Evan Thompson

Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

Contemporary philosophical research has, following Gilles Deleuze, turned toward the work of Henri Bergson with the intent of challenging phenomenology and its lingering influence. While Bergsonism has been put to anti-phenomenological use since Deleuze’s 1988 study, Bergsonism, one figure stands out for his ambiguous situation vis-à-vis the opposition between Bergsonism and phenomenology. Eight years prior to the publication of Bergsonism, Emmanuel Levinas wrote, “[i]t is important to underline the importance of Bergsonism for the entire problematic of contemporary philosophy; it is… the priority of duration over permanence—there is access to novelty, an access independent of the ontology of the Same”. Though famous for his contributions to ethics, Levinas’s status as a faithful phenomenologist has been taken for granted to the detriment of a rigorous exploration of the meaning behind his oblique but profuse praise for Bergson. This begins with a rigorous reading of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations laying the groundwork for Levinas’s deconstructive reply and then situates this problematic within the Husserlian temporal framework. Husserlian time is demonstrated to be insufficient for explaining the passage of time, and this insufficiency becomes fully apparent when pressing Husserl on the problem of embodiment. Levinas’s theory of time is shown to be reliant instead on Bergsonian memory, and we conclude with a discussion of the political and linguistic dimension of this mnemonic temporality through the lens of J.L. Austin’s and Eve Sedgwick’s theories of performative language.

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