PAOLA MARRATIsurprise when I answered, ‘‘If I knew what was to be the great dramatic work of the
future, I should be writing it.’’ I saw distinctly that he conceived of the future work
has being already stored up in some cupboard reserved for possibilities.... ‘‘But, I
said, the work of which you speak is not yet possible.’’—‘‘But it must be, since it is
to take place.’’—‘‘No, it is not. I grant you, at most, that it will have been possible.’’... Thus in judging that the possible does not presuppose the real, one admits that
the realization adds something to the simple possibility: the possible would have been
there from all time, a phantom awaiting its hour; it would therefore have become
reality by the addition of something, by some transfusion of blood or life. One does
not see that the contrary is the case, that the possible implies the corresponding
reality with, moreover, something added, since the possible is the combined effect of
reality once it has appeared and of a condition which throws it back in time.^3
Our understanding of future events is shaped by the pervasive belief that the possibil-
ity of things precedes their existence, like the ensemble of possible worlds Leibniz’s God
contemplates, like the a priori structures that lay out in advance the form of all experience,
or like a logical space in which all events are supposed to place themselves in preestab-
lished compartments. Hence it becomes understandable that the concept of the possible
is supposed to contain less than that of the real: one being the image of the other, exis-
tence would give a body to its own phantom, add to it the only thing it still is missing—a
little bit of reality. The final consequence, as Gilles Deleuze points out inDifference and
Repetition, is that existence becomes inexplicable: because it adds nothing to the concept
of a possibility that precedes it, existence remains outside the domain of the conceptual,
without reason and, paradoxically, without importance.^4
According to Bergson, the opposite, rather, is the case. The possible is just the real
with the addition of an act of the mind that throws its image back onto the past: ‘‘the
possible is the mirage of the present in the past.’’ We are mistaken to assume that the
possible is less than the real. There is more in the category of the possible than in that of
the real because the former also contains the very act of the mind that projects a possible
unto the past. The possible is constitutedretrospectively, indeedretroactively.
What is at stake, however, is much more than a question of method in the academic
sense of the term, or a question of conceptual analysis. Behind the illusion of the possible,
a mistake can be discerned that compromises the very task of philosophy as Bergson
conceives of it or, to be more precise, the task of aconversionthat philosophy must
achieve. The task is no longer to think the eternal—in another world or in this one, since
there also is a modern way of attaching thought to that which is removed from time—but
to think themoving(le mouvant), the new in the process of making itself. It is from this
perspective that Bergson’s critique of the traditional concept of possibility acquires its full
importance and unfolds its consequences. The philosophical failure to provide a concep-
tual determination of existence we have just discussed may seem a paradoxical outcome
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