Different Spaces: Beckett, Deleuze, Bergson

Abstract

In his 1966 work, Bergsonism, Deleuze restates the familiar opposition in Bergson’s thought between duration and space: that in a spatial perspective, multiplicity is seen as ‘terms juxtaposed in space’, rather than as ‘states which merge together in duration’; that conceiving things as differences of degree or intensity rather than as differences of kind is ‘perhaps the most general error of thought’; and that in adopting the spatial perspective we become ‘victims of a fundamental illusion’ which robs us of the true experience of duration by homogenizing what is heterogeneous and by representing events as a simple line where there is in fact complex, confused flow. Deleuze thus repeats Bergson’s injunction to state problems and solve them ‘in terms of time rather than of space’ (Deleuze, 2011, pp. 19, 20, 31; see also p. 122 n. 30). However, he goes on to note an evolution in Bergson’s thought on space: ‘space seemed to him to be less and less reducible to a fiction separating us from psychological reality, rather, it was itself grounded in being’ (Deleuze, 2011, p. 34). That is, Deleuze points out, from Matter and Memory onwards, Bergson came to see that ‘while the idea of a homogeneous space implies a sort of artifice or symbol separating us from reality, it is nevertheless the case that matter and extensity are realities, themselves prefiguring the order of space’ (Deleuze, 2011, p. 34). In other words, there are two types of space: the false space of spatialization — that ‘fiction’ separating us from reality that Deleuze noted — and real space, which resists representation in this way, a ‘properly differential and original space’ that Difference and Repetition will pursue (Deleuze, 2012, p. 61). This aspect of Bergson’s thought has been missed by philosophers and commentators with astonishing regularity.¹