One of Deleuzes Bergsonisms

Rossen Ventzislavov

City College of New York

Abstract
In this article I attempt to reveal some continuities between the antipsychoanalytic stance adopted by Gilles Deleuze in his later work and
Henri Bergsons early philosophy. On account of these continuities
I hope to provide a glimpse into what I believe is a century-old tangent
of philosophical resistance to the methods and theories of Freudian
psychoanalysis. In order to achieve this, I start with a brief meditation
on the challenges and benefits of cross-generational inheritance and
collaboration in philosophy. The purpose of this is twofold to explore
some general conditions for such collaboration and to tease out some
of the implications of these conditions for the substantive argument my
specific reading of Bergson via Deleuze occasions. I then expound on
Bergsons theory of duration and some of the uses to which Deleuze
puts it in the latter part of his career. In this I outline several fecund
similarities between Bergsons critique of associationism and Deleuzes
attack on Freud. Finally, I attempt a partial evaluation of Freudian
psychoanalysis from the joint, albeit naturally disjointed, perspective of
my primary sources.
Keywords: Bergson, Deleuze, Freud, anti-psychoanalysis

I. Creating and Inheriting Insight

It is not clear whether philosophy unveils knowledge which is already
there or whether it creates new knowledge. One clue to an answer may
lie in the historical fact that philosophers talk and write about other
philosophers. This fact can be considered of some evidential value to
Deleuze Studies 5.3 (2011): 340357
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0025
Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/dls

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the supposition that philosophising is more about elaborating on prior

knowledge than about inventing. But, then, how obscure and in need of
commentary can a thinkers writing be? Why do we so often need one
person to reveal and expound on the tenets of another persons thinking?
If we prefer to be charitable to the predecessor figure in general, we
could say that his/her commentator simply provides an update. If, to
the contrary, we decide to give more justice to the commentator, we
will have to admit that commenting is rich with revelation; that is, if
successful, it will amount to an upgrade.1
I hope that it will not be too much of a rhetorical stretch to say that
the category of the new in art is to a large extent analogous to the new in
philosophy. The new, in both cases, generally presents itself as a riddle, a
riddle that stops being considered new when it is solved. The solution, it
is important to note, does not simply make the new riddle old, but tries
to make sure the riddle is altogether no more. In art, this posing and
solving of riddles accounts for changes in artistic styles, as in the case of
Picassos distinct periods. But what if a philosopher attempts to solve his
or her own riddles? Many have tried. Descartes, for whom the idea of
a new philosophy was programmatic, is one good example of a thinker
who wrote with a view to all potential objections that could arise from
the direction of his critics. He thus wrote mostly backwards, not in the
sense of consulting prior philosophy, but in the sense of always trying
to pre-empt any future critique of his own. The example of Descartes
shows that there are thinkers whose heritage can remain mostly theirs.
One is always tempted to say that philosophers who write in stone, like
Descartes, are the truly great ones. This would mean that they did the
philosophers job better than most of their colleagues. But, then again,
is the philosophers profession that of a restorer or that of an inventor
of knowledge? And is it not strange that we would readily admit that
Descartes was clearly a creator of new (first) philosophy, but at the same
time we recognise the antiquarian effort his oeuvre demands of Cartesian
scholars?
The example of Descartes gives us a better clue to answering my
initial question. There must be philosophers of both kinds those who
create knowledge and those who dissect the knowledge passed on
from their predecessors. There is, of course, also the salient distinction
between those whose heritage opens up to unpredictable discourses and
those whose philosophy comes with strict directives for future use. Not
surprisingly, any number of the four nodes of the above distinctions
could then be expected to converge in the character of any specific
philosopher. And, to make the life of the consumer of insight even

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more difficult, many philosophers have been prone to switch between
extreme nodes or recombine them throughout the course of their writing
careers.

II. One of Several Bergsonisms

The two philosophers I am here interested in are Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze. They both belong to a category of difficult thinkers
because they readily display all of the above mentioned extremes in all
combinations possible at different periods in their careers. The challenge
in comparing two such philosophers is that, in the common ground
they cover, they would appear too similar or too unlike on different
occasions. With both of them at different times knowledge is in-themaking, but also ready-made; it is available to the reader, but also
remains locked. On the positive side, we are right to expect that such
comparison will yield productive ways of checking Bergson through
Deleuze, or vice versa. Still, in reading them there remains the salient
danger that the creativities of both our subjects taken together can at
any point collide into some sort of philosophical anarchy.
The special focus of my comparison will be on the sources of Deleuzes
anti-psychoanalytical discourse as found in Bergsons Time and Free
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. As difficult
as it is to admit of a strict continuity between the two philosophers
theories, there are many moments in both that resemble strangely
collaborative, if not derivative, efforts. In a parallel reading of Bergson
and Deleuze their similar liberal attitudes to knowledge-making and
knowledge-revealing may give rise to an impression of contemporaneity.
I thus prefer to see Bergson not as Deleuzes predecessor, but rather as
Deleuzes co-conspirator. Concerning the ways in which Bergson can be
tentatively said to have influenced Deleuze there are two major thematic
strands Bergsons theory of time (which refers to duration, intensity,
space and consciousness), and his theory of multiplicity (which deals
with virtuality, repetition and the body). Another distinction which
could be made is that between Deleuzes efforts to claim Bergsons
heritage on the one hand and his incorporation of this heritage into
the process of creating fresh insights on the other. I see the values in
these distinctions not in opposition to one another, but as concurrent
branches.
In terms of positioning Deleuze as Bergsons heir, the first branch
to follow would be the philosophical, analytic one of the earlier years,
before and at the time of Difference and Repetition (1968). In this

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work and those preceding it, Deleuze can be said to employ Bergson by
means of quotation, trying to develop his ideas, or just using them as a
backdrop. Philosophical also because at this stage Deleuze seems eagerly
engaged with prior philosophy in general, with Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Heidegger and many others. In the preface to Bergsonism, he boasts an
intimacy with the philosophers he has written about, the result of which
is, in Deleuzes words a child, which would be his [the philosopher
discussed] and which would at the same time be a monster (Deleuze
1988: 8). One of many proofs for the relevance of the metaphor lies
in the chain formed by Deleuzes treatment of Bergsons treatment of
Kants doctrine of the faculties.2 This could be looked upon as Deleuzes
formative period, when he gradually weaned himself away from earlier
philosophy and developed his own philosophical voice.
The second branch, the one that interests me here, is the interdisciplinary, inventive one, particularly as present in works like Anti-Oedipus,
A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? that is, in Deleuzes
collaborations with Guattari. These works are far less analytic, far less
philosophically correct. Here Deleuze unleashes a new Deleuzian
vernacular, with concepts uniquely his own. These are arguably also
the books whose influence has spread outside of philosophical discourse
(detectable in many contemporary architects writings, in the catalogue
of the Mille Plateaux record label, and so on). What makes them
Bergsonian is the attention they apportion to the method of intuition.
It is also here that Bergsons notions of multiplicity, virtuality and the
body are mobilised for a new purpose, new to both philosophers and, in
all probability, for philosophy in its totality. The innovation in question
is Deleuzes drawing out of the anti-psychoanalytic implications of Bergsons philosophy. As a Bergsonism, this is distinct from the historical
version manifest in the greater part of Deleuzes early work and from
the conceptual/creative one presented in his books on cinema. While
these other engagements with Bergson are just as valuable, and often
draw on the same sources, the anti-Oedipal Bergsonism I am concerned
with here is much less explored. My extraction of a new virtual dialogue
between Bergson and Deleuze on a new topic thus aims at making two
contributions first, to honour the two philosophers creative approach
to reading philosophy and, second, to carve out a place for a particular
Bergsonism which merits further attention.

III. Bergsons Playing Field

In the conclusion of Time and Free Will, Bergson attempts to recapitulate
the points he has made about duration and its informing connection

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to free will. Throughout the essay Bergson has avoided recognising the
possibility of any layering of consciousness. While consciousness is on
the agenda, there is a specific angle from which it is looked at, that
of psychophysics. All talk of the intensity of conscious states therefore
assumes a flat conscious plane rather than a mass of layered bricks.
Moreover, according to Bergson any spatial model of consciousness,
(be it Leibnizs pre-established harmony between conscious states and
extended objects, or Bergsons own vignette of the invisible musician
playing behind the scenes while the actor strikes a keyboard the keys of
which yield no sound, is doomed to assume more than is scientifically
provable (Bergson 2001: 147). Bergson does not deny the existence of
the unconscious and all things associated with the Freudian picture. He
just marginalises them and the possible ways of classifying them to the
speculative edges of inquiry.3
The important pre-Deleuzian move in the conclusion of Time and Free
Will is Bergsons criticism of the associationist conception of the mind.
The latter is often mentioned in the book as an outcome of the theory of
psychological determinism concerning the causal concatenation between
successive states of consciousness (Bergson 2001: 148, 155). What
Bergson has against such theory turns out to be analogous to what
Deleuze would later reject in Freudian psychoanalysis. The mistake
a determinist makes is to establish a causal link between physical
movement and conscious states. Even more fatally, a determinist of the
associationist type would claim that one conscious state causes the next
such state immediately following.
What this implies, according to Bergson, is that the workings of
consciousness are indeed traceable, pseudo-kinetic. He realises that with
associationism what is apparently true is taken for scientifically correct.
A state of determination about any action does seem to follow from
a previous state of consciousness where the object of determination
shaped up, but we cannot fully know the extent to which one causes
the other. Experience shows, Bergson points out, that many times we
are sure of what we are going to do in a certain situation where action
is called for, but we like to keep wondering what the best way to act
would be. In this and other ways, there can be states of consciousness
strangely inconsequential for the ones immediately following. To no
surprise, Bergsons verdict is that associationism is another example of
the confusion between temporal and spatial terms. In his conclusion, he
writes: Intensity, duration, voluntary determination, these are the three
ideas which had to be clarified by ridding them of all that they owe to
the intrusion of the sensible world and, in a word, to the obsession of the
idea of space (Bergson 2001: 224). The way space talk creeps into the

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associationists discussion of consciousness is through the inappropriate

admission of a homogeneous medium of psychic states. It is far easier to
distinguish psychic states from one another against an imaginary screen
of distribution of psychic functions. However, Bergson cautions that
this is not only pre-scientific, it is also dangerously unfaithful to the
observable phenomena themselves. It is a case of what he calls substituting the symbol of the ego for the ego itself (Bergson 2001: 226).
Bergsons whole theory of duration is aimed against such habitual
substitutions. Duration, for him, has two completely different lives in
theory and in actuality, lives that are compatible only if and to the extent
that theory has the humility to curb its findings at a safe distance from
the hope of general application.
There is a traceable line of thought in Bergson that seems to connect
his major philosophical concerns, or at least paves a way conspicuously
through the plethora of his creations. This line comes in his extensive
work on duration but also in other different arguments, like an avenue
chaining distinct city blocks, but uniformly, as a healthy obsession.
It can be broadly defined as the recognition of false substitution in
philosophy of the easy for the difficult. The sense in which the latter
two terms are used here is that of extremes on a line where common
sense occupies the middle point. It is only of minor interest to Bergson
to bestow ethical judgements upon anyones choice of position along the
line. The easy is not necessarily condemnable, the difficult is not always
commendable. Whenever Bergson chooses one over the other he does it
only to demonstrate the fact that they are clearly distinct. What I here
call the easy is science and the faculties of abstraction associated with
it. The difficult is metaphysics, a meta-something-or-other that dislodges
philosophy from the empirically inescapable.
In Bergsons theory of duration in particular, both physics and
metaphysics are given their share. It is only fair to have both; he
believes that space and time are inherently problematic because of
their easy surrender to common sense, which in its turn is largely
inadequate in dealing with them. Common sense is the turning point,
the place where the mistake of space/time substitution takes place.
This is why for Bergson metaphysics was born with the articulation of
Zenos paradoxes. A simple phenomenon like motion is there treated as
spatially discrete by science and as spatially indeterminate by common
sense. Only metaphysics can and should, according to Bergson, treat
motion as what it is a full and mobile experience (Bergson 1968: 17).
As the philosopher makes clear in his The Creative Mind, science has
always looked for positive attributes in space and not time. Since science

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struggles to foresee, it can only focus on time passed, not time unfurling.
Consequently, it is the calling of metaphysics to clear knowledge of
spatial metaphor and restore duration as the unceasing creation, the
uninterrupted upsurge of novelty that it is (Bergson 1968: 17).
A peculiar theoretical spillage occurs when traditional scientific
analysis becomes blind to the differences of the ontological values of
kind vs. degree, quality vs. quantity, duration vs. space, psychophysical
entity vs. the symbol for it. Bergson points out that general ideas (be
they easy, difficult, or commonsensical) are most often thought of within
a homogeneous medium like space. The main reason for this is the
promise of order that spatiality gives and always seems to deliver. It is,
for instance, a consequence of this symbolism of science that perception
is regarded as incapable of registering duration (Bergson 1968: 18). To
counter this, Bergson reminds us that the alleged failure of perception is
such only if duration is analytically chopped up into regular successive
pieces. In Deleuzes words, duration is in no way indivisible, but is that
which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division
(Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 483). Again, perception and consciousness
in general are nowhere properly apart from duration except within
theory. In the case of the associationists view of consciousness, Bergson
notices the same error in replacing the concrete phenomenon which
takes place in the mind by the artificial reconstruction of it and,
ultimately, of confusing the explanation of the fact with the fact itself
(Bergson 2001: 163). Bergson points out that the latter mistake was
firstly made by Kant and then inherited by the associationists (Bergson
2001: 232). To round off a historical polemic, it is my purpose here to
show how a mistake of a similar kind was committed by Sigmund Freud
and duly criticised by Deleuze.

IV. Anti-Oedipus and Bergson

As a Bergsonian, that is, as a difficult philosopher in his own right,
Deleuze has his own just claim to metaphysical innovation. In spite of
its originality, Difference and Repetition reads as if it has picked up
where Bergsons theory of duration had left off. It is not difficult (and
I hope not presumptuous) to trace Deleuzes conception of difference
back to Bergsons picture of pure duration. For one thing, since my
present interest lies elsewhere, it can be noted that both Difference and
Repetition and Time and Free Will work towards restoring the meta in
metaphysical. The later Deleuze has a very different plan for philosophy.

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In collaboration with Guattari he opens an anti-psychoanalytical

discourse which, through multiple series of philosophical manoeuvres,
connects to aesthetic theory, a new critique of capitalism, and a new
perspective on anthropology.4 If all this sounds strangely ambitious even
for a two-headed philosopher, we have to be reminded of how much
Bergson attempted and accomplished on his own. The question of what
Guattari did for Deleuze, however tangential for the present inquiry, is
for me as important as that of what Deleuze contributes to Bergson.
Judging by the primary sources, if Bergson had had the choice of writing
in collaboration with any one of his contemporaries it would have been
either Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein. The first, because consciousness
was always on Bergsons agenda, and the second because science in
general and duration in particular were of major concern to him. Since
Bergson did have his try at Einstein with Duration and Simultaneity, it
remains a mystery what would have become of a potential encounter
between Bergson and Freud. Deleuze, with Guattaris help, steps in to
lay bare the possible dynamics of such an encounter.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze discusses what he calls the
image of thought, an inaugural perpetuum mobile, a mechanism of
honorific assignments which are bestowed upon the practices of thinking
and knowledge. Here he also offers his answer to the question we
asked at the outset: Does philosophy update or upgrade knowledge? For
Deleuze, philosophy most often does the first but ought to do the second.
The philosophers predicament is to fall prey to common sense, the
middle ground, a safe place. But common sense shows every day . . . that
it is capable of producing philosophy in its own way (Deleuze 1994:
135). In Deleuzes opinion, this is where the Cartesian cogito comes
from, a general idea of good sense that appeals to the mundanely
undeniable. Thus, if there is Descartes the doctor scientiae, who looks
for philosophy-as-principle, there is also Descartes the folk thinker, who
appeals to the age-old recognition of thought-as-law.
According to Deleuze, the symbolic gesture of the Cartesian cogito
is far surpassed in brashness by Deleuzes arch-enemy Freud and his
theory of the unconscious. If it is not altogether safe to say that Deleuzes
anger towards Freud comes from the same place as Bergsons anger
with the associationists (however much we are inclined to recognise an
affinity of affective character between the two respective attitudes), it
seems true enough that Freuds obsession with Oedipus commits the
associationists error of substitution. In the two volumes of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari5 break into the theatrical stage
set of the Freudian unconscious. What displeases them in their findings

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is the predatory backwardness of Freuds reliance on common sense and
the aggressive spatiality of the Oedipal model.
The most direct attack on Freud in the entire two-volume project of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia is found in the second book under the title
One or Several Wolves? This short chapter restages the famous case of
Freuds Wolf-Man as a failure of Oedipal dramaturgy. The patient in
question, Sergei Pankejeff, is represented through a series of psychotic
episodes whose meaning Freud believed he had deciphered. The finality
of a cure, in Freud, is argued to be a function, and in this case the
felicitous outcome, of such meaning extraction. The process that leads
Freud to such a declaration, of a method and its success, is not far
from literary analysis after all, on some level the Wolf-Mans psychotic
episodes are stories, and we should not forget that Oedipus was once
just a story, too. Deleuze alludes to the latter fact by introducing his
chapter with the fictive statement That day, the Wolf-Man rose from
the couch particularly tired (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 26). But are
these merely stories and are they as unequivocally transposable as Freud
believes? Starting out with Pankejeffs dream of six or seven wolves,
with the help of Freuds retroactive dramatic apparatus, the plot, so to
speak, thickens to accommodate the inclusion of kid goats, an episode
of inadvertent voyeurism, two dogs, and, ultimately, the castration of
the patients father.6 This reduction, according to Deleuze, commits
the cardinal sin of replacing a dynamic multiplicity with a persistent
singularity. Wolves, as Deleuze reminds us, come in packs not in the
sense that wolves always come in groups operating on a common plane
or with a common purpose, but in the sense that the generic for wolf
presupposes a multiplicity, even when used in the singular.
Deleuzes concept of multiplicity here is partially borrowed from both
Bergson and Riemann. From Bergson comes the distinction between
numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or durational
multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 33). For Deleuze, the
patients pack of wolves belongs to both categories. The significance of
the above distinction between different multiplicities for the Freudian
picture is that it renders Freuds numerical fragment of a lost Unity or
Totality suspect (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 32). Even in a numerical
multiplicity there is never simply the One, a lone signifier, a father and
so on. Instead, there are accumulations of singularities, momentarily
discernible and even countable but, also, ever-shifting. The pack of
wolves seems the perfect model for this resistance to unity that Deleuze
posits it makes little sense to speak of the leader of a pack, of the centre
of a pack, of the pack at all.

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The One, on the other hand, emerges as a fiction of singularity, an

individual whose name is in constant danger of being edged out by a
new one that better fits the story. The impression of a happy end is set
in motion by the healthy transition of the Wolf-Man back into Sergei
Pankejeff, when purportedly cured. But such neat reversal, as Deleuze
points out, is impossible if the patient and his ailment have become many
and, as the (hi)story goes, have sucked all manner of subsequent doctors
and treatments into the natural loop of their multiplication.7
As to the second kind of multiplicity, Deleuze insists that it is not
the other side of a duality but rather the intensification of all processes
of re-distribution, re-mapping and de-individualisation characteristic
of numerical multiplicity. The Freudian unconscious is, for Deleuze,
a prime example of this intensive multiplicity. And, consequently,
where Freud sees an individual Deleuze sees a crowd. Singularity
presupposes a negation, a lack of some sort, by virtue of which it
accommodates repression, while for Deleuze the unconscious knows
nothing of negation (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 31). Going back to
the Wolf-Mans psychotic episodes, if they are read the Freudian way,
making sense of them surely gains something from the substitution
of a familial theatre for a schizoid multiplicity. But the editorial effort
involved is clearly arbitrary and what remains on the cutting-room floor
might just turn out to be the ever-changing story itself.
It is interesting that in Freud the normative seems to prey on the
phenomenological. Even in name, things such as a bad dream, a
nightmare and a psychotic episode have a built-in normative charge.
If one should inquire into the difference between a dream and a bad
dream, Freud is very likely to offer an explanation that, firstly, posits a
difference in kind between the two phenomena (rather than degree, or
intensity as Deleuze will have it), and, secondly, will bestow different
valences to each phenomenon relative to the degree to which each one
conforms to the analysts valuative system. Deleuze detects the same
procedure in Freuds differentiation between neurosis and psychosis, an
operation that starts out as a promising analysis of intensive multiplicity,
possibly even the greatest art of the unconscious, but soon after gets
bogged down by the Freudian reductive procedure (Deleuze and Guattari
1998: 27). As to the normative charges implied, Keith Ansell Pearson
contributes a great observation on the continuity between Bergson and
Deleuze in opposition to Freud: This explains Bergsons interest in
the anomalies of the life of spirit, one that will come to inform
Deleuzes analyses in the two Cinema books, such as deliriums, dreams,
hallucinations, and so on, which, Bergson insists, are positive facts

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that consist in the presence, and not in the absence, of something:
They seem to introduce into the mind certain new ways of feeling
and thinking (Ansell Pearson 2005: 5). Freudian reduction, however,
makes no provision for such positive facts, which undermines Freuds
claims to both an understanding of the meanings of these phenomena
and to possible convalescence through psychoanalytic transference.
If we take a step back to Bergson, we could recall that for him any
scientific model is based on the notion of space. Freud, however, recoils
from the possibility of becoming a scientist. His magnitudes, sections
of the human psyche, do not even properly measure the unconscious
but merely subordinate it to a theoretical master plan: Freud himself,
as Deleuze notes, recognises the multiplicity of libidinal currents that
coexist in the Wolf-Man:
That makes it all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the
unconscious the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to
the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar
or supreme hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single
Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1998: 31)

Bergson sees Freudian psychoanalysis (in theory and practice) as

evidence for the existence of an integral conservation of the past on
the threshold between science and common sense (Bergson 1968: 889).
What he means by this are the above mentioned tendencies of science
to focus predominantly on what has passed and the things of common
sense on things extended in space. Thus, the hybrid tangible past
subsists as a constant point of reference in psychoanalysis. It is curious,
or perhaps only to be expected, that Deleuze distinguishes a function
of memory which he calls the conservational and associates with any
pickled memories that work towards a relocation of the self into the past
(Deleuze 1994: 803). It would be only fair to note here that the Oedipal
past shares some traits of the Bergsonian (and Deleuzian) past, most
importantly its ontological value. For both Freud and his two critics the
past is, it subsists, it is never lost, it is an everpast. The major difference,
however, is that the access to it is furnished in different ways in Freud
on the one hand and in the two French philosophers on the other.
For Freud, the unconscious represents a record inscribed on the
psyche, it is rewritten every moment, but always remains the same.
What keeps an eye on the process is the Ego, an unwelcome answer to
the Bergsonian present, the Deleuzian body without organs. The body
without organs is a locus of becoming, the home of multiplicity, and the

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repudiation of organic unity. Both the Ego and the body without organs
are now, never two minutes ago or tomorrow. Even though Deleuze
rarely writes of the body without organs in temporal terms, what he
writes has a recognisable parallel to Bergsonian duration. The body
without organs performs an ousting of the past, it makes a difference
from the past the way in Bergson pure duration involves the aforementioned upsurge of novelty at every stage. In one place, Deleuze explains
that the body without organs is what remains when we take everything
away (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 151). Deleuze qualifies this suggestion by making an important distinction proper organisms perform
the connective syntheses of production while the body without organs
takes care of the disjunctive synthesis of recording (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 12). The past is available to the body without organs through
aberrant paths of communication between non-communicating vessels,
transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences
within their own particular boundaries (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
43). There is a record, but it is inconstant; the past is a body that continuously changes, the way in Bergson matter is subject to continuous
alteration. In the process of becoming which encompasses all of duration, space, and body for Bergson and Deleuze the present is the true
psychological existence, a present, as it were, untouched by the past except through the alterity of selective memory and an impetus for action.
Freud reserves the present for the Ego, the corrector of the past.
When he asserts that the Ego is the coherent organisation of mental
processes he admits the possibility of such organisation after the fact
(Freud 1999: 17). It is but a small step from here to the associationists
spatial model of consciousness. Space, for Bergson and even more
for Deleuze, is the stuff of conquest and regularity. Deleuze criticises
Freud severely for his letting the Ego supervene over the unconscious.
The symbolism of riders-whipping-horses, the present becoming an
excuse for past trauma, the layering of the psyche, presuppose a jump
between simultaneity and space. The memory of the past for Freud is
not selective, but solid; it does not call for action, but for retrograde
psychosis. The subdivisions of the psyche (Ego, Id, Ego Ideal, and so
on) line up in a strict hierarchy where everything follows neatly from
everything else. It is a theatre, a place rather than a time.

V. Oedipus Unravelling
The Freudian theatre is very aptly demystified by George Dimock
in his Anna and the Wolf-Man: Rewriting Freuds Case History

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(1995). In his article Dimock revisits the Wolf-Mans case through the
double lens of the patients late life memoirs and also of scholarship
on the case after Freud. From these texts there emerges considerable
evidence that Freuds reading of the patients neurosis was marked
by an unproductive tendency to over-simplify and twist the patients
variegated past experience. Following clues from Pankejeffs life story as
told by Pankejeff himself, Dimock reinstates the patients sister, Anna,
as a key presence and possibly a key psychological determinant in the
development of the Wolf-Mans disorder.
The first and seemingly least reliable clue Dimock pursues is a
childhood photograph of the patient with his sister. Even in this
dubious piece of evidence Dimock is inclined to find a peculiar filial
bond indicative of co-dependency and, possibly, salient neurosis. The
photograph, one among a few that Dimock discusses and reproduces,
exemplifies the highly stylised but deliberate approach of turn-of-thecentury family portraiture. The tight conventions it follows, however,
make the accidental and the personal all the more indicative of the
psychological dimension, which the sitters apparently share. Dimock
admits that the photograph can only be used as a metaphorical tool its
undeniable presence does not constitute immediate fodder for analysis
but it can very well be used, together with the other photographs
reproduced, in considering alternatives to Freuds analytic conclusions.
The shared psychological dimension in question is one that Dimock
calls the interpersonal, which he opposes to the introspective. The
interpersonal is where the entire history of the Wolf-Mans life branches
out to include other actual persons (family, friends, a nanny and
the larger population), their relevant experiences, and the subjective
complications they occasion for each other and, of course, for the
analysand. The introspective, on the other hand, refers to the subjective
experiences to which each of us has privileged access. At this stage of
his discussion Dimock introduces another parallel distinction through
the words of Pankejeff himself: The Wolf-Man proclaims that what
he writes is something like a short family novel, which favours
the epic over the sentimental or the theatrical.8 The epic here
assumes a parallel function to Dimocks interpersonal dimension, while
the theatrical is associated with the introspective. At first glance this
looks like a curious reversal of the Deleuzian sense of Freuds family
theatre the latter, after all, is seen by Deleuze as what amounts to a
calcified interpersonal diorama. Dimock, however, makes it the purpose
of his essay to show that Freuds dioramas assume an interpersonal
dimension but fall short of following through with the theoretical

One of Deleuzes Bergsonisms

353

and practical demands this dimension makes of psychoanalysis. To

go back to Dimocks photographic examples, the images undeniably
represent the relevant stage sets on which respective interpersonal
confluences are played out. Each photograph, however, is also markedly
resistant to psychoanalytic interpretation just because it is not, by
itself, a complete signifier its claim to dramatic importance is both
reinforced and undermined by its belonging to the enormous variety of
episodes, attitudes and simultaneities which constitute the larger family
epic.
For Freud, on the other hand, the family epic and its persistent
percolations into the patients psyche remain mostly out of reach.
Dimock cites Freuds indirect apology for not having provided a fuller
picture, but as Dimock notices this is not necessarily Freuds major
misstep it is rather the tendentiously static reading of Pankejeffs life
that distorts Freuds search and the findings thereof. Freuds process
of critically selecting bits of the narrative and endowing them with
special significance must have been completely arbitrary if he ignored
so much of the Wolf-Mans history.9 By way of proof, Dimock makes
a convincing case that the Oedipal theatre is just one of many dramatic
stencils that fit the bill. He finds fast connections between Pankejeffs
introspective reports and the cultural reality the patient grew up in. It
is thus that Tolstoys wolf-hunt scene and the subsequent reconciliation
between brother and sister in War and Peace constitutes a rival narrative
that, if transposed on Pankejeffs neurotic episodes, promises to
help explain much more than Freuds trusty Oedipus ever would
(Dimock 1995: 67).
For the literary to become literal, one has to have a particularly
conservative approach to story-telling and story-making. Freuds
approach is to look for scraps of Oedipus in the ruins of his patients
life the Wolf-Man also has a suicidal sister and an erotically charged
nanny, but Freud remains content with regarding such actors as
superfluous to the real drama of the Oedipal triangle. Another symbolic
triangle that of the number three mentioned by the patient, which
Freud eagerly and entirely speculatively attributes to Pankejeffs preconscious memory of witnessing his parents engage in intercourse three
times, might just as well be related to the three wolves that appear
in a photograph of Pankejeff and other family members after, yet
again, a wolf hunt. The psychoanalysts ambition to make sense of a
psychological ailment begins to look unrealistic against the plentiful
muddle of such associative clusters. A possible way out is suggested but
not properly theorised by the Wolf-Man himself.

354 Rossen Ventzislavov

What does the patient mean when he says that his memoirs favour
the epic over the theatrical? One reading, as offered by Dimock, is the
imperative of telling the whole story without the convenient omissions
so typical of Freuds editorial approach to trauma and drama. Another
interpretation, which does not contradict Dimocks but builds on it,
comes from the work of Bergson and Deleuze. The metaphysical mistake
of attributing spatial features to durational phenomena is very useful in
deciphering Pankejeffs suggestion. If theatre is understood as a space,
or at least the possibility of re-enacting the same story, Freuds fixation
with applying the dramatic arch of Oedipus Rex to all and sundry
psychological signposts constitutes an intrusion of a spatial model upon
a variety of durational occurrences. (One does not need to be reminded
of Giulio Camillos memory theatre to be able to recognise the mixed
blessing of tampering with the lived structure of mnemonic experience or
any experience whatever. Camillos claim that the memory theatre will
make it possible for anyone to converse with the erudition of a Cicero
belongs to the same utopian genre as Freuds ambition to make sense of
man, survival, and civilisation all on the purported force of a universally
applicable theatrical stencil.) The epic, on the other hand, is at least
superficially easier to identify with the Bergsonian/Deleuzian notion of
intensive multiplicity the epic is most often a long literary work which
relates a significant story in all aspects of its unfolding; it also represents
a battlefield upon which literary licence and historical accuracy never
cease to fight. Most importantly, however, the family epic Pankejeff
chooses to write becomes, with its intensive multiplicity of actors, scenes
and episodes, the most faithful representation of the factors that the
Wolf-Mans unconscious is ever so mysteriously predicated on. This
does not mean that the Wolf-Man himself would, just by writing the
story, acquire the coveted clarity about these factors and the workings
of his own unconscious but writing the story anew does reconfirm the
durational character of both neurosis and life, in short, of all manners
of becoming.
Like Bergsons begrudged associationists Freud believes that by
locating the coherence between disparate mental phenomena one is
afforded an easy, commonsensical, objective way out of, and never into,
becoming. As Bergson himself ingeniously puts it, this actual and not
merely virtual perception of subdivisions in what is undivided is just
what we call objectivity (Bergson 2001: 83). Coherence is the promise
of objectivity, of the divisible truth, the conquerable psyche. According
to Deleuze, these tendencies are all the fault of humanitys obsession with
unity, the wish to step outside of oneself and look back at oneself with

One of Deleuzes Bergsonisms

355

an air of Kantian disinterestedness. Both Bergson and Deleuze believe

that such detachment from and spatial appropriation of different aspects
of mental life is often inescapable, but always harmful.10 They both
belong to the species of philosophers Deleuze calls doctores angelici,
abortionists of unity and angel makers (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 6).
In contrast, the associationists make determinist machines and Freud
invents the theatre of stasis. Or, perhaps, they do not even invent
anything but only reproduce the script and the mistakes of some prior
story.

VI. The Riddle of the New

The preceding philosophical worries, if granted the interest and
validity I would claim for them, yield an important meta-philosophical
consequence. The consequence I refer to is that Freuds reading of
his patients story finds its place within my discussion not only with
reference to the work of Bergson and Deleuze, but also with reference
to the broader methodological context of Deleuzes manner of reading
Freud via Bergson. Within the latter context, Freud seems to occupy
an unenviable place on the continuum between creating insight and
inheriting it. What Freud chooses to learn from his patients story is
precisely what fits his own intellectual and narrative constructs prior to
ever meeting the patient. This resistance to novelty is neatly mirrored
in Freuds substantive theory itself. Deleuzes misgivings, via Bergson,
about the stagnant spatialisation of the Oedipal model seem to be, in
part, misgivings about Freuds reactionary brand of interpretation. Only
through such limited interpretation does it become possible for Freud
to declare therapeutic success where there is none a success which
registers more as an act of appropriation than as an act of understanding.
Ultimately, the Wolf-Mans psychological inscriptions are redacted so
that they can be folded neatly into the jealous inheritance of the selfcontained Freudian scroll.
This approach is the exact opposite of how Deleuze engages with
Bergsons heritage. In his application of Bergsonian notions of duration,
multiplicity and becoming to his anti-psychoanalytic project Deleuze
simultaneously honours Bergsons insight and writes it anew. As an
example of referring to a past, be it in psychoanalysis or its philosophical
counterpart, what Deleuze does mirrors the theoretical underpinnings
of Bergsons theory just as Bergson insists on the dynamic nature
of the pasts continuous redrawing, Deleuze insists on the dynamic
reconsideration of prior thought. The possibility of reading Freud

356 Rossen Ventzislavov

through Bergson is undoubtedly one that Deleuze creates. Among the
virtues of taking such a licence is that it opens the way for subsequent
commentators to multiply the particular chain of interpretation even
further.

Notes
1. Update is here used in the sense of a restorers effort, while upgrade is
associated with the work of the inventor.
2. Kants doctrine of the faculties was apparently influenced by Leibnizs idea of
pre-established harmony. In his Kants Critical Philosophy Deleuze picks up
on Kants fascination with Leibnizian harmony and tries to show that Kants
enhancement of Leibnizs meaning has the limitation of allowing apriority to
suffocate the free accord of the faculties (cf. Deleuze 1993: 224). It is in no
way bizarre that a similar treatment of the same topic lurks behind Bergsons
exposition in Time and Free Will.
3. One emblematic mention of the unconscious in Bergson is found in his Matter
and Memory: And we have expressed how the cerebral lesion may effect this
weakening, without the necessity of supposing any sort of provision of memories
stored in the brain. What the injury really attacks are the sensory and motor
regions corresponding to this class of perception, and especially those adjuncts
through which they may be set in motion from within, so that memory, finding
nothing to catch hold of, ends by becoming practically powerless: now, in
psychology, powerlessness means unconsciousness (Bergson 1988: 176).
4. Deleuze and Guattaris attempt to reserve a genre slot for their contribution
to philosophy reads: RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS. To this, a page later they
add POP ANALYSIS (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 224).
5. May any omission of Guattaris name with reference to the two works not be
regarded by the reader as discounting Guattaris contribution, but as a matter of
mere brevity.
6. This operation is accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, The
Wolf and the Seven Kid-Goats (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freuds
reductive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of
goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that are
only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is hiding in
the clock. Five wolves: he might have seen his parents make love at five oclock,
and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spreading of a womans
legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three times. Two wolves:
the first coupling the child may have seen was the two parents more ferarum, or
perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the father, as we all knew from the
start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not just a castrater but also castrated.
Who is Freud trying to fool? (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 28).
7. [I]t is at the highest point of this depersonalisation that someone can be
named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense
discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging
to him or her, and to which he or she belongs (Deleuze and Guattari 1998: 35).
8. Whatever else these terms may signify, they point away from introspection
toward the interpersonal, away from psychoanalysis toward the broader social
and historical arena (Dimock 1995: 54).

One of Deleuzes Bergsonisms

357

9. With respect to the full range of human experience, a single dream at four
years of age and its latent content, a primal scene at one and a half, cannot
be presented as inexhaustibly meaningful without becoming narratologically
oppressive by virtue of what they exclude from consideration. Freuds
psychoanalytic drama leaves no room for, among other things, intersubjectivity
in the form of family history. The Wolf-Mans memoirs address, however
inadequately, the casualties of this exclusion (Dimock 1995: 59).
10. In Bergsons discussion of free will, we read: But the moments at which we thus
grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free. The greater part
of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves
but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into
homogeneous space. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we
live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think;
we are acted rather than act ourselves (Bergson 2001: 231).

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