Bergsonism and the virtual: is the virtual real, and does the time-image give us a direct image of time?

Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Bergson's three theses on movement provide the structural key. Movement is not the space covered (movement is indivisible, space is divisible). The instant is an immobile section of movement (the cinematographic illusion). Movement is a mobile section of duration — every translation in space expresses a transformation in the Whole, where "the Whole = the Open = duration = creation." The Whole is not given (against Kant); it is the open. The virtual is fully real, just not actual; actualization proceeds from the virtual through differenciation (with a c). Multiplicity (Riemann via Bergson) is the proper name for what Difference and Repetition calls Idea: a structure of differential singularities.¹²

Hume's "clap of thunder": relations are external to their terms — the foundational thesis of empiricism, the basis of constructive philosophy, the genuine alternative to the post-Hegelian totalizing tradition.³

Sources

1. Above all, what Bergson wants to say using the glass of sugared water is that my waiting, whatever it be, expresses a duration as mental, spiritual reality. But why does this spiritual duration bear witness, not only for me who wait, but for a whole which changes?

   Cinema 1 The Movement-Image, pp. 9–10

2. If we think of pure atoms, their movements, which testify to a reciprocal action of all the parts of the substance, necessarily express modifications, disturbances, changes of energy in the whole. What Bergson discovers beyond translation is vibration, radiation. Our error lies in believing that it is the anyelement-whatevers, external to qualities which move.

   Cinema 1 The Movement-Image, p. 9

3. The heart of Bergson's project is to think differences in kind independently of all forms of negation: There are differences in being and yet nothing negative. Negation always involves abstract concepts that are much too general. What is, in fact, the common root of all negation? We have already seen it.

   Bergsonism, pp. 47–48

Where the argument is made

• Bergsonism (1966), Difference and Repetition (1968, especially 'Repetition for Itself' on the three syntheses of time and the chapter on intensity), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983), Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), Negotiations (1990, the cinema interviews and "Three Questions on Six Times Two"), Two Regimes of Madness (the cinema essays)

How the argument was received

The Bergson influence threads through the entire authorship — from the early monograph (1966) through Difference and Repetition (the three syntheses of time, the role of intensity), through the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (the geology of morals as Bergson + Simondon + Kielmeyer extended to social formations), through the Cinema books (1983, 1985) which are Bergsonism continued by cinematic means, into the late essay "Immanence: A Life" (the transcendental field as Bergsonian duration stripped of subject and object).