Bergson’s durée fails to theorize the genuinely new and unpredictable

Evidence

Yet it is not enough merely to make a place for temporality: even Bergson, who first in modern times revealed the essential spatiality of logical concepts and insisted on the uniqueness and specificity of lived time and durée as opposed to them, failed to evolve an adequate formulation of the reality of time. For insofar as he defined the latter as process or change, it is always in another sense the same at any moment; Bergson never managed to think his way through to the fundamental conceptual category which presides over the experience of the future and which is precisely the novum, the utterly and unexpectedly new, the new which astonishes by its absolute and intrinsic unpredictability. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 248

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Blochian category of the novum — the absolutely and intrinsically unpredictable new — against Bergson’s reductive reading of time as mere process.
• XREF: The contrast between Bergson’s durée and the novum is a classic both/and dialectical move — Jameson uses each philosopher’s limit to define the missing concept, precisely the strategy of his Frankfurt-school lineage. — connects to: Bergson’s vitalism rejects both mechanistic and finalist accounts of evolution; Horkheimer rejected Bergson’s durée for homogenizing time and erasing suffering — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 213; Bergson’s elan vital defines life as a creative, non-predetermined action on matter

Broader Connections

• Bergson’s elan vital defines life as a creative, non-predetermined action on matter #complicates (0.85)
• Bergson’s vitalism rejects both mechanistic and finalist accounts of evolution #qualifies (0.82)
• Horkheimer rejected Bergson’s durée for homogenizing time and erasing suffering #corroborates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 213