Seeing What the Philosopher Saw

Abstract

This essay poses the question of the relation between philosophy and literature in terms of the opposition between images and concepts. It examines Bergson's insistence on the importance of images in philosophical writing and specifically his notion of the “intermediate image.” We examine how Bergson's notion of the cinematographic operates as an “intermediate image” and explore how figures of photography are not subsumed under the cinematographic but rather unmask the illusion associated with it. Finally, we consider how Proust's novel resists what Bergson calls the “cinematographic method” and how it deploys photographic figures both to narrate the production of memories and to convey how experience in time is never immediate.

Keywords:

• Time
• Photography
• Proust
• Bergson
• The Image
• Cinematographic Illusion
• Memory.

Notes

1. For a general discussion of photographic metaphors in Bergson see Brunet, 295–302.

2. Bergson presents the “cinematographic illusion” most explicitly in L’Êvolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] chapter IV.

3. On chronophotography see Braun and Crary.

4. See Ortel and Brunet.

5. For a history of this distinction see Brunet.

6. On the structure of duration see Guerlac.