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might shed on the question of the theologico-political. Or should we leave the answer to
this question open, as she will suggest?
A succinct analysis of the philosophical problem of ‘‘the possible’’ in its (impossible)
relation to ‘‘the real’’—more specifically, the nature of ‘‘future events’’ and the creation
of ‘‘novelty’’—opens the way to addressing this issue. As Marrati demonstrates, this analy-
sis brings out Bergson’s conception of philosophy’s necessaryconversion—to a different
understanding of the power of time, together with its implications for ‘‘invention’’ in
religion, ethics, art, and the political. Indeed, the ‘‘assumption that the possibility of things
precedes their existence comes down to denying the reality of the new, to speaking of
time without thinking it, to erasing the only feature that defines time, its power of cre-
ation.’’ This is what Marrati calls Bergson’s ‘‘ontological pragmatism,’’ recalling that, for
this thinker, ‘‘if timedoesnothing, itisnothing’’ (p. 593).
A philosophical testament of sorts,The Two Sources of Morality and Religionshould
perhaps be seen less as the epilogue to an oeuvre whose metaphysical and scientific con-
ception rested upon the repeated affirmation of a metaphysics of process than as the
diagnosis of a blind spot in Western reason, which makes it susceptible to and productive
of the worst no less than the best—in particular, closure and the static, on the one hand,
and opening and dynamism, on the other. In fact, Bergson’s final work, as Marrati brings
out, can be seen as a (desperate?) attempt to counter the pernicious effects of reason’s
inevitable—Kant would have said transcendental—illusions as well as technology’s (in
Bergson’s parlance: ‘‘mechanicism’s’’) tendency toward a closed society of exploitation,
domination, and stagnation. It is around this ambiguity—the challenge and chance of the
‘‘absence of any determinate object’’ (p. 600)—that Marrati’s rigorous interpretation of
Bergson revolves. Bergson’s work, she claims, should be interpreted as an endeavor to
understand the age-old mystical impulse, which is not only the sole instance capable of
keeping dynamic and open the emergence and formation of our concepts, images, prac-
tices, and democracies but also a movement that tends to close off this creatively evolu-
tionary perspective.
The whole difficulty of understanding Bergson on the question of the ‘‘retrospective
illusion of the possible’’ (p. 601), implied in historical (read: Hegelian) teleology, finalism,
and doctrines of progress (read: Kant) is to situate it properly within its original context,
which is, for Bergson, primarily that of psychology and biology, regardless of its further
illustrations in references to art (especially music), literature, politics, and democracy.
This brings Marrati to her central question: ‘‘How is one to think the origin of morality,
the history and future of human societies, or the function of religion once one situates
oneself—as Bergson does—outside any historicist perspective, as well as outside any ab-
stract rationalism?’’ (p. 594). In other words, how is one to situate Bergson’s central
intuition by demarcating it from the long shadows cast by the work of Hegel and Kant,
that is to say, by the ‘‘philosophy of history’’ and the ‘‘universalism of pure reason’’?

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