Assemblée générale 20 octobre 2022

Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter à l’Assemblée Générale de la SAB, qui se tiendra en présentiel et en ligne le 20 octobre 2022 de 13h30 à 15h30 à l’ENS – 45 rue d’Ulm – Salle des Actes (escalier A, 1er étage). Les membres de la SAB auront accès au lien de la réunion via la newsletter Bergson News. Vous pouvez adhérer ici. Continuer la lecture

Recension: Bergson notre contemporain – Emmanuel Kessler (2022)

Mathilde Tahar 

       

            Si, depuis quelques décennies, en grande partie grâce à l’édition critique des Presses Universitaires de France, Bergson a de nouveau une place de choix dans le monde académique, il reste, auprès de la société, au mieux le philosophe qui a écrit sur Le Rire, au pire un nom vaguement connu de la culture française qui a donné son nom a des rues et à des collèges.

C’est donc avec un certain enthousiasme que nous accueillons la publication de cet ouvrage destiné au grand public sur l’œuvre et la vie de Bergson. D’une part, en tant que chercheur.se bergsonien·ne·s, il est plaisant d’imaginer qu’on pourra offrir l’ouvrage à nos proches, qui peut-être comprendront enfin quelque chose à notre travail universitaire. D’autre part, parce que ce livre, ne se contentant pas de faire une monographie du philosophe, veut montrer son actualité, sa nécessité même, pour penser la société d’aujourd’hui, redonnant ainsi à Bergson une certaine actualité dans un monde qui a tout oublié de sa gloire passée.

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Séminaire: PBJ International workshop: ‘Time and Biology in Bergson’s Creative Evolution’

Mathilde Tahar (University of Toulouse), an up-and-coming researcher attempting a contemporary reassessment of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, will visit Fukuoka, Japan under a research partnership between CNRS (France) and Fukuoka University.
PBJ (Project Bergson in Japan) takes this opportunity to organise a series of three-night workshops.

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Séminaire: How to Reach the Absolute: Bergson’s Anti-Kantism – Leonard Lawlor – Mardi 17 Mai 2022

Mardi 17 mai | Salle des Actes – ENS | 13h30-15h00

Leonard Lawlor is Head of the Philosophy Department and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. He the author of eight books, most of which concern 20th century French philosophy. The most recent is From Violence to Speaking out (Edinburgh 2016). He is currently working on a book called The Disparate: Deleuze’s Ethics of the Univocity of Being, which will be published by Columbia University Press. In 2021, Indiana University Press published his English translation of Renaud Barbaras’s Introduction à la phénoménologie de la vie. Lawlor has also completed the English translation of Bergson’s 1904-1905 course on the evolution of the problem of freedom, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.

More information

Book Review: The Bergsonian Mind. Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf (eds), 2021

Bruno Rates – University of São Paulo (FFLCH/USP), Brazil, Grant 2020/15114-5, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)During his lifetime, Bergson enjoyed considerable influence on the Anglophone intellectual scene, notably in the United Kingdom and the United States. After his death, however, Bergsonian studies in English were not consolidated in a continuous and structured way, and it was necessary to wait a few decades for this situation begin to be reversed. Driven by Gilles Deleuze’s increasing penetration into the Anglo-Saxon cultural (not necessarily philosophical) world, as well as through the efforts of researchers such as Keith Ansell-Pearson, John Mullarkey (among others) and, perhaps also, by a kind of “analytic philosophy fatigue” from its own practitioners (as seen in the growing interest in metaphysical themes, for example), the critical bibliography in English found a new impetus from the 2000s onwards. But, though since then we have witnessed a small editorial boom on Bergson, whether in England or the USA, a work that was both comprehensive and specialized was still lacking. In other words, a book that would function as an instigating gateway for those who would like to establish a first contact with Bergson’s thought and, at the same time, as a rich source of research for Bergsonian scholars interested in deepening their knowledge in specific topics that could be related to their own research.

 

The Bergsonian Mind, published in 2022 by Routledge in the “Philosophical Minds” Series timely and exemplarily fills such a gap. Edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, the book contains 36 texts (plus one short “Introduction”) written by specialists from many parts of the world, and covers a wide spectrum of subjects explored by Bergson. This geographic and thematic diversity can be felt in the five parts that constitute its 510 pages: “Sources and Scene”, “Mind and World”, “Ethics and Politics”, “Reception” and “Bergson and Contemporary Thought.” In this review, given the lack of unity of the book and the heterogeneity of its texts, I will give a brief presentation of each essay followed by a critical analysis. At the end, I will make some final comments vis-à-vis the bibliography and the internationalization of Bergsonian studies. It goes without saying that this volume is a great contribution to those interested in Bergson’s philosophy, and that my critiques have the goal to promote and advance the discussion, in a true spirit of academic comradeship.
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Call for Papers: Brazil Meeting of the Global Bergsonism Research Project (an online webinar) – 18, 24 and 25 of November, 2022

!!! THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO JULY 20 !!!

Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar)
University of São Paulo (USP)
Federal University of Paraná (UFPR)
UMR 8547 Pays germaniques – Transferts culturels (CNRS/Ens)

Ernesto Neto, We Fishing the Time, 2001

Based on the pioneering work of Bento Prado Júnior and Franklin Leopoldo e Silva, Bergsonian studies have developed significantly in Brazil over the last 20 years. This includes a thematic diversity that allows a rich dialogue with other scholars around the world. Our participation in the CNRS International Research Network “A Chapter in a Global History of Philosophy : New Perspectives on Bergsonism” intends to expand this exchange even further and, thus, the research horizon around Bergson’s philosophy. The openness of his thought, related to the fundamental idea of the continuous transformation of time, leads us to strengthen our ties while looking forward to new interlocutors, especially from Latin America, beyond the consolidated connection with France.

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New Bergson Bibliography – Coordination Meeting, February 15, 2022 (online)

The project to establish a new bibliography on the thought of Henri Bergson is part of the broader international research project on “Global Bergsonism”. 

The second edition of the most recent complete Bergsonian bibliography, edited by Pete A. Y. Gunter, dates from 1986. It is urgent that a new bibliography be made available to researchers, updated in two directions: firstly to integrate certain linguistic and cultural areas that are only partially represented by Gunter’s bibliography; and also to present the last 36 years of research, which have been among the most productive for Bergsonian researchers around the world, as well as for the edition of Bergson’s manuscripts, correspondence and courses. The new Bergson Bibliography will be the most comprehensive and accessible directory of Bergson studies. It will be a widely distributed, multilingual bibliography, based on the open source software Zotero, available online without a license.

From 2020 to 2021, the project was coordinated by Matyas Moravec, who achieved extraordinary results in bringing the bibliography to more than 1700 entries and to whom we extend our warmest thanks, as well as to all other contributors.

As of the end of 2021, the project will be coordinated by Alessandro Taverniti (Università degli studi di Torino) and Caterina Zanfi (CNRS/Ens).

This collective project is crowdsourced. Every contribution is important. If you wish to participate in this project and share your bibliography on Bergson studies, you are warmly welcome in our coordination meeting on February 15, 2022 at 12:00 Paris time, via Zoom.

For Zotero beginners: a basic knowledge of this tool is required. Thank you for registering to Zotero downloading it before the meeting, as shown in these short tutorials.  

If you are interested in participating, thank you for sending a registration message to Alessandro Taverniti before the meeting.

Join Zoom Meetinghttps://cnrs.zoom.us/j/94238880874?pwd=dk0yMWZUSkJibTZMSWoza3B2N0VDQT09

Meeting ID: 942 3888 0874
Passcode: 71EJEN

Book Review: Einstein vs. Bergson. An Enduring Quarrel On Time. Alessandra Campo and Simone Gozzano (eds), 2022

Alfonso Lanzieri

Clock time, time of consciousness. Lived time, time of nature. If the issue of time has always been one of the most difficult in the history of Western philosophical and scientific thought, one of the most discussed points is the relationship between an objective time, quantitative, and a subjective time, qualitative, and their our own natures. A decisive date in the history of this debate is 6 April 1922: on that day, in fact, took place in Paris the meeting between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, the clash between the ‘greatest physicist of the 20th century’ and the ‘philosopher of France’. Topic of the debate: the Einsteinian theory of relativity.

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Book Review: Cosmogenesi dell’esperienza. Il campo trascendentale impersonale da Bergson a Deleuze, Giulio Piatti, 2021

Francesco Pugliaro, KU Leuven, Belgium / FWO

Cosmogenesi dell’esperienza. Il campo trascendentale impersonale da Bergson a Deleuze (“Cosmogenesis of Experience. The Impersonal Transcendental Field from Bergson to Deleuze”), written by Giulio Piatti, is the fifth book published by Mimesis as part of the Canone minore series, directed by Rocco Ronchi, for which Piatti had already edited the first Italian translation of Jean Wahl’s seminal work, Vers le concret [1]. In the book Piatti stages a complex scene, by moving multiple authors and concepts in and out of the frame in order to map the migrations of an idea, and to measure its effects on 20th century philosophy, from Bergson to Deleuze (via Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, Ruyer, Simondon). It is the idea of an impersonal transcendental field, which – as Ronchi brightly suggests in the Preface – “does not belong to the history but to the chemistry of philosophical thought” (p. 9), as a recurring factor in the processes of composition of modern philosophies. In the strictest sense, the idea refers to the effort to understand experience beyond any exclusively anthropological framework, by regressing to a field of existence in which the subject (and its relation to the world) emerges as an internal effect, as “one of the many vicissitudes of the world” (p. 145). Piatti’s book reconstructs a vast conceptual environment – at the intersection of an investigation of experience, a redefinition of the transcendental gesture, and a meditation on nature – and this is exactly where its strength lies. It does not treat the notion of impersonal transcendental field as a unitary (and hyper-technical) concept, to be examined in a comparative study of different authors, but rather as a shared insistence: to seize experience at its root, along the lines of development of a plural universe.

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Programme: The revival of Bergson in the Twenty-First Century 26 November 2021 – Ateneum The Finnish National Gallery

Organised by the project ‘Science, Literature and Research’, funded by the Kone Foundation, at the University of Helsinki

What explains the renewed interest in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, memory and creative evolution at the start of the twenty-first century? Having been dismissed as a “serious philosopher” in the post-Second World war period – in no small part as a consequence of the celebrity status of this philosopher, who is said to have caused the first traffic jam on Broadway with his 1913 lecture at Columbia – the revival of Bergson in the anglophone world owed much to the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’ 1966 essay on Bergsonism in 1988. This event was soon accompanied by a resurgence of anti-Bergsonism in the context of science wars in the following decade, prompted by the alleged mistreatment of natural science by postmodern philosophers. The ‘Sokal affair’ and the book Intellectual Impostures (1998) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont amounted to a warning that philosophers should not meddle in scientific affairs out of their reach – Bergson’s conversation with Einstein in 1922 was invoked as a warning example – or concern themselves too much with the implications of contemporary science for our worldview.

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Assemblée générale (en ligne) 23 octobre 2021

L’Assemblée Générale de la Société des amis de Bergson se tiendra le samedi 23 octobre 2020 de 14 heures à 15 heures 30 CEST (heure de Paris), en ligne. Les membres de la SAB auront accès au lien de la réunion via la newsletter Bergson News. Vous pouvez adhérer ici

Ordre du jour:

1. Rapport moral 
– Rapport des activités de l’année 2020/2021
– Publications : nouvelle revue Bergsoniana, recensions, bibliographie et autres outils en ligne (site)
– Global Bergsonism : état d’avancement du projet ; colloque en ligne de Fukuoka ; Atelier Bergson à partir de janvier
 

2. Rapport financier
– Cotisation en ligne via HelloAsso
– Entrées et dépenses

3. Communication (carnet, facebook, twitter, newsletter)

4. Bibliographie Zotero et autres outils

5. Prochaines activités 
– Webinaire sru Bergson en Asie de l’Est, Université de Fukuoka (en ligne) : 12, 18 et 19 novembre 2021
– Calendrier du projet Global Bergsonism
– Prochains numéros de Bergsoniana

6. Publications et activités des membres 

7. Questions diverses 

Nous espérons vous y voir nombreu·ses·eux.

Bien cordialement à chacun·e,  

Caterina Zanfi (Présidente)
Arnaud Bouaniche (Secrétaire)
Mathilde Tahar (Trésorière)