Time Regained

“If you don’t understand the sequence of which a concept is part, you cannot understand the concept”, Gilles Deleuze insisted in a seminar on Baruch Spinoza given at Vincennes in 1980. This approach to understanding thinkers and their concepts is already apparent in his 1966 book Bergsonism, which prompted the rediscovery of the work of Henri Bergson in French academia after a period of relatively decreased interest in his work. In this work, Deleuze interprets Bergson’s work as having three major stages—duration (la durée), memory and élan vital. Deleuze determines a progression between these, moving from an understanding of human psychology to an ontological understanding of reality. The elucidated sequence provides a fuller understanding of the concepts than an analysis of a concept in isolation could achieve.