Introduction: Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson — Rhizomatic Connections

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson have each been recognized as among the leading philosophers of our age, definitively marking both ends of the twentieth century. At the start of the century Bergson’s thought was hailed as ‘the beginning of a new era’ and yet, under the weight of criticisms which labelled his thought ‘intuitionist’ or ‘irrationalist’, he virtually disappeared for most of the middle decades of the twentieth century, only to reappear again in new guise in the 1990s.¹ For his work during the early decades of the twentieth century, especially as co-author of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead’s place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, and the ‘imaginary’ of analytic philosophy, is already secure.² Yet, in ways that resemble the ‘forgetting’ of Bergson, Whitehead’s later thought has been regarded by the majority of professional philosophers for much of the latter half of the twentieth century as simply an irrelevant anachronism, a sort of nineteenth-century or even pre-Kantian speculative metaphysics with little or no redeeming merit. Towards the end of the twentieth century Michel Foucault infamously claimed that the century would be known as ‘Deleuzian’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 165). Whatever that might mean, a good deal of the early Anglo-American readings of Deleuze’s thought, and some of the continuing interest, rely on ‘ready-made’ codes for the reception of ‘French thought’ including postmodernism, poststructuralism and continental philosophy generally.