Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming

Deleuze understood Bergson as perhaps the greatest theorist of difference, the theorist whose insistence brought difference into philosophy and showed that philosophy was irresistibly drawn, insofar as it is directed by real questions and problems, those that impinge on us without relief, to that which differs from itself, to that which exists only as becoming. For Bergson, philosophy brings to knowledge that which the sciences must necessarily leave out, the continuities and connections that the sciences cannot see in their focus on closed systems and definable and isolatable terms. He articulates that which the arts express more directly than the sciences but can articulate only through an absolute and ungeneralizable singularity: the continuity of the real, the immersion of life and matter in the real, the force and effect of duration. Neither science nor art can simultaneously grasp both the relentless universal force of difference, and its absolute specificity: as each touches upon one it elides the other. Philosophy functions somewhere ‘between’ these approaches, seeking the two-faced movement of universalization and particularity, of generalization and individuation, through that which unites them: the dual force of duration, the double generation of the past and the present, the virtual and the actual, which is the movement of difference.