Duration, Long and Short: Sketches of a Genealogy of a Bergsonian Concept

“Duration” is unanimously considered to be Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) most important concept, and the first one he allegedly “created.”1 According to the organic vision of his philosophy, shared by most Bergsonians, this concept, used for the first time in the PhD dissertation Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), translated into English as Time and Free Will, has to be con- ceived as the seed from which the whole of Bergson’s philosophy developed: the problem of the relationship between real and “lived” time and spatialized time generated the problem of the relationship between perception and mem- ory in Matter and Memory (1898), then that of the conflict between intelligence and intuition in the “Introduction to Philosophy” (1904), and finally that of the union between matter and life in Creative Evolution (1907), the work that would see Bergson become a major figure on the global intellectual scene. In this essay I propose some hypotheses aimed at proving that the “discovery of duration” was related to a long spiritualist tradition that Bergson was forced to adapt to the philosophical field of the 1880s, traversed by conflicts and debates. I thus reconsider Bergson’s declarations about his philosophical trajectory, suggest- ing replacement accounts in both the long duration and the short duration. This analysis aims at providing another type reading of the first sequence of Bergson’s philosophical output, attentive to both epistemological changes and institutional macrostructures on the long duration.