PAOLA MARRATIof life as a tendency toward change. Humanity is not an exception: no one can know in
advance what would define humanity, what would indicate the unbridgeable boundaries
of the human. Also, if the open society is to include all of humanity, the mystic opening,
as we have seen, passes through humanity, so to speak, without tying itself down. To put
it in different, non-Bergsonian terms: the universal has no figure, the universal is empty.
But this emptiness is not structural. The universal is a movement, a movement without
preestablished direction and without continuity. It is a fragmented movement that stops
itself and freezes, suddenly to reappear, elsewhere and differently. Much later, in 1991,
Deleuze will remember Bergson when he writes inWhat Is Philosophy?that the first prin-
ciple of philosophy is that universals do not explain anything because they need to be
explained themselves.^22
But what is the source of mysticism, of a morality, a religion, and a politics of open-
ing? What opposes itself to the pressure of social obligation (all along entering into com-
promise with obligation, because for Bergson pure mysticism does not exist as a state that
one could enter once and for all and remain there)? For the reasons we have seen, the
second source cannot be habit or pure reason: it is the power of affects and feelings. The
example of music, which Bergson chooses, is significant. Certainly, it is a commonplace
to attribute to music a particular power to excite emotions, but what is important to
Bergson is that this power is all the stronger for being detached from any object. Music is
able to create new feelings and introduce them into us or, more precisely, Bergson writes,
to introduce us into them. The force of a feeling has to do with this power to open us up
to the new: the mystical source of morality and religion lies in this force; instead of being
derived from social pressure, it is aspiration.^23
The absence of any determinate object on which I have so insisted certainly has a
counterpart in Bergson’s thought. That which can communicate open morality, propagate
it, cannot be a corpus of doctrines or an institution. The power of a feeling cannot be
triggered except by an example; hence the necessary role of a hero of morality, famous or
anonymous (the exemplary figure among these being the Christ of the Gospels). We must
not believe, however, that the figure of the exemplary hero fills the void of the open: if
imitation is necessary, it is also, strictly speaking, the imitation of nothing. There is no set
of rules, norms, or conduct to follow: what must be imitated is an attitude, a tendency of
the mind, and a capacity to act.
Bergson is not calling for a morality and a politics of irrational emotions or sublime
sensibility. His claim is, rather, that no morality and no politics—whether ‘‘open’’ or
‘‘closed’’—can ever take place within the limits of reason alone.
Insofar as the author ofCreative Evolutionis concerned, with his faith in living beings’
power of creation, we now find ourselves in a strange situation. We are confronted, on
the one hand, with ‘‘natural’’ societies, sustained by an evolutionary instinct that leads to
the closed group, always ready to close itself even further in order to attack the enemy.
On the other hand, we also see a demand for an opening, a second source of morality,
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