WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS:

THE DISCORDANCE OF TIME IN

LEVINAS AND BERGSONsjp_39 371..392
Ronix Dtnir
\ns+n\c+: One of the earliest examples of articulating the discordance of timea
theme that serves as a guiding thread woven throughout much of the
re-engagement with time that is characteristic of continental philosophycan be
found in a series of essays written by Levinas in the aftermath of World War II.
I show how these essays derive from a set of key texts by Bergson and how
Bergson already anticipated the distinctive ways of conceptualizing the movement
of time that are advanced by Levinas in his early essays. Nevertheless, as I will
show, Levinas chooses not to acknowledge this Bergsonian anticipation of his
theory of time, despite his recognition, repeated throughout many texts and inter-
views, of the inuence of Bergson on the formation of his own thought. I conclude
by reecting on the complexity of the Bergsonian inheritance in Levinass philoso-
phy of time.
A re-engagement with the problem of time lies at the heart of much of
continental philosophy. This is most obviously the case with Heidegger, of
course, but it is equally evident in the work of Bergson, Husserl, Bachelard,
Levinas, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Derrida, and Serres. Among the
most challenging of the themes to emerge from this work is Derridas demon-
stration (in his deconstruction of Husserls lectures on the consciousness of
time) that the full presence of the present is always deferred and that an
originary double movement of differentiation/deferral is constitutive of
time. A number of other writers, such as Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, had
already been reecting on the notion of the cart as a means for expressing the
movement of the temporalization of time. The earliest indications of these
attempts emerge in a series of texts published by Levinas in the immediate
Robin Durie is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. He has published a
number of articles on time and the phenomenology of temporality. He has a strong commit-
ment to transdisciplinary research, underpinned by his work on complexity theory, in such areas
as environmental sustainability, healthcare, community regeneration, and swarm robotics.
The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Volume 48, Issue 4
December 2010
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 48, Issue 4 (2010), 37192.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00039.x
371
aftermath of World War II. While the analyses of these texts are, for the most
part, located in the milieu of Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian
fundamental ontology, in what follows, I will showhowLevinass rst attempts
to make sense of the signicance of the movement of time owe as much, if not
more, to the philosophy of Bergson as they do to phenomenology.
1
1
Levinas himself frequently attests to Bergsons inuence on the development of his
thought, as when he says, for instance: I feel close to certain Bergsonian themes . . . it is to him,
no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives (Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the
Other, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshay [London: Athlone, 1998], 224); see also a late
interview with Levinas, The Other, Utopia, and Justice in Is It Righteous To Be: Interviews with
Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 201. Levi-
nass recently published prison notebooks (Levinas, Oeuvres compltes Tome 1: Carnets de captivit
[Paris: Grasset, 2009]), which record the development of his thinking in the period leading up
to the publication of the works with which we are primarily concerned, make Bergsons
importance for Levinas abundantly clear. In his critical study of Bergson rst published in 1931
(reprinted as Vladimir Janklvitch, Henri Bergson [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1959]), Janklvitch argues that Bergson had failed in his project of thinking the radically new,
and a signicant thread running through Levinass own philosophical project can be understood
as consisting in the attempt to make good this failure. Richard Cohen draws attention to this
aspect of Bergsons thought in the editorial introduction and explanatory notes to his translation
of Time and the Other (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Despite the clear
evidence of Bergsons inuence in Levinass own writings, the majority of commentators who
write from a Levinasian perspective tend to focus on the phenomenological context of Levinass
thought, whether that be Hegelian, Husserlian, or Heideggerian. Thus, to cite just one example,
in a recent article Levinas Philosophical Origins: Husserl, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig,
Glenn Morrison states that the writings of Husserl, Heidegger and Rosenzweig have made up
[Levinass] primary inuences (Heythrop Journal 46 [2005]: 41). This is perhaps indicative of the
more general critical fate that befell Bergsonism as the twentieth century progressed and that
Levinas himself bemoans: Bergson is hardly quoted now. We have forgotten the major
philosophical event he was for the French university, . . . and the role he played in the consti-
tution of the problematic of modernity [Entre Nous, 223]. One exception to this tendency is
John Llewelyns Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995), in which the
inuence of Bergson on Levinass thought remains a constant presence. Llewelyn highlights in
particular Levinass focus on the interruption of duration by the dead-time (temps mort), which
intimates the approach of absolute alterity. However, the Bergsonian context for the relation
between radical novelty and the interruption to the continuity of duration has not received
extended critical scrutiny from Levinasian commentators. The majority of texts written from a
Bergsonian perspective that reect critically on the relation between Bergson and Levinas tend
to respond to the ethical imperative of Levinass thought by turning to Bergsons Two Sources of
Morality and Religion. Thus, Len Lawlor asks in the third chapter of The Challenge of Bergsonism
(London: Continuum, 2003) whether Bergsonism can be interpreted as representing a challenge
to ethics in the Levinasian sense (see also James McLachlans valuable review of Lawlors book
in Janus Head 8 [2005]: 36166). While John Mullarkey, in Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999), notes the afnity between Levinass ethics and the Two
Sources, where the latter is understood as a work of proto-ethics, he goes further, indicating a
series of places throughout Bergsons work where afnities with Levinas can be detected,
ranging from Pierre Trotignons claim that lan vital represents an attempt to think alterity,
through to the unthinkability of the other deriving from their temporal separation from the
knowers durationin other words, the alterity of the other is a consequence of the nature of
time (Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, 10710). However, both of these works, in effect, explore
the relation between Bergson and Levinas retrospectively. My aim in this paper is to explore the
details of the inuence of certain texts and themes in Bergsons philosophy on the specic
development of a decisive aspect of Levinass thought.
372
ROBIN DURIE
In a late interview, Levinas would explain how, for him, Bergsons concep-
tion of duration effects a rupture with the tradition of thinking about time in
which the future functions simply as the what is yet-to-come (un -venir); how
duration itself would be access to novelty ; but also how it would be
necessary . . . to insist on a novelty signifying by force of the concordance in
the very discordance of time.
2
It is a focus on this discordance of time, rather
than on the concordance that emerges from it, that is shared by many of the
discourses on time in the continental tradition. As we shall see, in From Existence
to Existents (1947) and Reality and Its Shadow (1948), Levinass depiction of
what he will subsequently characterize as the discordance of time is framed in
a way that appears to be explicitly critical of Bergson. However, I will showhow
the Bergsonian texts that provide Levinas with the resources from which he
develops the distinctive positions adopted in these essays already anticipate the
theses on time that Levinas advances by way of an apparent critique of
Bergsons position. This prompts the question of why Levinas does not
acknowledge the full extent of the convergence between his theories of time
and those of Bergson, and why instead he prefers to emphasize the way in
which his thinking marks a departure from the milieu of Bergsonism.
2
Levinas, Is It Righteous To Be, 26869. While Bergson has, for the most part, been acknowl-
edged as having a role to play in the history of continental philosophy, it remains the case that
few thinkers or commentators have explicitly engaged with his legacy. The exception to this
norm is Deleuze, and it is striking that the phrase the concordance in the discordance of time
echoes two of the four poetic formulas by which Deleuze seeks to characterize the novelty of
Kantian philosophy. The rst of these formulas derives from Shakespeares famous phrase in
Hamlet, time is out of joint (the French translation of which also allows the sense of time being
unhinged, off its hinges [hors de ses gonds]). By this disjointure of time, Deleuze seeks to capture
the shift that occurs in Kants philosophy, whereby time is no longer subordinate to the
movement by which it is counted or measured. (Of course, in Time and Free Will, Bergson also
argues that, for science, and for common sense, time is subordinate to the spatiality by which it
is able to be counted.) Deleuze draws attention to the Latin root of cardinal, namely, cardo,
meaning hinge. A hinge is both that on which something such as a door turns but also that
which is fundamental to something else. When time is out of joint, it no longer hinges on
movement; and movement no longer provides the means by which time can be counted. In his
discussions of the phenomena of weariness and desire, respectively, in From Existence to Existents,
Levinas writes that, in the former, being is out of joint with itself (dun tre qui ne se suit plus) and
in the latter, time becomes unhinged (le temps sort de ses gonds) (Levinas, Existence and Existents,
trans. A. Lingis [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988], 35, 45; De lexistence lexistant [Paris: J.
Vrin, 1998], 50, 68). The fourth formula derives from Rimbaud and refers to the discussion of
the sublime in the 3
rd
Critique, in which, Deleuze argues, the regulated concord of the faculties
is shown to derive from a prior discord of the faculties (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco [London: Verso, 1998], 2735). It appears as if Levinas is also
claiming that, in Bergsons philosophy of duration, time in its most basic form consists in a
discordance, within or from which a concordance can emerge, and that duration is time when
it is unhinged from movement. It would be possible to draw a further series of relations between
the force by which novelty signies in and to experience and the theory of the encounter that
forces us to think that is developed by Deleuze in his theory of the faculties in chapter 3 of
Difference and Repetition.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
373
Reality and Its Shadow was originally published in Les Temps Modernes
and addresses various themes in aesthetics and criticism. In contradistinction
to the existentialist paragon of the engaged artist that the editorial line of Les
Temps Modernes espouses, Levinas begins Reality and Its Shadow by sug-
gesting that art, and specically the work of art, is more appropriately char-
acterized by disengagement. But this is not, Levinas argues, a disengagement
from our mundane world in favor of a more authentically real world of pure
subjectivity or of Platonic ideas. Rather, Levinas asks, can one not speak of
disengagement on the hither side [en de]of an interruption of time by a
movement going on, on the hither side of time [en de du temps], in its
interstices?
3
Since Plato, and especially following the analogy of the Good
in the Republic, the realm of understanding has been aligned with light
and enlightenment. By way of contrast, Levinas proposes that the aesthetic
realm is characterized by not understanding. If light is the element of
understanding, then obscurity is the element of not understanding.
4
Levinas wants to claim that this element of obscurity is not simply the
negation of, nor the absence of, the element of light and understanding (i.e.,
it is not derivative of light and understanding)rather, he insists that it is a
totally independent ontological event. This event occurs in art: Art does not
know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very art
of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.
5
In order to show why the phenomenon of disengagement that is character-
istic of aesthetics follows from an interruption of time, Levinas begins by
developing a phenomenological description of the art event that occurs in this
element of obscurity. The nature of the relationshipwe have withreal objects
is one of understandingwe grasp real objects by means of concepts. Levinas
claims that this relationship is determined by action, and in doing so, he is
following the arguments of Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896) as much as he
might be following those of Heidegger in Being and Time (1927). But in art, we
are not presented with an object, or a concept, but with an image, and this image
neutralizes the usual relation we have with objectsin other words, we do not
grasp the object as a means toward some imminent activity. Rather, an image
marks a hold over us rather than our initiative, a fundamental passivity [une
passivit foncire].
6
But just as Levinas wanted to avoid conceiving the element
of obscurity as simply deriving, either as lack or negation, from the enlighten-
ment of understanding, so he does not simply want passivity to function here as
3
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987),
23; La ralit et son ombre, Les Temps Modernes 38 (1948): 773.
4
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3; La ralit et son ombre, 773.
5
Ibid.
6
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3; La ralit et son ombre, 774.
374
ROBIN DURIE
lack or negation of activity. Thus, by means of a phenomenological account of
the way that the artistic image marks a hold over us, he will seek to develop
an account of passivity as an independent ontological event.
As a clue to follow in making sense of how the image marks a hold over us,
Levinas considers rhythm, which, as he points out, is a phenomenon that is
frequently invoked in art criticismyet is one that tends not to be given any kind
of rigorous denition or characterization. Levinas argues that rhythmis not an
explicit, identiable element of the poemitself but, rather, consists in the way
the poetic order affects us.
7
What rhythmdoes, in effect, is exercise a pull on
objects as we experience them in timefor instance, rhythm leads us to
experience the syllables of a verse as call[ing] for one another, just as the
words of a song to which we are listening do, or the movements of a dancer.
8
The distinctive temporal quality of an experience affected by rhythm, whereby
the parts or phases of what is being experienced call for one another, is bound
up with the fact that both the object and we ourselves are disengaged from
the reality in which relations with objects are determined by imminent actions,
such that these partsfor instance, the syllables of the poemimpose themselves
on us without our assuming them.
9
Rather than our experience of an object being
ordered and directed, more or less purposively, by an imminent action to be
performed (rather than the object presenting itself in the mode of being
ready-to-hand, as Heidegger wouldsay), we are insteadcaught upandcarried
away (saisi et emport) inthe rhythmic presentationof the image.
10
Captivated
by rhythm, we are neither simply conscioussince we are not actively grasping
an objectnor unconscioussince both the object and we ourselves remain,
7
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 774.
8
Bergson frequently compares the continuous multiplicity of duration to a melody, thereby
seeking to illustrate how the parts of duration interrelate with one another. But, he writes, if we
interrupt the rhythm by dwelling longer than is right on one note of the tune, it is not its
exaggerated length, as length [i.e., as quantity] which will warn us of our mistake, but the
qualitative change thereby caused in the whole of the musical phrase (Bergson, Time and Free
Will, trans. F. L. Pogson [London: Macmillan, 1910], 10001; uvres, ed. A. Robinet [Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1959], 68). From the Levinasian perspective, that would be to
say that dwelling longer than is right on a particular syllable of a poem would disrupt the call
that the syllables make for one another. Why does Bergson say that this dwelling causes a
qualitative rather than a quantitative change? It is because the phases of duration coalesce to
form an organic whole (in contrast to the parts of a discrete multiplicity, which form a divisible
aggregate). Rhythm is an effect of this organic wholeness, and it works to organize the parts
precisely as parts of an organic whole. It seems clear that Levinass phenomenological descrip-
tion of rhythm, as exemplary of the way in which the artistic image marks a hold on us, adheres
to this Bergsonian account, when he species that poetic order is able to affect us rhythmically
to the extent that poems are wholes whose elements call for one another (Levinas, Collected
Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 774).
9
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 774.
10
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 775.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
375
as Levinas writes, in a dark light [une obscure clart], present. We participate in
the phenomenon of rhythm; indeed, we become absorbed in it, as if we are
in a waking dream (rve veill ).
11
When we have a relation with an object that is geared toward imminent
activity, we can be said to have an interest in this object. But if indeed this
relation with the object is neutralized to the extent that, in art, we have a
relation with an image rather than an object, then we might characterize
the relation we have with the image as one of disinterestedness; and, of
course, disinterest has been held, since at least Kants Critique of Judgment, to
be a determining feature of the aesthetic way of being. However, Levinas
wants to resist this movein fact he claims that it would be more appro-
priate to talk of interest than of disinterestedness with respect to images.
12
When we experience the object as an image, when the object is stripped of all
possible utility, then we can say that the image is interesting in the literal
sense of that wordit is, as Levinas says, involving. The Latin root of
interesting is inter + esse, literally, to be among. The involvement charac-
teristic of the experience of an image thus entails a being-among images.
When we are absorbed in and by rhythm, we become involved in the
rhythmwe become wrapped up in and by the rhythmand it is this
involvement that marks our passivity, the pathos of the imaginary world of
the waking dream. It is passive because our experience of the object is not
prolonged into an action that we perform with or on the object; instead, we
participate in and among the image.
13
Levinas now tries to make phenomenologicalontological sense of this
pathos of participation that characterizes our mode of being when an image
takes hold of us. Experience without conceptual understanding, without
being prolonged into action, is closest to what psychology has introduced as
a limit case, namely, pure sensation not yet converted into perception
(what, in the phenomenology of the Ideas, Husserl would characterize as pure
hyle uninformed by animating morphe). And he continues:
It is as though sensation, free from all conception, that famous sensation that eludes
introspection, appeared with images. Sensation is not a residue of perception, but
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 77576. Clearly, Levinas is
here pushing at the limits of both concepts and language in order to describe the experience he
has in mind. However, the point he is making is perhaps not so strange when we try to make
sense of it from the perspective of aestheticsthus, when we watch a play or a lm, we would
not experience any emotions if we were absolutely disinterested; equally, if we were performing
real actions along with those whom we are in fact watching, then we would suffer real bodily
affections; however, what actually happens is that we sense emotions without these real bodily
affectionsjust as we do in a dream.
376
ROBIN DURIE
has a function of its ownthe hold [lemprise] that an image has over us, a function
of rhythm. What today is called being-in-the-world is an existence with concepts.
Sensibility takes place as a distinct ontological event, but is accomplished only by the
imagination. If art consists in substituting an image for being, the aesthetic element,
as its etymology indicates, is sensation.
14
But is it possible to go further in making phenomenological sense of the
nature of the aesthetic hold that images have over us in sensibility? In a
parallel analysis of aesthetics in From Existence to Existents, Levinas offers the
following beautiful description. The movement of art consists in leaving the
level of perception so as to reinstate sensation, in detaching the quality from
this object of reference. Instead of arriving at the object, the intention gets lost
[sgare] in the sensation itself, and it is this wandering about [garement]
15
in
sensation, in aisthesis, that produces the aesthetic effect.
16
In Totality and
Innity, Levinas will rename this wandering about as errance.
17
How might this detaching of the image from the object of reference be
possible? What is it that enables the interruption of the otherwise systematic
process by which consciousness takes up and grasps sensation? And why has
Levinas at this precise moment chosen to characterize the quality of being-
among as wandering, as errance?
That Levinass discussion stems from a reection on Bergsonism is sug-
gested by an introductory comment to the section in which this passage on
wandering in sensation is located. We have seen that, for Levinas, art consists
in the substitution of images for objects with which we might otherwise have
a relation of utility, or, as he writes in From Existence to Existents, that the
elementary function of art . . . is to furnish an image of an object in place of
the object itself. Levinas proceeds to specify that this image is what Bergson
called a view of the object, an abstraction. However, he distances himself
from Bergsons position, claiming that Bergson considered the image to be
something less than the object, whereas he himself argues that one should
see in the image the more of what is aesthetic.
18
Bergsons theory of images is worked out in detail in Matter and Memory. The
original edition of that book begins by seeking to bracket any knowledge we
might have of epistemological and metaphysical debates. In so doing,
Bergson claims, we would nd ourselves in the presence of images, in the
vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to
14
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 5; La ralit et son ombre, 776.
15
As well as the sense of wandering, or going astray, sgar can mean unhinged, as in the
phrase son esprit sgarehis mind is becoming unhinged.
16
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 53; De lexistence lexistant, 85.
17
Levinas, Totality and Innity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press,
1969), 172; Totalit et Inni (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 147.
18
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 52; De lexistence lexistant, 8384.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
377
them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon
one another.
19
Between the original publication of Matter and Memory in 1896
and the publication of the second edition in 1910, it is apparent that Bergson
had become aware that his use of the word image needed clarication.
Thus, in the preface to the second edition, he writes: By image we mean a
certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representa-
tion, but less than that which the realist calls a thingan existence placed
halfway between the thing and the representation.
20
The position adopted
in Matter and Memory, the position adumbrated in the opening lines of the
books rst edition, is that matter exists just as it is perceived; and, since it is
perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image.
21
So
when Levinas characterizes Bergsons theory of the image as a view of the
object, it is this denition that he has in mind, namely, that an image is the
object as it is perceived. And when Levinas claims that Bergsons position is
that the image is something less than the object, he is referring to Bergsons
clarication that the image is less than that which the realist calls a thing.
22
Bergsons account of perception in chapter 1 of Matter and Memory begins
froma thesis about matter: I call matter the aggregate [ensemble] of images, and
perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one
particular image, my body.
23
The role of perception is to display [des-
sine] . . . the eventual or possible actions of my body.
24
Dessine has the sense
of outlining, delineating, or sketching, and so it is by means of perception that
the brain prepare[s], while beginning it, the reaction of my body to the action
of external objects.
25
In this way, perceptual images foreshadow[esquissent] at
each moment its [i.e., my bodys] virtual steps [dmarches virtuelles] . . . the brain
prolongs [movements received] into reactions which are merely nascent.
26
A
merely nascent reaction is then a possible action that has been delineated or
foreshadowed by perception. In order that immediate reactions be delayed,
19
Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books,
1988), 17; uvres, 169.
20
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 9; uvres, 161.
21
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 10; uvres, 162.
22
Levinass presentation of Bergsons position appears to be critical, to the extent that he
writes that, instead of the image being seen as less than the object, it should be seen as the
aesthetic more of the object. However, it should be borne in mind that Bergson is setting out his
theory of images by way of explicit contrast with metaphysical theories of representationalism
and realism, whereas, of course, Levinas is contrasting the aesthetic image with the object as it
is grasped by consciousness toward an end of utility. In fact, as we shall see, it is just this relation
of the image to a subsequent action, and indeed the separability of the image from such an
action, that forms the hinge of Bergsons account.
23
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 22; uvres, 173.
24
Ibid.
25
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 23; uvres, 175.
26
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 2324; uvres, 175.
378
ROBIN DURIE
and in order that the prolongation of movements into merely nascent
reaction movements is made possible, it is necessary that there be, in effect, an
expansion of the instant of experience, and Bergson goes on to showhowthis
expansion is achieved by the work of contraction memory: However brief we
suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration [dure], and
involves, consequently, an effort of memory which prolongs, one into another,
a plurality of moments.
27
Through this work of contraction, memory prolongs
into one another multiple external moments, giving otherwise instantaneous
moments a duration. The instantaneous passing of moments is thereby
delayed, and as a consequence the immediate and inevitable consequentialism
of reaction following action: By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition
multiple moments of duration, it [i.e., memory] frees us fromthe movement of
the ow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity.
28
Thus freed
from the rhythm of necessity, the brain is able to select from movements that
are delineated in the form of virtual nascent actions.
We shall return both to the temporal dimension of the duration of
moments prolonged into one another by contraction memory and to the role
played by the notion of virtuality when we consider how time underpins
Levinass discussions in From Existence to Existents and Reality and Its
Shadow. Before doing so, however, we need to consider why it is that the
theory of images as it is developed by Bergson in Matter and Memory might have
given rise to Levinass characterization of the quality of being-among
images as wandering, as errance. In order to do this, we need to turn to a series
of essays that Bergson wrote in the decade following the publication of Matter
and Memory that take up themes from his book. In these essays, Bergson seeks
to provide accounts of a series of mental phenomenasuch as dreams,
intellectual effort, and false recognitionbased on the theories of perception
and memory developed in Matter and Memory.
We recall that Levinas argues that the experience of images neutralizes our
usual relation with objects, to the extent that we do not grasp objects as the
means toward some imminent action; he describes the relation we have with
images as a form of passivity, precisely because the experience is not pro-
longed into an action that will be performed in relation to the object; and,
nally, he characterizes this pathos of the imaginary world as a kind of
waking dream.
29
Taking this evocation of the waking dream as a clue, let
us consider Bergsons essay Dreams (1901). In this essay, Bergson seeks to
account for why it is that we experience images when we dream, why I
27
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 34; uvres, 184.
28
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 228; uvres, 359.
29
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 4; La ralit et son ombre, 775.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
379
perceive persons and things when nobody and nothing is there.
30
Bergsons
answer is that during sleep we are affected by external and internal bodily
stimuli, and these stimuli are fabricated into dream-images.
31
What the
mind is doing during the dream is seek[ing] to give a meaning to the
heterogeneous assemblage of meaningless fragments that result from
the stimuli endured while sleeping.
32
The means by which the mind is able to
accomplish this meaning-giving activity is memoryand Bergson proceeds
to offer a brief overview of how memory functions, summarizing the more
detailed investigations of Matter and Memory. Bergson argues in this text that
memory has two basic functions: on the one hand, as we have already noted,
there is the effort of memory to contract a plurality of potentially separate
instants into an enduring moment; on the other hand, memory covers imme-
diate perceptions with a cloak of recollections.
33
This position raises the issue of how memories are formed, to which we
shall return below. It also raises the issue of how it is that only certain
memories, at any given moment, interweave with present perception images.
Bergsons answer parallels his account of perception: just as, in perception,
the brain selects possible reactions on the basis of objects that might act on the
body, or upon which the body might act, so memories are ltered on the basis
of which memory-images are most closely connected with our situation and
action.
34
Memory is thus able to perform the function of recalling, in each
circumstance, the advantageous or injurious consequences which have fol-
lowed under analogous conditions, and to teach it [i.e., the animal, or person]
what it ought to do.
35
As with perception, so it is with memoryeverything
is geared toward imminent action. Indeed, it is clear that perceptions ability
to delineate possible outcomes of actions on, or by, the body is facilitated by
memory, to the extent that it provides more or less general recollections of
consequences that occurred under analogous conditions. This proclivity
within the body, whereby it adapts itself to its present circumstance such that
memories are selected according to its need for action, is termed by Bergson
attention to life.
36
When the tendency of memories to force themselves into
present consciousness is enabled by attention to life, that is, when selected
memories cloak or come to insert themselves in (viennent sinsrer dans)
30
Bergson, Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920), 104; uvres,
879.
31
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 113; uvres, 884.
32
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 115; uvres, 885.
33
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 34; uvres, 184.
34
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 115; uvres, 885.
35
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 116; uvres, 886.
36
Bergson, Matter and Memory, 173; uvres, 312.
380
ROBIN DURIE
present perceptions, they prot by the vitality of the perceptions and, in this
way, return to life.
37
But this tension, this concentration of memory on perception in attention
to life, requires effort.
38
In sleep, however, we lose our interest in life, we
become detached [dtach ] from life.
39
In sleep, our perception extends its
eld of operation. It loses in tension what it gains in extension.
40
That is to
say, as we sleep, we sense all of the minor bodily stimuli that are ignored when
we are focused on action. In order that some sense be made of the chaos of
small bodily stimuli, it is only necessary that there be a general overlapping of
memory images with the perception images of these stimuli, and this provides
us with the content of our dream. Where attention to life necessitates tension,
dreaming entails de-tension. The dream does not adjust the sensation with
precision to the memory, but rather, it allow[s] some play [ jeu] between
them.
41
With this relaxationthis de-tension that follows from inattention to
life when our experience of perceptions is no longer geared toward action
there is a play among the images that anticipates the wandering about, the
errance, in sensibility with which Levinas characterizes aisthesis. One wanders,
just as one plays, when one is not focused on, or directed toward, some
specic end.
42
We nd an even stronger indication that the analyses of Reality and Its
Shadow owe their provenance to Bergson when we consider Bergsons
remarkable essay Memory of the Present and False Recognition (1908).
43
Just as he had explained the process and content of dreaming on the basis of
inattention to life, so in this essay Bergson seeks to show how the phenomenon
37
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 122; uvres, 890.
38
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 12425; uvres, 89192.
39
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 125; uvres, 892.
40
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 112; uvres, 884.
41
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 128; uvres, 894.
42
There are a number of further textual hints that are suggestive of the proximity between
the position being worked out by Levinas and the way Bergson develops the theory of images
within this context of inattention to life. For instance, in From Existence to Existents, Levinas offers
a brief account of play, and the detachment of play from reality, which evokes themes from this
account of the play of dream images in Bergson and the account of the errance in aisthesis
advanced in Reality and Its Shadow more or less equally (Levinas, Existence and Existents, 26;
La ralit et son ombre, 34). Similarly, in the essay Intellectual Effort, published a year after
Dreams, Bergson characterizes the consequence of inattention to life, in the particular case
when the mind does not interpret words as part of their whole context immediately but moves
from word to idea on a word-by-word basis, as the mind wandering (errante) (Bergson,
Mind-Energy, 208; uvres, 945).
43
Although published in the year following Creative Evolution, False Recognition represents
the culmination of the profound conceptual labors undertaken for Matter and Memory and bears
eloquent testimony to Bergsons commitment to critical reection on his own most basic ideas.
In this essay, we nd a compelling development of the theme of the formation of memory
interwoven with some of Bergsons most audacious attempts to capture the movement of time
at its most fundamental level.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
381
of false recognition (what is referred to in English, as it were, as dj vu) also
stems from inattention to life. Bergson sums up the aim of the essay, therefore,
as being to determine the peculiar form which inattention to life takes in this
case, [and to] explain why its effect is to mistake the present for a repetition
of the past.
44
In order to address this aim, Bergson focuses on the question of how
memory is formed, to which we drew attention previously. The thesis that
Bergson advances is that the formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of
perception; it is contemporaneous with it. Step by step, as perception is created, the
memory of it is projected beside it, as the shadow falls beside the body.
45
The
key point with regard to false recognition, however, is that in the normal
course of experience determined by attention to life there is no conscious-
ness of the memory that is created simultaneously with the perception. This
is because perception is, as we have seen, always already prolonged into
nascent action and, as such, is geared toward utility, whereas memory in and
of itself does not have this link to action. It is on just this basis that memory
is, as Bergson consistently argues, virtual rather than actual. Since it is not
actual, in the sense of being prolonged into nascent action, and since, in
contrast to the normal interweaving of memory with perception, it adds
nothing to present perception, Bergson is led to conclude that there is nothing
more useless [inutile] for our present action than memory of the present
. . . memory of the present has nothing to teach us, being only the double of
perception.
46
However, when there is inattention to life, the view of con-
sciousness can wander from the perception image to the memory image that
doubles it. But in what might this inattention consist? Bergson argues that
immediate consciousness feels, at any given moment, its movement into the
future, it senses the present in the future into which it encroaches [empite],
rather than in itself.
47
If ever this movement into the future is enfeebled
(faiblit), the effect is that the present experience becomes detached from the
nascent action that had been the future into which it was moving. But the
virtuality of the memory image that is formed simultaneously with the per-
ception image is determined by the fact that it has no future nascent action
into which it is prolonged and by which it would be actualized, and so, when
the movement of consciousness itself becomes detached from its future, con-
sciousness experiences the present moment as the virtual memory image
rather than the actual perception image. The key, then, for understanding
how and why the phenomenon of false recognition occurs, is
44
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 150; uvres, 908.
45
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 157; uvres, 913.
46
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 177; uvres, 925.
47
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 180; uvres, 927.
382
ROBIN DURIE
to look for . . . a momentary stop in the lan of consciousness, a stop which, no doubt,
does not change anything in the materiality of our present, but detaches [dtach ] it
from the future to which it cleaves and from the action which would be its normal
conclusion, so giving it the aspect of a mere tableau, of a play [dun spectacle] which is
being presented to oneself.
48
Not only does this characterization of the experience of false recognition
directly echo the notions of play and errance that we have seen at work across
the texts of Bergson and Levinas,
49
we also nd that the interwoven notions of
the memory image as a simultaneous double of present perception and the
temporal phenomenon of a momentary stop, a detachment of the present
from its future, are both at work in the philosophical position Levinas is
adumbrating in Reality and Its Shadow and From Existence to Existents.
Bergson argues that the memory image is created simultaneously with the
creation of the perception image that it doubles and that this doubling
represents the projection of a virtual image alongside the actual image of
perception. As Bergson writes, our actual existence, whilst it unfolds in time
[se droule dans le temps], doubles itself with a virtual existence, like a mirror
image.
50
Despite this, we persist in assuming that the creation of memory
images succeeds perception because, in attending to life, our experience is
turned exclusively to perception and to the nascent action for which it is
preparing. In attending to life, consciousness has no need of the virtual double
of this perception, since it adds nothing to perception, it has no utility or
value. In the normal course of experience, therefore, we simply do not notice
the virtual memory image; it is as if it is not there at all. But if indeed the
memory image is created simultaneously with the perception image, then we
must conclude that the present is twofold [ddouble] at every moment.
Bergson depicts the present as having a dynamically bid nature, its ongoing
movement consisting in an up-rush [ jaillissement] [of ] two jets exactly sym-
metrical, one of which falls back [retombe] towards the past whilst the other
springs forward [slance] towards the future.
51
In other words, it is not just
that the memory image differs from the perception image in being virtual as
opposed to actualit is not just, as Bergson says, that each moment of our
life presents two aspects, actual and virtual; it differs in its dynamic ten-
48
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 18182; uvres, 928.
49
A further resonance in Bergsons text can be found with the notion of rhythm that Levinas
argues takes hold of the sensibility of aisthesiswhen, due to inattention to life, consciousness
turns away from the perception image to its memorial double, the utility that determines
perception is replaced by mere pleasure; and when utility no longer determines the course of
perception, then the play of images is governed by a law of attraction (Bergson, Mind-Energy,
175; uvres, 924).
50
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 165; uvres, 917.
51
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 160; uvres, 913.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
383
dency.
52
The movement of perception is one with the overall movement of
consciousness and life, the thrust, the lan, of the present into the future,
whereas the tendency of the virtual memory image is to move in a counter
direction, falling backward into a past that it thereby continually (re-)creates.
How is it that each present moment of consciousness comes to have this
dynamically bid nature? Bergson claims that each moment is not simply
given in consciousness as double, as actual and virtual, but rather that the
doubling of each moment is itself a consequence: Each moment of life splits
itself [se scinde] as and when it is posited; or rather, it consists in this splitting
[scission].
53
The doubling of consciousness into two dynamic tendencies, one
actual and pushing forward into the future, the other virtual and falling back
into the past, is an effect of this movement of splitting. Similarly, it is due to
this splitting that, as each present moment moves forward into its future, it is
able to function as a eeting limit between the immediate past which is now
no more and the immediate future which is not yet.
54
How then should we understand the cause of the phenomenon of false
recognition if we regard it from the perspective of this fundamental move-
ment of splitting? The event of false recognition stems from a certain enfee-
bling of consciousness, a brief inattention to life, that results in a momentary
stop in the lan of consciousness that detaches the present from the future to
which it cleaves. We wish to suggest that this detaching has its condition of
possibility, so to speak, in the fundamental movement of splitting and that the
momentary stop in the lan of consciousness has its condition of possibility in
the movement of splitting. Furthermore, to the extent that the momentary
stop and the detaching are consequences of a certain enfeebling, it appears as
if the continuity of the movement of consciousness is not simply given but,
rather, requires an effort of contraction or of tension.
At the conclusion of our initial discussion of Levinas, we asked how the
detachment of an image from its object of reference might be possible. In
working through what we wish to suggest is the Bergsonian provenance of
Levinass position, we have seen that there is a temporal root for this detach-
ment, that the turn of consciousness from attention in actual present percep-
tion to life, to a certain play, or wandering, among the virtual memory of the
present consists in a detachment (or disengagement) of the present from the
future into which it would otherwise have been moving. The connection of
Levinass position to the Bergsonian line of thought we have been explicating
becomes more evident when we pay heed to his own theory of doubling in
Reality and Its Shadow and to the theory of time on which it is based.
52
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 165; uvres, 917.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
384
ROBIN DURIE
Levinas concludes that if art consists in substituting an image for being, the
aesthetic element, as its etymology indicates, is sensation.
55
An image refers
to its object in a way that is distinct from the modes of reference of signs,
symbols, and wordsthe image resembles its object. Does that mean,
Levinas asks, that we must take the image as an independent reality which
resembles the original?
56
We avoid this necessity when we come to under-
stand that resemblance is not a way of comparing already given realities but,
rather, a process that doubles reality within itself: Reality would not only be
what it is, what it is disclosed [dvouile] to be in truth, but would be also its
double, its shadow, its image.
57
Levinas is, in effect, giving a strong onto-
logical interpretation of Bergsons claim that each moment of conscious life is
doubleat once both actual and virtual. Thus, Levinas writes: There is a
duality in this person, this thing, a duality in its being . . . and there is a
relationship between these two moments . . . the thing is itself and is its image,
[and the] relationship between the thing and its image is resemblance.
58
But Bergson goes further: it is not enough merely to posit this doubling of
each moment; an account also needs to be given of the reason why conscious-
ness turns away from its normal attention to actual perception and experi-
ences the virtual image. In the same way, Levinas also seeks to account (in
ontological terms) for why it is that, in aesthetic sensibility, the image rather
than the object gives itself. We saw that Levinas, having initially gestured
toward a hither side of time, went on to claim that the hither side within
which art functions consists in a certain obscurity, by way of contrast to the
light in which objects are comprehended by consciousness. In understanding,
the object reveals itself to consciousness in the light of presence. But when the
object gives itself as its double, when it is the image that is given, it appears as
if it is a still life (nature morte). Rather than the object coinciding with the
face it presents to the world, the face by which it shows itself, it is as though
it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though
something in a being delayed behind being.
59
It is because we are conscious
of a certain absence of the object, which consists in the withdrawal of the
object into obscurity, that we see the image precisely as an image. Rather than
bringing the object to presence, the image indicates the absence of the object.
55
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 5; La ralit et son ombre, 776.
56
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 6; La ralit et son ombre, 778. Levinas is here
referring to the different ontological realms of Platonic metaphysics.
57
Ibid. We recall that in his characterization of the formation of memory, Bergson had
written that, simultaneously with the creation of perception, the memory of [the perception] is
projected beside it, as the shadow falls beside the body (Bergson, Mind-Energy, 157; uvres,
913).
58
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 6; La ralit et son ombre, 778.
59
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 67; La ralit et son ombre, 779.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
385
It is as if, just like in a still life, the object itself has in some way passed away.
Thus, we are not taken to the object itself, as we are in understanding (or, as
Bergson argues, as we are in perception when we attend to life); nor are we
taken to a different ontological realm; rather, we are led toward the objects
absence, toward its withdrawal.
The notion that the withdrawal is like a being delayed behind being
provides us with a clue as to how this withdrawal of the object is possible. The
simultaneity of object and image is disturbed by this delay, just as when, for
Bergson, there is an inattention to life, the forward thrust of the present into
the future is delayed, constituting a momentary halt in the movement of
consciousness, a detachment of the present from its future. And so it is in this
way that we come back to the idea within this text of Levinas with which we
began, namely, of an interruption of time by a movement going on, on the
hither side of time, in its interstices.
60
This movement is the withdrawal that
consists in a certain delay that breaks up the simultaneity of object and image,
which, if we were to recast it in Bergsonian terms, breaks up the simultaneity
of actual and virtual, the simultaneity of the double tendency of the present to
thrust forward into the future and fall back into the past, the very duality of
tendencies that enables the present to function as the eeting limit between
the immediate past which is now no more and the immediate future which is
not yet.
61
And it is here that we encounter the most striking convergence
between the texts of Bergson and Levinas.
There is a familiar trope in aesthetics that gestures toward the eternal in
the work of artas Levinas says, the Mona Lisa will smile eternally.
62
What
is being evoked here is, Levinas claims, a stoppage of time [un arrt du temps],
or rather its delay behind itself [son retard sur lui-mme]. The task that remains,
Levinas continues, is to show in what sense it stops or delays.
63
This
stoppage in time realizes the paradox of an instant that endures without a
future [qui dure sans avenir] . . . [that] has a quasi-eternal duration [une dure
quasi eternelle].
64
This is precisely the notion of a present detached from its
future that Bergson had previously employed to describe the images experi-
enced in false recognition. It is important at this point to notice that Levinas
evokes the general context of Bergsonism through his use of the word
60
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 23; La ralit et son ombre, 773.
61
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 165; uvres, 917.
62
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 9; La ralit et son ombre, 782. We could equally think
of the characters in Keatss Grecian Urn, the bride of quietness still unravished, the happy
boughs . . . that cannot shed their leaves, the happy melodist who remains forever unwea-
rid ( John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd ed. [Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976], 34445).
63
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 8; La ralit et son ombre, 782.
64
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 9; La ralit et son ombre, 782.
386
ROBIN DURIE
endures here and his claim that it would represent a paradox (implicitly, for
Bergsonism) to talk of an instant both enduring and having no future, since
duration consists, as we have repeatedly underscored, in the continuous
movement of the present into the future. Developing this notion of the
eternally suspended future in the work of art, Levinas writes:
The imminence of the future endures before an instant stripped of the essential
characteristic of the present, its evanescence. It will never have completed its task as
a present, as though reality withdrew from its own reality and left it powerless. In this
situation the present can assume nothing, can take on nothing, and thus is an
impersonal and anonymous instant.
65
Although Bergsons name is invoked fairly regularly in From Existence to Exis-
tents, which was composed at the same time as Reality and Its Shadow and
deals with similar issues pertaining to time and temporality, and although
Reality and Its Shadow develops a theory of images and their temporality
that, as we have sought to demonstrate, has its provenance in Bergsons work
on memory and associated phenomena of consciousness such as dreams and
false recognition, it is striking that it is only at this point in Reality and Its
Shadow that Levinas nally names Bergson explicitly. It is striking because
he does so in the following way: Since Bergson it has become customary to
take the continuity of time to be the very essence of duration. By contrast,
and again following Bergson, it is now commonplace to dismiss the Cartesian
notion of time as a series of discontinuous instants as being an illusion of a
time grasped in its spatial trace, an origin of false problems for minds inca-
pable of conceiving duration.
66
Despite the degree to which his position derives from Bergsonism, it is clear
that Levinas wishes to claim that the theory of time on which he bases the
aesthetics of Reality and Its Shadow is in fact contrary to that of Bergson.
It is contrary to Bergsonism, according to Levinas, because it stems from
a sensitivity to the paradox that an instant can stop (linstant puisse
sarrter)
67
a paradoxicality that, by implication, would lead Bergson to
consign the phenomenon of the momentary stoppage of time to the realm of
the false problems generated by the spatialized conception of time criticized
in Time and Free Will (1910). Now, while the Bergson of Time and Free Will
might indeed have baulked at the apparent paradoxicality of an instant
detached from the future into which it would otherwise have been bound to
move, and that would thus be unable to pass, it is nevertheless clear that the
Bergsonian texts from which, as we have been arguing, Levinas draws on in
65
Ibid.
66
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 11; La ralit et son ombre, 785.
67
Ibid.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
387
the development of his theory of images in Reality and Its Shadow directly
countenance this otherwise paradoxical detachment of the instant from its
future.
68
However that may be, Levinas goes on to underscore that the work
of art reveals in time the uncertainty of times continuation. It is as if, he
carries on, in the interstices on the hither side of time, as though parallel with
the duration of the living ran the eternal duration of the intervalthe mean-
while [lentretemps]. Art brings about just this duration in the interval.
69
The
duration of the instant that endures without a future is an entretempsit is,
literally, between time, an interval carved out in time, but an interval in time
to which art brings a certain temporality.
The implicit criticism of Bergson sketched out in Reality and Its Shadow
is developed more fully in From Existence to Existents. In this text, Levinas is
particularly concerned with the event of hypostasis, the event whereby an
existent stands out from the anonymous murmur of existence, the il y a, the
fact that there is.
70
This event has a fundamentally temporal dimension, the
same temporal dimension that is addressed from the perspective of aesthetics
in Reality and Its Shadow. Just as existence in and of itself does not yield the
event of hypostasis, so of itself, time resists any hypostasis.
71
Rather,
hypostasis is the accomplishment [accomplissement] of a subject.
72
The
hypostasis within time consists in the coming to presence, or better, the
coming into the present, of the instant.
73
In and of itself, the present is
evanescence, pure passing, as Levinas also makes clear in Reality and Its
Shadow. In and of itself, as pure passing, the present is the pure event of
being. The hypostasis, the coming to presence of the instant, constitutes the
transmutation of this pure event into a substantive.
74
The event becomes
a substantive due to what Levinas calls the instants halt [larrt de
linstant].
75
When the instant is present, when it comes to presence, the
68
In a forthcoming book on Bergson, I argue that the development that can be traced in
Bergsons work from Time and Free Will through Matter and Memory and its associated texts to
Creative Evolution represents a pathway from a static to an emergent, dynamic, dualism. It is from
the perspective of this development that the later Bergson is able to make sense of this otherwise
irreducibly paradoxical halt in time.
69
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 11; La ralit et son ombre, 786.
70
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 20; De lexistence lexistant, 20.
71
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 73; De lexistence lexistant, 125.
72
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 73; De lexistence lexistant, 126. Levinass accomplissement
here translates the Husserlian concept of Leistung, which has the sense of an effect or product
and the performance by which this effect or product is brought about. The genitive in the
phrase accomplishment of a subject would, therefore, be both subjective and objective.
73
The common root shared by instant and hypostasis, as well as ecstasis, is the Latin
stari, meaning to stand (upright); it also can mean to remain, tarry, or linger.
74
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 73; De lexistence lexistant, 125.
75
Ibid.
388
ROBIN DURIE
present is a halt [est arrt], not because it is arrested [quil est arrt], but
because it interrupts and links up again to the duration [la dure] to which it
comes, out of itself.
76
We have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that the Bergsonian text
that provides a description of the temporal source for the phenomenon of
doubling that offers the wherewithal for Levinass aesthetics of images turns
on an account of the momentary stopping, or halting, of time. We argued that
the potential for this stopping consisted in the movement of splitting, a
movement that, Bergson argues, enables the present moment to function as a
eeting limit between the immediate past which is now no more and the
immediate future which is not yet. Without this movement of splitting,
indeed, Bergson claims that this function of the present moment would be a
mere abstraction.
77
It would be a mere abstraction for two reasons: rst, it
would have no content or structure; but second, and more importantly, the
bid tendencies of the actual and virtual create, on the one hand, the future
into which the actual surges forward and, on the other hand, the past into
which the virtual falls back. Thus, the movement of splitting within the
present is a differential movement, one that differentiates the future and the
past. Rather than acknowledging this resource in Bergsons thought,
however, Levinas chooses to consign him to the camp of modern philoso-
phy that sees in the instant only the illusion of scientic time and that
conceives of the instant as the limit between two times, a pure abstraction.
By contrast to this lifeless abstraction, reality would be composed of the
concrete lan of duration.
78
Despite employing the exact turn of phrase used by Bergson in order to
condemn a certain conception of the instant as a mere abstraction, and
despite Bergson describing the movement of splitting that accounts for the
possibility both of a halt in time and the presents function as a concrete,
moving limit differentiating future and past, Levinas is evidently seeking to
distance himself from Bergson at this precise point. We may reconstitute the
series of interconnected steps by which Levinas seeks to do so here. First, he
wants to delineate the way in which the instant is characterized, and then
criticized, within a certain tradition of modern philosophynamely, the
instant as an abstract line of division between past and future. Second, he
wants to align Bergson to this way of thinking about, and criticizing, the
instant. Clearly, this is an accurate representation of Bergson. Third,
however, Levinas wants to present an alternative account of the instant, on
the temporal basis of which the hypostasis of the subject is accomplished
76
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 73; De lexistence lexistant, 126.
77
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 165; uvres, 91718.
78
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 7374; De lexistence lexistant, 126.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
389
namely, the halt of the instant. Fourth, Levinas wants to argue that the notion
that the instants halt can only be thought as a paradox within a Bergsonian
theory of time as continuous duration. According to this version of his posi-
tion, Bergson must condemn the instant and its halt as an illusion generated
by scientic time, just as surely as he must condemn the present as abstract
limit as an illusion generated by scientic time.
The false representation of the instant, the representation that Bergson is
supposed to endorse, is one in which the instant has no breadth, has no
duration, is not duration.
79
Whatever qualities the instant may possess, they,
like the instant itself, are derived from the prior nature of time itself, of which
the instant is merely a function. The existence of the instant is a consequence
of the existence of time. Moreover, to the extent that existence consists in
persistence through time, the instant cannot be the locus of complete
existencean existing object traverses the stance of the instant; it carries
across (pass travers) the instant in order to accomplish a duration.
80
Levinass aim is to reconceive the relation between time, existence, and the
instant, to consider the possibility of an existence specic to the instant itself,
such that the instant is the accomplishment of existence, on the basis of
which it becomes possible to make functional sense of the halt of the instant.
81
It is this possibility, Levinas argues, that Bergsons connement of the instant
to abstract time (as opposed to concrete, lived duration) misses.
82
What is
distinctive about the existence of the instant is that beyond duration its
existence must be accomplished by the instant itself. The instant, Levinas
argues, must have a beginning in and of itself, a birth, and this beginning,
because of the very nature of the instant, must be a relationship sui generis.
83
Levinas explicates this fundamental point in the following way:
What begins to be does not exist before having begun, and yet it is what does not
exist that must, through its beginning, give birth to itself, come to itself, without
coming from anywhere. Such is the paradoxical character of beginning which is
constitutive of an instant. And this should be emphasized. A beginning does not start
79
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 74; De lexistence lexistant, 126.
80
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 75; De lexistence lexistant, 128.
81
The functional sense of the halt of the instant goes back to the theme of effort, the effort
by which the instant is begun, and by which the stance of the instant is taken up. This
phenomenon of effort, when analyzed alongside such phenomena as lassitude and fatigue, allow
us to catch sight, as Levinas writes, of the articulation of an instant (Levinas, Existence and
Existents, 80; De lexistence lexistant, 137), an articulation that contrasts with the instant lacking
in breadth and duration condemned by Bergson as a mere abstraction. For a fuller discussion
of Levinass account of the articulation of the instant, see David Webb, The Complexity of the
Instant: Bachelard, Levinas, Lucretius, in Time and the Instant, ed. Robin Durie (Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2000).
82
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 76; De lexistence lexistant, 130.
83
Ibid.
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ROBIN DURIE
out of the instant that precedes the beginning; its point of departure is contained in
its point of arrival, like a rebound movement [choc en retour]. It is out of this recoil
[recul] in the very heart of the present that the present is accomplished, and an
instant taken up.
84
Whereas, following Bergson, we might want to say that existence stems from
the continuity in and of duration, Levinas wants us to think of an existence
specic to the instant, an existence that must therefore be accomplished in
and by the instant, indeed, such that the instant would consist in this accom-
plishment, and such that the instant would come to be in the present, that is,
would come to presence. But such an existence cannot be derived from
preceding instants, nor from the duration of which it might form a part. The
beginning of the instant must be an absolute beginning, literally, creation ex
nihilo. And it must be creation ex nihilo precisely because of the isolation of the
instantits absolute separation from any instant that precedes or succeeds it.
As a consequence, when an instant comes to presence, the present becomes
the occurrence of an origin (vnement de lorigine).
85
Here then we can see one way in which it might be possible to interpret
Levinass claim that it would be necessary to insist on a novelty signifying by
force of the concordance in the very discordance of time. Normally, we
understand the present as a moment within the continuity of duration, what we
might take to be the concordance of time. Despite the insistence on novelty
and creation that resounds throughout Bergsons work, and in his reections
on time in particular, Levinass claim here is that it is only in the coming to
presence of the instant that we encounter the full force of novelty. We do so
precisely because of the nature of the instant that entails that it must, of
necessity, have an absolute beginning. However, it is this very nature of the
instant that constitutes the discordance of time, times being out of joint, or
unhinged. Yet, despite being unhinged in this way, there is still time. The
instant does not destroy timerather, as we have seen, it constitutes a halt in
time, and the distinctive path that Levinass philosophy will follow consists in
exploring the nature of the concordance of time that follows from this halt.
We have seen the extent to which the analyses of these crucial early works
of Levinas have their roots in certain key texts by Bergson. We have also seen
that these same texts provide an account of the very phenomenon, namely,
times halt, which Levinas wishes to argue marks the point where his own
thought takes its leave from the milieu of Bergsonism. Why then, we must ask
in conclusion, does Levinas refuse to nd the resource for thinking the
discordance of time in the Bergsonian account of times splitting and dou-
bling? One reason may be that Levinas harbored reservations about the
84
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 76; De lexistence lexistant, 13001.
85
Levinas, Existence and Existents, 79; La ralit et son ombre, 136.
WANDERING AMONG SHADOWS
391
capacity within a Bergsonian thinking of time for thinking the corollary of the
absolute beginning of the instant, namely, its absolute cessation, a notion
anticipated in the theme of death that begins to permeate the analyses toward
the end of Reality and Its Shadow. Similarly, we saw that for Bergson the
halt that can arise from the splitting of time stems from a certain enfeebling
of the movement of duration that follows inattention to life. By contrast,
Levinass account of the halt of time concentrates on the effort entailed by the
accomplishment of an existent in hypostasis. In other words, the halt in time
in Levinas is an effect of tension, whereas in Bergson it is an effect of
de-tension. On the other hand, in such later works as Intentionality and
Sensation (1965) and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), Levinas
offers an analysis of the Husserlian Ur-impression, which has the same quality
as the absolute beginning of the instant, utilizing the notion of the cart,
revealing a clearer thread of afnity with Bergsonian splitting. What is dif-
ferent about the position adopted by Levinas in these later texts is that the
minimal deviation of the cart is a movement occurring in the midst of the
passage of time, while also being constitutive of the temporalization of time,
and in this way, the position adumbrated in these later texts is much closer to
that of the text in which Bergson explicates the movement of times splitting.
In From Existence to Existents and Reality and Its Shadow, however, Levinas
is driven by the imperative of demonstrating that the being of the instant does
not derive from the continuous movement of duration and that the instant is
separate from this movement. Although Bergson depicts the splitting of the
moment as the originary movement of time, just as Levinas will go on to
locate the cart at the origin of time, in these earlier texts, Levinass position is
determined by the more or less polemical need to assert the absolutely
originary status of the instant. It is perhaps suggestive that, while Bergson
features far less in these later texts, nevertheless the position worked out in
them becomes closer to the Bergsonism that provides the conceptual
resources for the positions developed in Levinass earlier texts. However we
answer this question, it is clear that the distinctive trajectory of Levinass
thought emerges from a profound engagement with the philosophy of
Bergson, an engagement whose complexity challenges us to think anew about
the most fundamental problems of the philosophy of time.
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