reproduction). We must understand something more radical. The world
no longer exists except as an image. The gesture of conceptual creation
accomplished by Heidegger is thus precious and of the greatest impor-
tance, if we wish to understand how philosophy has evolved over the
last decades, the decades in which Heidegger has been read and inter-
preted. But his is also a repulsive gesture because it removes any breath
of freedom and any generosity from human action. Not on the ontolog-
ical plane, but on the ethical plane is it possible and necessary to free
oneself from the depressing Heideggerian conceptualization.User’s manual for BergsonHenri Bergson’s contribution to thinking in the twentieth century, it
seems to me, is largely undervalued. Before Guattari and Deleuze, Berg-
son’s message had not entirely been understood. Instead it had been
taken as a kind of messy irrationalism, a marginal perspective, purely
transgressive with respect to the history of Western metaphysics. When I
read Deleuze, and especially when I tried to understand the Guattarian
philosophical gesture, I realized that it is with Bergson that the body for
the first time claims its own foundational value.
With Bergson, corporeality acquires an essential role in the onto-
logical sphere. There is no longer a discourse of being, but finally a dis-
course of intensive modalities that make possible a projection of being.
In the history of Western metaphysics, there has never been anyone
(except perhaps Spinoza) who has stated with such clarity that life is
the register of being, and that intensive duration is the register of time.
As he wrote in Creative Evolution, ‘wherever anything lives, there is,
open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed’ (16).
Time cannot be understood from the point of view of being, but only
from the point of view of vital intensity. And the rhythm of temporality
is located in the organism; it’s in the flow, in decline that meaning is
found. Bergson’s thought can with every right be defined creationism,
and only in this sense, it is a vitalism: not in a Romantic, irrationalist
sense, but in a very precise sense, the creation of being as projection of
the lived.42 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_07_cha06.pdf 10/3/08 11:34 AM Page 42