NOTES TO PAGES 593–601one problem: how is change possible?... The answer to this question given by Aristotle... is that
movement—by which he means an upward movement of change, the advancing amelioration of
everything which is through its increasing determination by the absolute—is to be equated with the
realization of the possible, insofar as the possible is opposed to natural causality. That is really
Aristotle’s central proposition. And this proposition, that movement is the realization of the possi-
ble, already implies the Hegelian thesis of history as progress in the consciousness of freedom...
movement is the becoming real of the possible’’ (Theodor W. Adorno,Metaphysics: Concept and
Problems[1998; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 81–82).
- On the difference between the Greek and the modern way of understanding time, see Henri
Bergson,Creative Evolution(1907; New York: Dover, 1998), 304–43. - Ibid., 342.
- Apart from Deleuze, a remarkable exception is Levinas, who writes, in the preface added to
the German translation ofTotality and Infinityand included in the subsequent French editions of
the book, that the Bergsonian concept of duration is one of the very few attempts to break with an
ontological conception of time. - Bergson,Creative Evolution, 340.
- Bergson,The Creative Mind, 90.
- Ibid., 10.
- The very idea of a singular concept for a singular object seems nonsensical from a philo-
sophical perspective, as well as from the perspective of the ordinary definition of the termconcept.
This is a decisive point in Bergson’s conception of philosophy, however. Against any tendencies to
abstract generalization, Bergson believes in the possibility, indeed the necessity, for knowledge of
the being of the singular, for respecting and adapting to the specificity of objects and events, and
for the ability to recognize their novelty. In this regard, Bergson is calling for a philosophy of
difference as the necessary counterpart to a philosophy committed to thinking time as the invention
of the new. - Bergson’s political activities are now well known, thanks to Philippe Soulez’s remarkable
Bergson politique(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). - See Bergson,Creative Evolution, xiii.
- Henri Bergson,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion(1932: Notre Dame, Ind.: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 15. - Ibid., 25.
- Bergson thus openly rejects the idea of a ’’primitive mind,’’ governed by its own rules, that
Le ́vy-Bruhl had elaborated in his influentialLa Mentalite ́primitive, first published in 1922. - In this regard, Bergson anticipates the important work of scholars such as Leroi-Gourhan
and Simondon on the impact of technological objects on human societies. See Gilbert Simondon,
Du mode d’existence des objets techniques(1958; Paris: Aubier, 2001) and Andre ́Leroi-Gourhan,
Gesture and Speech(1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). - Bergson thus provides an account of the ‘‘situation of exception’’ different from the one
that Schmitt develops and Agamben further formalizes. - Bergson,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 33.
- Ibid., 38.
- Gilles Deleuze and Fe ́lix Guattari,What Is Philosophy?(1991; New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 7. - Bergson,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 103 ff.
- Ibid., 58.
- Ibid., 317.
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