and the Virtual
Science and mathematics, are always, for Bergson, linked to the control of matter. This means that science is missing the rich, potentially infinite, interconnections between matter that lead to the evolutionary emergence of life. The place of philosophy, and particularly a philosophy of intuition, is to provide some recognition of that which quantification leaves out - intensity, quality or the virtual. We will explore how Bergson understands the virtual, and how it anticipates Deleuze’s more contemporary use.
Reading: Henri Bergson, Creative Mind, especially chs. 3, 4 & 6
Topic Five: Deleuze and the Virtual
Deleuze brings together the wayward contributions of Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson on the question of the intensive and the extensive. We will explore his position mid-way between Nietzsche and Bergson.
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repitition, ch. 4
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
Assessment: Will be determined by a 1500 — 2000 word essay on the above topics.
Biographical Information: A leading philosopher of becoming, Elizabeth Grosz has pioneered the contemporary reconceptualization of bodies and materialization, specifically in relation to social spaces, institutions, practices, and modes of representation. Grosz’s seminal works Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (1995), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (2001), and numerous articles and edited collections, have reinvigorated and altered the trajectory of feminist theory, gender studies, cultural studies, theories of space, and social theory, sending each in a direction that can only be characterized as new. Grosz’s current research continues to prompt such deviations through a philosophical exploration of time, virtuality and the future.
1 Available (Cross-listed) for Graduate Credit as OSH 503 if Appropriate.