Strani

nedelja, 25. november 2012

EKSPERIMENTI....








1. IMIGRACIJA / IMMIGRATION
2. SAMOREFLEKSIJA / SELFREFLEXION
3. DRŽAVLJANSKA VZGOJA / CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION
4. UČINEK POLITIČNE RETORIKE NA RAZVOJ MNOŽIC / INFLUENCE OF POLITICAL RHETORIC ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MASSES
5. VPLIV KULTURNE VZGOJE NA RAST POSAMEZNIKOV / INFLUENCE OF CULTURAL EDUCATION ON THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALS
6. RAZISKAVA POMENA AVTORSTVA - PRIMERJAVA VPLIVA ORIGINALA OZIROMA PLAGIATA NA RAST OSEBKA / EXPLORING THE MEANING OF AUTHORSHIP - COMPARISON OF THE INFLUENCE OF ORIGINAL VS. THE INFLUENCE OF THE PLAGIAT ON THE GROWTH OF SPECIMEN
7. KLASIČNO, SODOBNO ALI TRADICIONALNO - VPLIVI NA RAST / CLASSICAL, CONTEMPORARY OR TRADITIONAL - THE INFLUENCE ON THE GROWTH


ODPRTI VRT/PART 2



D`où venons nous? D`où sortons nous ?
Where do we come from? Where do we leave from?
Quand saurait-je où je vais?
When will I know where I`m going?
Pourquoi sommes-nous sur terre?
Why are we here ?

LOUISE BOURGEOIS le jour la nuit le jour
2. Space- The Mapping
(Map as a sign of structures of power)- how to subvert this power?
These (to find) are places and spaces of political and personal resistance, of memory and action. In and of itself this will not bring the State to its knees—indeed the Nazis brought about Benjamin’s own untimely death—but it does suggest, quite brilliantly, the dialectic between lived experience/embodied space and the larger political and cultural world, and the potential for subversion.
Benjamin’s insistence that memory collapses time into space goes against the western notion of the linear narrative, of biography as sequence, of maps that chart events and actions as though they were over and done with. It emphasizes flux, change, potential: Time…thrusts us forward from behind, blows us out through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets.
Part of Benjamin’s fantasy of alternative ways of mapping have been put into action in contemporary Britain by organisations such as Common Ground, which try to get people to draw their own maps: ‘authorising’ their version of the world, the places and paths they know as against the grey anonymity of the official map. In such undertakings the map is as much performance and process as object. It may become a site for struggle as well as celebration, bringing out social difference by providing one public imaginative space on which to work. Even the most outwardly conciliatory and harmonious of Parish Maps might act as a blanket thrown over difference which, in covering it, keeps it warm and stewing. (Crouch and Matless 1996:253) In part, Benjamin’s fantasy is given academic expression through Giddens’s mapping of people’s movement between places, of entrances and exits, back-stages and fore-ground, in which repetitive time and cyclical time are played off against time’s arrow (Giddens 1985; see also Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Pred1990).
 —differentiated worlds of experience. It could, I suppose, be suggested that Giddens or Rose is simply mapping Bourdieu’s habitus: mapping the everyday places and encounters through which people are socialised and disciplined; logging the behaviour that creates and maintains Foucault’s structures of surveillance. But, equally, they may be mapping potential non conformism, ways of questioning—even undermining —the accepted way of doing things.

A POETICS OF INTELLECTUAL LIBRARY SPACE: A HIDDEN STORY OF NATURAL GROWTH
Ewen Jarvis, Deakin University
Synopsis.
Libraries are structures built for the storage, preservation and provision of stories, and as a story is an intellectual structure, one can conceive of libraries as spaces in which intellectual structures are brought together to form a kind of superstructure. When readers and writers use libraries they do more than inhabit them physically. To make use of a library is also to inhabit the intellectual structure it represents. This paper aims to describe the experience of inhabiting and extending intellectual library space. By focusing on how Haruki Murakami’s protagonist in Kafka on the Shore experiences language, this paper will attempt to come to an understanding of what the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard called the ‘psychic reality of reading and writing’: a reality within which the library’s primary function is to open spaces within readers and writers in which acts of creation can occur. After considering the nature of the reading and writing experience, this paper will propose various built forms appropriate to an intellectual library which deals in such acts of creation. This task will involve describing how built forms taken from the literary works of Italo Calvino, Coleman Barks, Jeanette Winterson and Franz Kafka, among others, can be profitably employed as metaphors for intellectual library space.

A POETICS OF INTELLECTUAL LIBRARY SPACE: A HIDDEN STORY OF NATURAL GROWTH
In the final instalment of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time the French novelist writes: ‘In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself’ (2009). In Champion of a cause: essays and addresses on librarianship Archibald MacLeish, the poet and former librarian of congress, writes that ‘the physical book: is never more than an ingenious cipher by which the intellectual book is communicated from one mind to another, and the intellectual book is always a structure in the imagination’ (MacLeish in Basbanes 2003: 6). In these passages Proust and MacLeish both comment on the nature of books. Proust likens books to optic instruments that enable readers to make the invisible within them visible, while MacLeish likens books to ingenious ciphers through which meaning can be conveyed. Both writers suggest that books direct our gaze inward, allowing us to internally apprehend the intellectual structures they contain.
This article aims to interrogate the experience of reading, which the physical library serves. It will then suggest a series of habitable structures that can be profitably employed as metaphors for the intellectual apparatus we use and develop when we bring story structures into existence. In literary terms, the space of the reading experience has been described variously as ‘the domain of the prophet’ (Sebald 2002: 62) and as ‘the realms of gold’ (Keats 1970: 61). Jalal ad-Din Rumi refers to such spaces as ‘inspired solitudes’ (trans. Barks: 2002:105). Italo Calvino, contemplating the nature of nameless things, imagines that they reside in the place where ‘thoughts take on form and substance’ (2009: 110). Haruki Murakami refers to a ‘space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap’ (2005: 449). In philosophical terms, however, this space has been described as a space that ‘links us to an eternal present’, and as the sphere of language and writing, which, more than the body, “corresponds to the soul” (Derrida 2006: 18). It has been called a ‘poetisphere’ and a ‘dimension of the modern psychism’ (Bachelard 1994: 24) that represents ‘the threshold of being’ (Bachelard 1994: xii).
In Earth and Reveries of the Will, Bachelard reminds us that the task of philosophy, according to the German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi, is simply to discover the origins of language (2002: 4), and he maintains that each literary image offers the experience of the creation of language’ (2002: 5). What remains to be explored is the space within which this creation of language is experienced. Bachelard describes this space as the site of the poetic act and as a place where the poetic image emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man (1994: xviii). Elsewhere, he writes that ‘the poet in the novelty of his images is always the origin of language’ (1994: xx). But it is not only the poet who experiences this poetic act which is an origin of language. Readers also share in the joy of creation, and this act of creation ‘makes of the reader a poet on a level with the image he has read’ (1994: xxv).
In this light, it would not be too presumptuous to suppose that the primary function of the library, the function it performs that is higher than its functions of storage, preservation, access, and so forth, is to open up within readers a space where acts of creation can take place. This is, indeed, how Murakami uses the invented library in his novel Kafka on the Shore, in which a fifteen-year-old boy runs away from home to live in the corner of a small public library. The library that is central to Kafka on the Shore acts as a kind of halfway house between the conscious and the subconscious, the living and the dead. From the first chapter, in fact, we are informed that this halfway house is the destination of the protagonist: ‘On my fifteenth birthday’, the narrator explains, ‘I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in the corner of a small library’ (Murakami 2005: 4). It is, furthermore, not insignificant that Murakami specifically states that his protagonist will come to live in ‘the corner’ of a small library, and it would even be useful, at this point, to reflect on what Bachelard has written about the corners of inhabited spaces: ‘every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination’ (Bachelard 1994: 136). When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners,’ he continues, ‘we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts’ (Bachelard 1994: 137). At one point, Bachelard even designates the corner as ‘the chamber of being’ (1994: 138). These descriptions of corners reveal something about our experience of reading, as it is a corner that we see when we open the pages of a book: a corner of paper that takes us to realms beyond memory. One of the most concise descriptions of disappearing into a corner of paper appears in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake writes: ‘I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended’ (2004: 191). An observation of Bachelard’s also takes us deep into the reading experience: ‘it is as though the poem in its exuberance’, he writes, ‘opened new depths in us’ (1994: xxiii). This is not to suggest that the religious and philosophical system that Blake envisioned agrees with the phenomenological insights of Bachelard. Their conceptions of depth in these works differ, but both writers, nonetheless, associate the reading experience with the notion of descent. It is a simple and meaningful association.
This depth-opening experience of language is also described by Jacques Derrida: ‘To grasp the operation of the creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom. One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness’ (2006: 7). Murakami explores this concept through his protagonist’s imagined friend, whose name, quite appropriately, is Crow. It is Crow who, on Kafka Tamura’s behalf, swoops down into blind depths to find words for Kafka’s half-formed thoughts: ‘I try putting into words my impressions of the novel, but I need Crow’s help – need him to appear from wherever he is, spread his wings wide and search out the right words for me’ (Murakami 2005: 113). Crow plays a part in the creative acts that are inherent to the protagonist’s experience of language. Crow is at once part of and separate from the protagonist, and his presence illustrates the concept of separation from self that Derrida proposes. There are, however, less benign sides to our experience of lonely corners and dark depths; ‘there are angles from which one cannot escape’ (Bachelard 1994: 144), and there are corners which are also graves. It is Kafka Tamura’s desire to avoid such malevolent corners that drives him to seek out the Komura Memorial Library: a place that is situated somewhere between, or rather within, both reality and imagination. The protagonist even states, at one point, that:
As I relax on the sofa and gaze around the room a thought hits me: this is exactly the place I’ve been looking for all my life. A little hideaway in some sinkhole somewhere. I always thought of it as a secret, imaginary place, and can barely believe that it actually exists (Murakami 2005: 39).
Inevitably, Kafka Tamura is drawn into the space between the real and the imagined within the library. His journey is indeed a journey into the depths—into the aspect of library space that interests us most—the in between space, that is, which exists between the written word and the emerging image: an in between space which swells and expands a sentence’s tenuous thread (Bachelard 1994: xxii). This in between space is where we go when we begin to intimately inhabit the space of the word: an experience that has been described in the following way:
Words–I often imagine this–are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce,” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves–this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. (Bachelard 1994: 147)
So if a single word can be the germ of a house or a world, then what of a sentence or a story, and what of an entire library? When we begin to imagine intellectual systems made up of multiple word, sentence, and story structures, vast edifices begin to swell in the imagination: vast edifices that exist on the other side of the corporal and temporal world. Indeed, what pleasurable feelings of expansion we experience when, seduced by what we read, these structures begin to expand as we push them out from within? Murakami, through his protagonist, describes this experience in the following way: ‘I’m alone inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world’ (2005:61), and Bachelard would say that during such moments of expansion the dreamer and his reverie have entered totally ‘into the substance of his happiness’ (1994: 12).
This alone space within which we build habitable story structures is the liminal space that the title of Murakami’s book alludes to. The protagonist is, after all, positioned, right from the beginning ‘on the Shore’. Perhaps Murakami is referring to the shore-like space that Bachelard describes in Earth and Reveries of the Will, a space that exists between an images psychological reality and its physical reality (2002: 3). Similarly, the philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception goes some way towards describing how we experience this space between the physical and the psychological:
the [physical] brush which presents itself to the senses is merely an envelope or a phantom. The true brush, the stiff, prickly entity which is incarnated in these appearances, is concentrated in the gaze; it has moved from the window, leaving there only its lifeless shell. (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 339)
What is said here of the physical brush could also be said of the word ‘brush’, which itself is merely an envelope that allows for the incarnation of the true brush. Between the brush itself and the word brush is a border space. It is this border space, no doubt, in which Bachelard imagines a chord sounding in the soul of the reader (Bachelard 1994: 100), the type of word-chord that generates images as it descends: images that will become more stable as they surface. Bachelard maintains that the human psyche forms itself first and foremost in images (2002: 3), and ascertaining what happens in the silent poetic moment in which images emerge takes him directly to the object of his enquiries, which is the insides of poems (2002: 6), as it is within poems that literary images are born. ‘I believe’, he continues, ‘that the pre-eminence of imagination may be discovered through the close examination of literary images’ (2002: 4–5). This observation, which puts its faith in the pre-eminence of the imagination, seems to be pointing to a renewal of Romanticism, which is in essence a renewed interest in genesis, in becoming. We are given more proof of this in his description of the two types of images: perceived images and created images, which seem to correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘psychological’ and ‘physical’ realities. For Bachelard ‘perceived images and created images constitute two very different psychological phenomena:
Creative imagination functions very differently than imagination which relies on the reproduction of past perceptions, because it is governed by an unreality principle every bit as powerful, psychologically speaking, as that reality principle so frequently invoked by psychologists to characterize an individual’s adjustment to whatever “reality” enjoys social sanction. It is precisely this unreality principle that reinstates the value of solitude, ordinary reverie being one of the most elementary aspects of solitude. (Bachelard 2002: 2)
Here Bachelard elevates the creative imagination, which is governed by an unreality principle, above the formal imagination, which relies solely on the reproduction of past perceptions. This movement, which, as we have noted, is a movement toward Romanticism, and which is guided by the phenomenological method, involves a study of poetic images as they are originally experienced. What, however, is an appropriate shape for an intellectual library which deals in such originally experienced creations?
There are many habitable structures in the natural world that can help us to envision what such a library would look like. In The Poetics of Space Bachelard describes ‘the world as the nest of mankind’ (1994: 104), and in the same work he describes nests as refuges, as shelters, and, quite significantly, as curved corners. There are dead nests and living nests (994: 94) and oneirically fertile nests full of eggs which sit snugly in the forks of branches (1994: 96). But if we can think of the world as the nest of mankind, can we not also think of the library as the nest of the human mind? What is a library, after all, if not a nest of poetic images waiting to be re-experienced/imagined? Two lines by the poet Ivan Goll take our imagination in this direction:
I found a nest in the skeleton of the ivy
A soft nest of country moss and dream herb.
(Ivan Goll in Bachelard 1994: 90)
Thinking oneirically, it makes perfect sense to use dream herb to build soft nests of the mind.
Another natural structure that can help us to envision an intellectual library that deals in originally experienced creations is the shell. One writer who has dreamed the life of a shell-secreting mollusc is Italo Calvino, and deep within his shell building reverie we are informed that the mollusc made the shell simply to express itself: ‘while I [the mollusc] was making it [the shell] I had no idea of making it because I needed it; on the contrary, it was like when somebody lets out an exclamation he could perfectly well not make, and yet he makes it, like a ‘Ha’ or ‘hmph!’, that’s how I made the shell: simply to express myself … From the margin of that fleshy cloak on my body, using certain glands, I began to give off secretions which took on a curving shape all around, until I was covered with a hard and variegated shield, rough on the outside and smooth and shiny inside. … Once it existed, this shell was also a necessary and indispensable place to stay inside of, a defence for my survival’ (2009: 143). Similar observations have been made about nests.
According to Jules Michelet, the nineteenth century French historian and natural scientist, a bird is a worker without tools. It has ‘neither the hand of the squirrel, nor the teeth of the beaver.’ ‘In reality,’ Michelet writes, ‘a bird’s tool is its own body, that is, its breast, with which it presses and tightens its materials until they have become absolutely pliant, well-blended and adapted to the general plan’ (Michelet in Bachelard 1994: 100). But even though nests are precarious shelters, they do encourage day dreams of security. They remind us of home, and as nests are the hiding places of winged creatures, they can easily set us to dreaming of homecomings and movements towards safe shelter (Bachelard 1994: 94-103). As we noted in chapter two, Murakami’s library in Kafka on the Shore is a transitory space, and all of the characters have a nomadic quality about them; not for a moment are we given the impression that any of them are there in the library to stay. Murakami’s library does remain, nonetheless, a place in which it is possible to feel at home, and this inhabiting of word-homes within the library corresponds to an inhabiting of homes in the natural world. In Kafka on the Shore, movements toward the library are certainly imbued with a sense of homecoming. When Kafka Tamura needs somewhere that is safe and warm, for instance, the only place that comes to mind is the library (Murakami 2005: 76). The library is a physical home for Kafka, but it is also an intellectual one, and this intellectual library is like a nest or a shell composed of intimate dreams within which it is possible to live. Meditating on these habitable libraries of the mind, we are reminded of what Bachelard tells us books give us: They ‘give our day-dreams’, he writes, ‘countless dwelling places. Is there one among us’, he continues, ‘who has not spent romantic moments in the tower of a book he has read?’ (1994: 25)
One manmade dwelling place that embodies aspects of intellectual library space is the seventeenth century Khajou Bridge in the city of Isfahan in Iran. In utilising Bachelard’s phenomenological method of analysis, however, we will concern ourselves not with the bridge’s physicality, but with how it has been experienced by the active imagination of the poet, who in this case is Coleman Barks, the American poet and translator of the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. But before Barks shares his impressions of the Khajou Bridge, he prefaces his comments with the following words:
I sometimes fall in love with bridges. One lazy spring when I was staying in a house in Kanlica, across from Istanbul, it was the Sultan Mehmet Bridge, with its Bosphoric procession of boats. The Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, England. The lowly San Mateo Bridge across San Francisco Bay, and all those others across that body of water. The rickety old Walnut Street Bridge we drove over every morning going to elementary school in Chattanooga. I used to imagine places to live in lodged among the girders, or especially, not on that bridge but others, in the drawbridge lift operator’s room. (Barks 2007: 1)
This passage bridges its way toward childhood dreams of inhabiting, and inhabiting has been central to this discussion of library space thus far. One invented library in particular that seems to mirror the sentiment of Barks’ bridge-dwelling reverie appears in Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies. In Winterson’s re-imagining of the ancient library of Alexandria, the library is a vertiginous space in which climbing boys, whose job it is to ascend into the dizzy miles of shelves, are eventually racked at various levels around the library, so that they can form a human chain, and pass down any volume. Accordingly, Winterson writes, the boys built themselves eyries in among the books, and were to be seen squatting and scowling at greater and greater heights around the library. Soon, we are told, the boys had tunnelled behind the huge shelves and thrown up a rookery of strange apartments where beds were books and chairs were books and dinner was eaten off books and all the stuffings, linings, sealings, floorings, openings and closings, were books (Winterson 1995: 4-5).
In Winterson’s soaring reverie, the physical library becomes a many-chambered nest inhabited by vaporous Alexandrian slave-boys. Winterson’s library, however, is made somewhat grotesque by the fact that the library’s residents are slaves who are unable to benefit from the knowledge which surrounds them. Barks’ bridge inhabiting reverie provide a less pessimistic impression of the structures he imagines himself lodged in, but his reveries only reach their full potential when his dreams of inhabiting are applied, through metaphor, to poetry. He does this by using the Khajou Bridge as a metaphor for Rumi’s poems: ‘the stanzas of a Rumi ghazal (ode)’, he writes, ‘have the brio and living dynamic of the sluices and alcoves of the Khajou Bridge … they provide spaces where conversation can flourish, and [they provide] silence, the deep silence we remember near water.’ Barks then writes that he ‘was impressed by the depth of solitude in those who were sitting on the steps looking downstream’ (2007: 5), and further on he states that ‘the ghazals of Rumi and the Khajou Bridge are similar expressions of awareness’ (2007: 6). Barks is clearly pointing to the possibility of inhabiting the lines of poems. This oneiric correspondence is, however, not the only way that the Khajou Bridge could be said to resemble an inhabited intellectual structure.
Blake observed that it is in the brain of man that we live (2004: 288), and this sentiment is echoed in Arnold Zable’s description of the domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria: ‘The Dome and its ascending galleries’, Zable writes, ‘seemed like a giant brain vaulting towards the heavens’ (ed. Barnes 2003: 76). Barks uses a similar comparison to describe the Khajou Bridge, which is a bridge with both an upper and a lower level. The bridge’s upper level is lined with small arcades, in which, we are told, groups congregate for dinners, poetry recitations, philosophical discussions, etc., and its lower level, which sits a few feet above the water, is much more intimate and conducive to solitary reflection. ‘It is as intricate and as woven as a brain,’ Barks writes, before going on to describe the bridge as ‘a halved and opened labyrinth’. ‘The right brain’, he maintains, ‘is dominant here, with its artistic sensitivity and wisdom flow, but Khajou is also an image of balance, with its upper roadway, very practical and left-brain, and its lower level conductive to music and meditation, friendship and poetry’ (Barks 2007: 2–3). At any rate, it is certainly right brain, artistically sensitive thinking that is responsible for a legend about the construction of the bridge, which holds that the bricks used to build it were made of ‘limestone mixed with egg white, like a cake’, ‘Alchemically cooked’ (Barks 2007: 4), as it were. Barks admits to being unaware of why limestone and egg whites were used, but as limestone is a sedimentary rock born of the earth, and as egg white is close to the origin of dreams of flight, then perhaps it is not too much to say that the bridge, made as it is of dreams of earth and air, is not only a bridge from one bank to another, but also a bridge from the earth to the sky. We are thus reminded of Bachelard’s words in The Poetics of Space: ‘To mount and descend in the words themselves–this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together’ (1994: 147). By reading the bridge in this way it can be seen to represent the creative activity of poets and of those who read their work.
As well as having been invested with the oneiric power of the earth and the air in its materiality, the Khajou Bridge also offers us, as libraries do, an invitation to be silent, all the better to allow us to join the poets in their mad ascents and descents. In fact, there is something of an ode to silence in Barks’ description of the Khajou quarter and the Khajou Bridge. He describes the Khajou quarter, on the north bank of the river, as ‘a honeycomb of secret places, many of them out in the open, but perfectly suited for any transaction with beauty. … It is an encouragement for those sojourning through to rest a while and deepen’ (Barks 2007: 2). And on the edge of this quarter of secret places, the Khaju Bridge stands like ‘a human-made shoal that people are drawn to, to enjoy the seasonal motion, to sit quietly in time’ (Barks 2007: 6). The words Barks uses to describe a man-made structure speak eloquently of the experience of intimately inhabiting. A human-made shoal full of places to sit quietly in time and within which it is possible to rest a while and deepen certainly comes close to intellectual library space as we have conceived it thus far. In fact, the verbs ‘to deepen’ and ‘to descend’ are at the core of our intimate experience of this type of space. We have noted that Kafka Tamura’s journey is ‘a journey into the depths’, and it is the ‘depths of solitude’ into which people have allowed themselves to fall that impress Barks as he crosses the bridge. In fact, to Barks, the Khajou Bridge seems to stand as a symbol of a sound mind: a mind that, from time to time, needs ‘to rest a while and deepen’ (2007: 2). All of this deepening begs a consideration of what Merleau-Ponty has written about our experience of depth.
Merleau-Ponty argues that depth is the most existential of all dimensions because it announces an indissoluble link between things and self by which the self is placed in front of them, whereas breadth can, at first sight, pass for a relationship between things themselves, in which the perceiving subject is not implied’ (2007: 298). In this sense, depth is the only dimension in which the perceiving subject is indispensable and central, as there can be no depth without an embodied subject with the ability to project a gaze, and there can never be an embodied gaze without some sort of intention. ‘Depth is born beneath my gaze’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘because the latter tries to see something’ (2007: 306), and he describes this intention-loaded gaze as ‘a sort of knowledge machine’ which organises what we perceive and which is guided by a ‘perceptual genius underlying the thinking subject’ (2007: 307). This perceptual genius at work in our visual field, tending always towards the most determinant form (2007: 306) operates in the dimension of depth: ‘the dimension in which things or elements of things envelope each other’, as opposed to breadth and height in which they are juxtaposed (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 308). The dimension of depth brings the body’s genius back into our understanding of space by making the body the subject and origin of space, while forcing us to rediscover the primordial experience from which it springs (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 292-8).
But, in as much as there can be a double reality of the image, can there not also be a double reality of depth? We certainly sense, at any rate, that Bachelard and Barks would both attempt to steer us away from a purely external perception of depth and toward a perception of depth which reaches from the external through to the internal: to an inner depth in which ‘things or elements of things envelope each other’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 308); to an inner depth which, like its external counterpart, longs for synthesis, and which speaks of the genius within us that seeks meaningful shapes and forms, not only in space, but in the whole unruly mosaic of experienced sensations, descriptions, narratives and ideas; to a depth which remains a core of disorder seeking order. Reaching such a depth involves, we must assume, some kind of descent. Barks posits that the Khajou Bridge might be a kind of ‘descent’ (2007: 4). Alternately, a library might act as a site from which we descend. Indeed, at the end of Barks’ reflective contemplation of the Khajou Bridge, he unites the bridge and the library with a single image. After reminding us that Rumi ‘has long been felt to be a bridge, a place for cultures and religions especially to merge and enjoy each other’, Barks recalls that ‘During his [Rumi’s] ride with his family down the Silk Road ahead of the Mongol armies, from Balkh in central Asia to Iconium (Konya, Turkey), he accumulated a rich baggage of Taoist, Buddhist, and Zoastrian images, along with stories from India, to add to those from his Islamic texts. It is said’, Barks continues, ‘that ninety camels were needed just to carry Bahauddin’s (Rumi’s father’s) books. There is a caravan bridge to contemplate’ (2007: 7-8), he concludes. This caravan/bridge/library, with its rich baggage of literary images, comes close to being an ideal metaphor for a library of the mind. What it lacks, however, and what the reading experience can invest it with, is depth. To understand the space of the reading experience, a space which the physical library serves, we would certainly do well to try to see it through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological observations about the nature of depth.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, it is Franz Kafka who provides us with a reverie of depth and descent which, in its labyrinthine, round-cornered intimacy, succeeds in creating a sense of homecoming for us in our search for forms that can be employed as metaphors for intellectual library space. In his work entitled ‘The Burrow’ we find an incredibly detailed and sensitively rendered description of what it means to call a complex structure home. The narrator of ‘The Burrow’ is a small animal who, over the course of the narrative, describes the home that it has been building for much of its life. It is a home composed, we are told, of passageways along which, every hundred yards or so, little round cells have been hollowed out, and in the very centre of which lies a chief cell, which is referred to as the Castle Keep (Kafka 1993: 470). When the burrow was just beginning, the narrator of the story informs us, he was ‘nothing more than a humble apprentice’ and ‘the labyrinth was only sketched out in rough outline’, and ‘everything was so tentative that it could only be regarded as an experiment’, but by slow degrees the burrow expands, and when, towards the end of the animal’s life, the burrow is completed, it is described as a ‘great vulnerable edifice’ (Kafka 1993: 499). As is often the case with Kafka, however, early on we begin to assume that in writing about a burrow, he is referring to much more than a burrow, and, indeed, as his description proceeds, we begin to apprehend a structure that resembles a branching intellectual growth: an intellectual growth, furthermore, that is intimately experienced precisely because it is inhabited. In fact, Kafka’s burrow is, if nothing else, a masterfully rendered dream of inhabiting, and in its lines we find repeated many of the themes that we have encountered on our way towards a more complete understanding of intellectual library space.
Kafka’s narrator informs us, for instance, that although the small cells that line the passageways of his burrow are very nearly identical, he is, nonetheless, able to clearly distinguish one from the other with his eyes shut by the mere feel of the wall: ‘they enclose me’, he says, ‘more peacefully and warmly than a bird is enclosed in a nest’ (1993: 483). And in this warm, peaceful, nest-like burrow, a process of ordering and reordering is constantly underway. The stores kept in the burrow’s central chamber are endlessly divided, and only after precise calculations have been made and careful plans have been laid are these stores carried to other cells, and in this activity it is easy to make out a system of mass intellectual organisation: a system not without moments of intellectual crisis. Occasionally it dawns on the narrator that ‘the present distribution of his stores is completely and totally wrong, might lead to great dangers, and must be set right at once, and at these times everything is thrown into disarray … at other times, it seems best to keep all the stores in the Castle Keep (Kafka 1993: 472). This perpetual reorganisation certainly corresponds to the following passage from Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore:
Every one of us is losing something precious to us … Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library. (Murakami 2005: 501)
What better way is there of saying that we inhabit our thoughts, and that to understand and protect ourselves requires many and constant adjustments? Another aspect of the burrow that we have found in both the bridge and the library, and which Kafka draws our attention to, is its stillness and its silence. ‘But the most beautiful thing about my burrow’, Kafka’s narrator informs us ‘is the stillness (1993: 469), and he describes the entrance to the passageways, which lead off the Castle Keep, as ‘still and empty, [and] ready by their various routes to conduct me to all the other rooms, which are also still and empty’ (1993: 483). At the best of times the passageways are filled with a ‘silence which flows’, and we are informed that sometimes ‘it is as if the fountains from which flows the silence of the burrow were unsealed.’ This is a silence in which ‘all life is transfigured’ (Kafka 1993: 494). It is a silence which ‘can flood one with peace if one only remains quite open and receptive to it’ (Kafka 1993: 482). At one point, Kafka’s narrator states quite forcefully that he must have silence in his passage (1993: 486). Then, inevitably and importantly, we are confronted with the fact that the narrator of the story, the one-time apprentice who is now the master architect of the burrow, judges himself to be inextricably united with his abode, and Kafka provides several reasons as to why the subject of the story would feel this way, not least of which is the fact that so much physical and intellectual effort has gone into its construction. There are the passageways and smaller cells of the burrow which, we are told, ‘are the outcome of intense intellectual labor’, and then there is the central chamber which was ‘fashioned by the most arduous labor of the body, which involved hammering and pounding the loose and sandy soil into a firm state to serve as a wall for the beautifully vaulted chamber’ (Kafka 1993: 470). At one point, Kafka’s narrator states that ‘I and the burrow belong ‘indissolubly together’ (1993: 483), and a little later he states that ‘any wound to his burrow hurts him as if he himself were hit’ (1993: 499).
Kafka’s story is about an animal burrowing, but at a deeper level it is about a human burrowing an intellectual home of the mind. ‘To experience a structure’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is not to receive it into oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover its immanent significance’ (2007: 301), and, in this sense, Kafka’s animal could certainly be said to have experienced its burrow. So we can say that the burrow’s branching growth, in conjunction with the animal’s constant rearranging, and its constant and regular descents into the Castle Keep, which, it should be noted, lies at ‘unusual depth’ (Kafka 2007: 488), its need for stillness and silence, and the intellectual and physical labour that has gone into the burrow’s construction, and, furthermore, the presence of an intimacy within which the entity inhabiting and the space being inhabited are one: all of these things can be seen to represent the necessary aspects of an intellectual library in which descents into pure depth, where the origin of language lies, are made possible. And what are these descents if not, to use Derrida’s words, a ‘returning to the things themselves’ (2006: 194), what are they if not ways to open a ‘space of description’? (Derrida 2006: 196)
Our exploration of poetic images of intimately inhabited spaces that correspond to the experience of intimately inhabiting intellectual library space has taken us from an exploration of the shell, to an exploration of the nest and the bridge and finally the burrow – all structures that can help us conceive of a psychically authentic and intimately experienced intellectual library which can potentially serve as a shell/nest/bridge/burrow/library-home within which the embodied ‘I’ can reside. Such an intellectual home has ‘the curious property of being in relation with all other sites’ (Foucault 1998), and is, furthermore, able to bring earth and sky together. Without the descent of the reading and writing experience, however, such library homes lack ‘depth’: the kind of depth that Bachelard seemed to understand only too well: ‘in human daydreams everything remote intermingles’ (1994: 120) he writes. It is this ‘deep’ and ‘remote’ intermingling, this deep and remote becoming, this deep and remote genesis, if you like, that makes the expansion of the intellectual library possible. This deep and remote activity at the root of the reading and writing experience, within which words are found to describe, ‘the uniqueness of inner disturbance’ (Bachelard 1994: 220), is, most certainly, a true origin of language.
Agrippa once wrote that ‘imagination is a better interpreter of the world than reason’ (Bachelard 2004: 151), and perhaps Heidegger had such a sentiment in mind when he chose to fall back on the words of a poet in his attempts to articulate for his readers the nature of language’s remote source. The poem that performs this task for Heidegger describes a transcendental landscape, in which a goddess of words inhabits a twilight world. From a dark place without names the poet approaches with what he has found, and the goddess draws names from her well to bring these nameless things to life, because it is only with a name that the poet can truly own what he has found (Stefan George in Heidegger 1982: 60). Language, Heidegger writes, belongs within the domain of this mysterious landscape in which poetic saying borders on the fateful source of speech. This origin of language, this place of genesis, where, as Bachelard puts it, ‘the poet’s soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry’ (2004: 5), is a living space, a living depth, that finds corresponding spaces in the depths of the physical world: in the depths of oceans, in the depths of the earth, and in the less fathomable depths of space. There are also, however, manmade depths which attempt to mirror the living depths where language has its root. The interiors of Aztec temples as described by Bernal Diaz in 1519, for instance, seem to be, in a perverse way, reaching toward a kind of manmade depth: ‘all the walls of that shrine were so splashed and caked with blood [the blood of sacrificial victims, that is] that they [the walls] and the floor too were black’ (Diaz in Tannahill 1975: 87) Diaz writes. And this layered organic depth reminds us of the massive canvasses that Rothko produced in his final years, which have been described as rectangles that ‘pull us into a dark, choking, grave like space’ (Elkins 2001: 14). Perhaps we could even see, in the Hebrew myth of the Passover, in which the blood of a spring lamb was daubed on the doorposts of houses for protection, an unconscious attempt to invest physical abodes with a kind of interior living depth.
Such manmade constructions seem to invite us to share in an inner depth of mankind, either through real or associated violence or death. The means used to extend this invitation, however, must certainly strike us as misplaced, and, in the case of the Aztecs, perverse. But it is precisely this sense of living depth that we seek in our experience of library space. Only a poverty of authentic depth, however, would cause us to attempt to create this through physical means, that is, with physical violence and bloodletting with a view to making what is transcendentally internal physically external. What is called for, however, is the type of experience with language that Heidegger urges us to undergo by entering into language and submitting to it (1982: 57), and this type of experience flows from a genesis in ‘lived’ depth (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 300). ‘If it is true’, Heidegger writes, ‘that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language … then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence’ (1982: 57). Close reading of the work of William Blake would lead us to believe that Blake arrived at similar conclusions almost two centuries before Heidegger. According to the Blake scholar S. Foster Damon, ‘LOS is Poetry, the expression in this world of the Creative Imagination. He is the manifestation in time and space of Urthona, the deepest Zoa, who is the centre of each Individual’ (1965: 246).
It is difficult to speak with complete certainty when it comes to terms like ‘the innermost core of our being’, ‘the centre of each Individual’ and what has been described elsewhere as man’s ‘controlless core’ (Kernan in Bloom 1970: 345). What we can be certain of, however, is that for Blake the core of man is where man is most creative, and man is, as Bachelard has observed, an imagining being in whose reveries he alone is sovereign (2004: 80–81). The physical library presumes the existence of an intellectual library where this creative function in man is given free reign. This intellectual library, as has been shown, resembles habitable structures in the physical world. The physical library is therefore an in between space that allows for the storage and consumption of dead words: dead words that the human imagination must resurrect, because only when words have been revived by man’s deeply rooted imagination do they begin to breathe, and only when they breathe do they start to tell the truth.
References
Gaston Bachelard (1988). Air and dreams: an essay on the imagination of movement (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications)
Gaston Bachelard (2002). Earth and reveries of will: an essay on the imagination of matter (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture)
Gaston Bachelard (2004). The poetics of reverie: childhood, language, and the cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1994). The poetics of space, (Boston: Beacon Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1968). The psychoanalysis of fire (Boston: Beacon Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1983). Water and dreams: an essay on the imagination of matter (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation)
Coleman Barks trans.(2007). Rumi: bridge to the soul (New York: HarperOne)
Coleman Barks trans. (2002). The Soul of Rumi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco)
John Barnes (ed) (2003). The La Trobe journal, No. 72 spring (Melbourne: State Library of Victoria Foundation)
Nicholas Basbanes (2003). Patience & fortitude (New York: Perennial)
William Blake (1991). Poems and prophecies (New York: Everyman’s Library)
William Blake (2004). The complete poems (London: Penguin Books)
Harold Bloom (ed) (1970). Romanticism and consciousness: essays in criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company)
Italo Calvino (2009). Cosmicomics (London: Penguin Classics)
Samuel Damon (1965). A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of William Blake (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press)
Jacques Derrida (2006). Writing and Difference (London and New York: Routledge Classics)
Umberto Eco (1983). The name of the rose (London: Secker & Warburg)
James Elkins (2001). Pictures and tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings (New York: Routledge)
Michael Foucault (1998). ‘Of other spaces’ http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed: 5 October 2009).
Martin Heidegger (1982). On the way to language (New York: HarperSanFrancisco).
Franz Kafka (1993). Franz Kafka: collected stories (New York: Everyman’s Library).
John Keats (1970). The poems of John Keats (London: Longman).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007). Phenomenology of perception (London and New York: Routledge Classics).
Haruki Murakami (2005). Kafka on the shore (London: Harvill).
Marcel Proust (2009). Time regained
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html
(accessed: 20 February 2010).
Winfried Sebald (2002). Vertigo (London: Vintage).
Reay Tannahill (1975). Flesh & blood: a history of the cannibal complex (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Jeanette Winterson (1995). Art & lies (London: Vintage).








GASton bachelard et l'intuition de l'instant


Iuliana Pastin

Abstract: If the purely epistemological work of Gaston Bachelard was the
subject of several high quality studies, we may note, however, the absence of
studies related to Bachelard's philosophy of time. This article tries to give a
contribution to fill this gap.

Keywords: movement, space, intuition, time, instant, imaginary.



Abstract: If the purely epistemological work of Gaston Bachelard was the
subject of several high quality studies, we may note, however, the absence of
studies related to Bachelard's philosophy of time. This article tries to give a
contribution to fill this gap.

Keywords: movement, space, intuition, time, instant, imaginary.


Dans un livre récent, publié par Vincent Bontems1 Gaston Bachelard
(1884-1962), est présenté comme un philosophe originaire, non conformiste:
figure exemplaire de l’école laïque - boursier d’origine modeste, il finira par
occuper la chaire d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences de la Sorbonne - est un
penseur non conventionnel: s’appuyant sur des recherches de chimie et de
mathématiques en pleine révolution, mais aussi sur Freud et Jung (réinterprétés),
il a construit une épistémologie d’un rationalisme subtil qui a largement fait école,
comprenant le progrès de la science comme une suite de discontinuités; Il le
caractérise aussi comme étant un métaphysicien, qui s’est opposé à Bergson sur le
problème du temps, défendant une philosophie de l’instant contre sa
philosophie de la durée. II a aussi introduit une nouvelle approche de la
poésie, en donnant une importance inédite à l’Imaginaire et à  la rêverie. 
On pourrait examiner l’œuvre complexe de Bachelard son épistémologie,
depuis l’Essai sur la connaissance approchée jusqu’au Matérialisme rationnel en
passant par La Philosophie du non et Le nouvel esprit scientifique jusqu'à sa
”métaphysique”, concentrée dans L’Intuition de l’instant et La Dialectique de la
durée;
On arrivera ainsi à sa poétique, depuis La Psychanalyse du feu jusqu’à La
Poétique de la rêverie en passant par L’Eau et les rêves et La Poétique de l’espace.
Cependant l’espace restreint de cet article ne nous permet que quelques
considérations plus générales sur son œuvre L’intuition de l’Instant qui l’opposera
à la célèbre théorie de la durée de Bergson.

Influences de la philosophie de l’époque sur Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard, est un philosophe français qui a eu un grand renom
non seulement dans le domaine des sciences mais aussi dans celui de la poésie
et de l’imaginaire. Il est l'auteur de nombreuses réflexions concernant la
connaissance et la recherche scientifique. Sous l’influence de Jung il invente ce
qu'il appelle la «psychanalyse de la connaissance objective, étudie les obstacles
                                                 
 Senior Lecturer Ph.D, - „Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University, Bucharest.
1
 Vincent Bontems, Bachelard, Editions Les Belles lettres, Figures du savoir, Paris, 2010.
affectifs dans l'univers mental du scientifique et de l'étudiant, obstacles qui les
empêchent de progresser dans la connaissance des phénomènes. Dans la
Philosophie du non, il analyse des exemples tirés de la logique, de la physique
ou encore de la chimie. Dans cette œuvre, Gaston Bachelard livre une critique
sévère de l'inductivisme et de l'empirisme. Le fait scientifique est construit à la
lumière d'une problématique théorique. A partir de laquelle la science se construit
contre l'évidence, contre les illusions de la connaissance immédiate, des théories
de l’empirisme. C'est en ce sens que Bachelard parle d'une «philosophie du non».
L'accès à la connaissance comme l'histoire des sciences est donc marquée par une
«coupure épistémologique», qui opère une séparation avec la pensée
pré-scientifique. Produire des connaissances nouvelles, c'est donc franchir des
«obstacles épistémologiques» selon l'expression de Bachelard qui parle aussi de
rupture épistémologique.2
Pour Bachelard, toute connaissance est une connaissance approchée:
«Scientifiquement, on pense le vrai comme rectification historique d'une longue
erreur, on pense l'expérience comme rectification de l'illusion commune et
première».
En tant qu’épistémologue Bachelard renouvelle l'approche philosophique
et littéraire de l'imagination, s'intéressant à des poètes et écrivains tels que
Lautréamont, Edgar Poe, Novalis, au symbolisme ou encore à la
psychanalyse.
Le grand mérite de G. Bachelard est celui d’avoir eu le courage d’approcher
des domaines en apparence irréconciliables tels que la littérature et la
science, c'est-à-dire d’étudier les rapports entre l'imaginaire et la rationalité.
Ils peuvent être conflictuels ou complémentaires selon certains auteurs.
Concernant la psychanalyse du feu nous pouvons constater que chez Bachelard
une image ayant un intense pouvoir affectif provoquera des illusions pour le
scientifique car l'image du feu pourra empêcher la connaissance de l'électricité.
Mais cette même image produira en littérature des effets inattendus et surchargés
poétiquement: son pouvoir de fascination sera très important chez des poètes
romantiques tels que Novalis ou Hölderlin surtout pour l’image du feu. 
Dans son ouvrage essentiel: Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934), Gaston
Bachelard opère un dépassement du débat empirisme/rationalisme. Pour
Bachelard, le matérialisme rationnel se trouve au centre d'un spectre
épistémologique dont les deux extrémités sont constituées par l'idéalisme et
le matérialisme.
Cependant Bachelard considère qu'il faut dépasser l'opposition entre
empirisme et rationalisme: «Pas de rationalité à vide, pas d'empirisme
décousu». L'activité scientifique suppose la mise en œuvre d'un «rationalisme
appliqué» ou d'un «matérialisme rationnel.»
                                                
2
 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Bachelard. La rupture épistémologique
désigne, dans l’approche de la connaissance, le passage qui permet de connaître réellement en
rejetant certaines connaissances antérieures qu’il serait nécessaire de détruire pour que se révèle
la connaissance nouvelle. Dans cette perspective, l’obstacle épistémologique que peut constituer le
savoir du passé, bien que naturel, ainsi que le "sens commun", devraient être franchis afin qu'une
«vraie science» apparaisse.
La notion de temps chez Gaston Bachelard
Pour comprendre Bachelard nous devons commencer par nous poser
quelques questions: sur le temps de même que sur la «durée», sur «l’instant», ou
sur «le moment». Y a-t-il un fondement à la réalité? Pour Gaston Bachelard, la
vérité est avant tout une histoire, une perception du vrai, admise aujourd'hui, niée
demain; le monde est imaginé avant d'être vu et remémoré. Cet essai constitue
aussi une excellente introduction à une philosophie originale où le poème et
l’analyse scientifique ne s'excluent pas. L’intuition de l’instant est un
ouvrage suivi de l'Introduction à la poétique de Bachelard par Jean Lescure3
qui fait le commentaire suivant:

Qu'est-ce que le temps? Que faut-il entendre par «durée», «instant»,
«moment»? Y a-t-il un fondement à la réalité? Pour Gaston Bachelard, la
vérité est avant tout une histoire, une perception du vrai, admise
aujourd'hui, niée demain; le monde est imaginé avant d'être vu et
remémoré. Un essai limpide, qui est aussi une excellente introduction à une
philosophie originale où le poème et le théorème ne s'excluent pas. Un
hommage de la pensée à la pensée.

Dialectique de la durée métaphysique
Le titre du premier ouvrage de Bachelard l’Intuition de l’instant4 rend
compte d’une polémique affichée contre les thèses bergsoniennes telles qu’elles
sont exposées dans L’Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience5 ainsi que
dans Durée et simultanéité. Bergson estimait en effet que l’homme pouvait faire
«l’intuition de la durée», c’est-à dire l’expérience métaphysique d’un temps
subjectif, radicalement indivisible et impossible à mesurer, distinct par sa nature
du temps homogène et spatialisé des montres et des horloges. Cette analyse de la
durée s’accompagne d’une dépréciation du «temps homogène», quantitatif et
objectif dans lequel Bergson ne voit qu’une projection de la durée qualitative dans
l’espace, qu’une sorte de durée dégradée. Dans L'Intuition de l'instant
Gaston Bachelard considère que:

«La durée intime, c'est toujours la sagesse. Ce qui coordonne le monde, ce
ne sont pas les forces du passé, c'est l'harmonie tout en tension que le
monde va réaliser. On peut parler d'une harmonie préétablie dans les
choses, il n'y a d'action que par une harmonie préétablie dans la raison.
Toute la force du temps se condense dans l'instant novateur où la vue se
dessille, près de la fontaine de Siloë, sous le toucher d'un divin rédempteur
qui nous donne d'un même geste la joie et la raison, et le moyen d'être
éternel par la vérité et la bonté».
                                                
3
 Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’Instant, Introduction a la poétique de Bachelard, Editions
Stock, coll. Livre de poche, La quatrième de couverture, Paris, 1931, 1965, 1992.
4
 Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant, éd. Stock, Paris, 1932, 1992.
5
 cf. Bergson, L’Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, thèse de doctorat p.82
Ouvrage originalement publié en 1888. 144e édition. Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France,
1970, 182 pages.
C’est cette argumentation, fondée toute entière sur «l’intuition de la durée»,
que Bachelard entreprend non seulement de critiquer, mais de renverser cette
thèse.

D’après M. Bergson, nous avons une expérience intime et directe de la
durée. Cette durée est même une donnée immédiate de la conscience. Sans
doute elle peut être par la suite élaborée, objectivée, déformée. Les
physiciens, par exemple, tout à leurs abstractions, en font même un temps
uniforme et sans vie, sans terme ni discontinuité. Ils livrent alors le temps
entièrement déshumanisé aux mathématiciens. (G. Bachelard, l’Intuition
de l’Instant, p.17)

À partir d’une lecture du livre Siloë6 de son ami Gaston Roupnel, Bachelard
va mener une véritable critique de la durée pure. Il reproche d’abord à Bergson
d’avoir séparé le temps des hommes du temps des choses, faisant de la durée une
nouvelle différence anthropologique. Ce «temps des horloges», Bergson en parle
comme d’un temps inhumain littéralement impossible à habiter. L’instant, nous
dit Bachelard, n’a pas qu’une réalité objective: il a aussi une réalité subjective.
Renouant avec la théorie humienne de l’associationnisme7
7
 si injustement
critiquée par Bergson, Bachelard entend montrer que notre esprit, à
proprement parler, ne «dure» pas mais qu’il est tout entier investi
dans l’instant présent, dans l’instant objectif. Chose dont nous faisons tous
l’expérience élémentaire:

«Qu’on se rende donc compte que l’expérience immédiate du temps, ce n’est
pas l’expérience si fugace, si difficile, si savante, de la durée, mais bien
l’expérience nonchalante de l’instant, saisi toujours comme immobile. Tout
ce qui est simple, tout ce qui est fort en nous, tout ce qui est durable même,
est le don de l’instant».

A l’intuition si incertaine de la durée, Bachelard oppose l’intuition naturelle
de l’instant présent. Il n’y a guère que l’esprit du Métaphysicien, tout éloigné qu’il
est du réel, qui puisse vraiment se dire coupé du «temps des choses». Bachelard
reproche donc à Bergson d’avoir joué l’hypothèse invraisemblable de la durée
contre la réalité véritablement intuitive, la réalité présente et incontestable de
l’instant:
«Nous refusons, ajoute-t-il sur un ton décidément fort humien, cette
extrapolation métaphysique qui affirme un continu en soi, alors que nous
ne sommes toujours qu’en face du discontinu de notre expérience». (p.42)
                                                
6
 Gaston Roupnel, Siloë, éd. Stock, Paris, 1927.
7
7
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associationnisme: L'associationnisme (qui s'écrit parfois
aussi associationisme) est une thèse philosophique concernant l'esprit et la connaissance.
Fortement liée à l'empirisme, elle prétend expliquer par l'association des idées toutes les
opérations intellectuelles, tous les principes de la raison et même tout l'ensemble de la vie mentale.
David Hume comparait l'association des idées à la loi de l'attraction universelle découverte par
Newton.
En somme, et pour détourner une formule platonicienne célèbre, Bachelard
ne croit pas à cette «image immobile du temps mobile» qu’est la durée
bergsonienne. Le renversement s’opère dans ce cas sous la forme d’une
opposition: ce n’est pas le temps qui a été inventé à partir de la durée, mais la
durée à partir du temps, c’est-à-dire à partir de l’instant. Ainsi G. Bachelard se
demande sur la démarche incompréhensible pour lui du raisonnement
bergsonien: Pourquoi alors serions-nous arrêtés dans la division du temps? (p.
43). Et il continue en ajoutant d’autres arguments:

«Mais le problème changerait de sens si nous considérions la construction
réelle du temps à partir des instants, au lieu de sa division toujours factice
à partir de la durée. Nous verrions alors que le temps se multiplie sur le
schème des correspondances numériques, loin de se diviser sur le schème
du morcelage d’un continu».8

Car Bergson pense le temps objectif sur le mode du morcelage: une continuité
essentielle (la durée) est parasitée par une division objective (le temps). Pour
Bachelard, au contraire, c’est dans la discontinuité radicale que réside l’essence du
temps. Le temps ne se remarque que par ses instants car il n’est qu’instant. Et
voici le vieux problème augustinien résolu. Ainsi, dès le troisième chapitre de
l’Intuition de l’instant, la sentence est définitive: «La durée n’est qu’un nombre
dont l’unité est l’instant.» Elle est «poussière d’instants, mieux, un groupe de
points qu’un phénomène de perspective solidarise plus ou moins étroitement.»

La physique radicale du temps
Le moment critique de l’argumentation étant achevé, il s’agit maintenant
pour Bachelard d’établir une physique du temps, qui puisse se passer de la
représentation abstraite d’une durée non-physique. Pour ce faire, il s’appuie
sur la critique einsteinienne de la durée objective. La longueur de temps
que Bergson voulait homogène et mesurable se révèle essentiellement relative à la
méthode de mesure. C’est sur cette base que Bachelard récuse l’idée d’une
perception distincte du temps que l’on pourrait abstraire du mouvement et du
repos des choses. Le temps n’est pas une donnée métaphysique. Il n’est
jamais que «la quatrième dimension de l’espace». Un philosophe
contemporain ne saurait ignorer purement et simplement cet acquis incontestable
de la physique moderne. «La relativité du laps de temps [ou: durée] pour les
systèmes en mouvement est désormais une donnée scientifique [...] Par exemple
tout le monde s’accorde que l’expérience de dissolution d’un morceau de sucre
met en jeu la température? Eh bien, pour la science moderne elle met également
en jeu la relativité du temps». On peut lire dans la même perspective ces lignes
extraites de La dialectique de la durée:
«La science contemporaine dispose de la variable temps comme de la
variable espace; elle sait rendre le temps efficace ou inefficace à propos de
qualités distinguées. Peu à peu, quand la technique des fréquences sera
                                                 
8
 L’Intuition de l’instant, p.43
mieux connue, on arrivera à peupler le temps d’une manière discontinue
comme l’atomisme a peuplé l’espace».9

L’intuition de l’instant
Bachelard propose de saisir la réalité première et fondamentale de
l’instant objectif dans l’expérience intuitive. Il développe pour cela deux
exemples bien distincts: l’instant douloureux et l’instant d’attention. 
«Quand survient l’instant déchirant où un être cher ferme les yeux,
immédiatement on sent avec quelle nouveauté hostile l’instant suivant
assaille notre cœur».10

Le fardeau du Temps se fait insoutenable, «déchirant», proprement
discontinu. Mais si l’instant demeure une réalité indépassable en termes
quantitatifs car il ne saurait y avoir de «durée» mais seulement des
instants qui se succèdent et s’anéantissent cela ne veut dire qu’il n’y ait
aucune différence qualitative entre les différents instants qui composent une
journée car c’est seulement l’idée de durée qui égalise et efface l’instant vécu pour
en faire une réalité dégradée. L’intuition de l’instant vécu nous montre, tout au
contraire, combien des instants peuvent être différents, combien ils peuvent être
plus ou moins riches, plus ou moins denses, lourds ou légers, joyeux ou tristes11. 

Le phénomène de condensation instantanée
«Cueille l’instant», conception épicurienne antique aurait pu être le titre
de ce paragraphe tant la conception bachelardienne du temps rejoint celle des
épicuriens12. «Le temps infini contient un plaisir égal à celui du temps limité, si de
ce plaisir on mesure les limites par la raison», affirmait le philosophe. Alors la
question qui se pose serait: comment un temps fini pourrait-il contenir autant de
plaisir qu’un temps infini? Bachelard essaie de répondre à cette question dans les
dernières lignes de L’Intuition de l’instant:

  «Toute la force du temps se condense dans l’instant novateur où la vue se
dessille, près de la fontaine de Siloë, sous le toucher d’un divin rédempteur
                                                
9
 Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée, éd. P.U.F., coll. «Quadrige», Paris, 1963, p.60
10
 L’Intuition de l’instant, p.15
11
 L’Intuition de l’instant, p.16
12
 Littéralement, cette phrase signifie «Cueille le jour présent et sois le moins confiant possible
en l'avenir». Elle est tirée de vers latins du poète Horace, intéressé par l'épicurisme et le
stoïcisme (dans ses Odes, I, 11, 8 «À Leuconoé»). Elle résume le poème qui le précède et dans
lequel Horace cherche à persuader Leuconoé de profiter du moment présent et d'en tirer toutes les
joies, sans s'inquiéter ni du jour ni de l'heure de sa mort. Rendu célèbre auprès du grand public
depuis l'Antiquité, l'extrait Carpe diem fait l'objet d'une mauvaise interprétation: traduit par
«Profite du jour présent» (alors que les deux mots signifient «cueille le jour»), est compris comme
une incitation à l'hédonisme le plus fort, peut-être le plus aveugle, il perd tout rapport avec le texte
original, qui au contraire, incite à bien savourer le présent (sans toutefois récuser toute
discipline de vie) dans l'idée que le futur est incertain et que tout est appelé à
disparaître. C'est donc un hédonisme d'ascèse, une recherche de plaisir ordonnée, raisonnée, qui
doit éviter tout déplaisir et toute suprématie du plaisir. C'est un hédonisme a m inima: c'est un
épicurisme (Horace faisait partie de ces épicuriens de l'ère romaine).
qui nous donne d’un même geste la joie et la raison, et le moyen d’être
éternel par la vérité et la bonté».(p.95)

Il s’agit selon Bachelard de connaître «la joie et la raison» ainsi que de
devenir éternel. Le moyen d’être éternel n’est autre que la capacité à
faire que «la force du temps se condense». Vivre «plus» ce n’est pas
vivre plus longtemps mais c’est vivre mieux, connaître un supplément
d’être. 
De là l’inversion proposée par Bachelard dans son article «Instant poétique et
instant métaphysique»13: le temps doit parfois se faire «vertical» et non plus
simplement «horizontal». Voila pourquoi toute l’importance de l’instant vécu
consistera alors à donner à l’instantané les couleurs et le goût de l’éternité.
«Condenser» le temps c’est d’abord prêter au présent les résonances du passé, de
notre plus lointain passé. La condensation du temps est, tout simplement, une
«recherche de la base et du sommet». Au-delà du sens psychanalytique du terme
qui n’est pas sans intérêt, il faut comprendre le mot «condensation» dans le sens
qu’il prend en chimie; c’est-a dire de rendre solide, d’amener à l’être-solide un
élément aussi volatil que le temps. Il faut tout un art du progrès qualitatif de vivre.
Il y faut cette alchimie que l’on appelle sagesse. C’est donc bien la densité
singulière d’un instant, tout en nuances, tout en «différences», qu’à redécouvert
Bachelard. Ce qui fait, en somme, la valeur d’un instant n’est pas son
inscription éphémère dans une Durée majuscule mais c’est sa densité
qui lui permet de prendre corps et d’être vraiment cueilli à l’arbre de
la vie, et de cultiver ce carpe diem. De cette façon on pourrait considérer
qu’un instant vécu est toujours plus qu’un instant. En ce sens nous pouvons
rappeler l’affirmation de Proust qui s’éloignait à ce propos de la pensée
bergsonienne et qui s’exprimait d’une façon très originale et poétique a à la fois
dans Le temps retrouvé:

«Une heure n’est pas qu’une heure. C’est un vase rempli de parfums, de
sons, de projets et de climats.»

Ce que Bachelard semble dire c’est qu’il n’appartient qu’à nous de
faire d’un instant une telle condensation de réel. Ainsi, l’éthique
bachelardienne de l’instant vécu nous donne les moyens d’habiter le temps
poétiquement. Solidifié, condensé, l’instant restera non pas inscrit dans
l’être-mémoire bergsonien mais «exinscrit» à l’être-vivant, ou plutôt «co-inscrit à
l’être», comme une nuance musicale dans la marge de notre existence. Qu’est-ce
donc alors que se souvenir? C’est «partir à la recherche des instants perdus»14
nous dit Bachelard; car une durée ne peut en aucun cas faire l’objet d’une
réminiscence. Nous ne nous souvenons pas, à proprement parler, d’une semaine
ou d’un mois, mais toujours d’un instant précis dans sa densité plurielle et
inépuisable, éternelle.
                                                
13
 G. Bachelard, «Instant poétique et instant métaphysique» in Le droit de rêver, PUF,
collection "Quadrige", 2010. (Œuvre posthume).
14
 L’Intuition de l’instant, p.47.
Il faut la mémoire de beaucoup d’instants pour faire un souvenir complet.
[…] Le temps n’a qu’une réalité, celle de l’instant. Autrement dit, le temps
est une réalité resserrée sur l’instant et suspendue entre deux néants. Le
temps pourra sans doute renaître, mais il lui faudra d’abord mourir. Il ne
pourra pas transporter son être d’un instant sur un autre pour en faire une
durée. L’instant c’est déjà la solitude… C’est la solitude dans sa valeur
métaphysique la plus dépouillée. Mais une solitude d’un ordre plus
sentimental confirme isolement de l’instant: par une sorte de violence
créatrice, le temps limité à l’instant nous isole non seulement des autres
mais de nous-mêmes, puisqu’il rompt avec notre passé le plus cher. (p 13) 

La dialectique de l’éveil et du repos
Quatre années après la parution de l’Intuition de l’instant, Bachelard publie
un autre livre consacré à la notion de temps: La dialectique de la durée15. Il
entreprend d’y démontrer que l’essence de ce que nous appelons «durée» n’est pas
seulement discontinue mais, bien plus, dialectique. C’est-à-dire que,
contrairement à ce qu’avançait Bergson, la durée est nécessairement hétérogène:
elle comporte des moments négatifs que l’on pourrait appeler «intervalles». La
durée homogène n’est jamais, pour l’être vivant, qu’une abstraction. C’est
pourquoi Bachelard soutient qu’une «description temporelle du psychisme
comporte la nécessité de poser des lacunes». On pourrait, par analogie, décrire la
physique bachelardienne du temps comme une théorie atomiste. Lui même
n’hésite pas à s’en réclamer. En ce sens, une fois de plus, Bachelard est épicurien.
Contre Aristote, Épicure affirme que le temps est une succession de mouvements
et de repos: il confère au repos une réalité temporelle positive. L’aristotélisme de
Bergson n’étant plus à prouver, c’est sur le lien entre les deux «physiques du
temps» qu’il nous faut concentrer notre analyse.
        «Sans doute n’est-il pas indifférent, qu’Épicure mette le repos sur le même
plan que le mouvement et qu’il rapporte la perception du temps à des
couples contraires. Il n’est pas impossible qu’il veuille ainsi suggérer que le
temps se caractérise, non pas par une illusoire continuité du mouvement,
mais par l’alternance des phases événementielles, éventuellement
contraires, et par les ruptures qui marquent leur succession»16 

Nous sommes ici en présence d’une théorie dialectique de la durée telle
qu’elle est défendue par Bachelard dans les ouvrages qui nous intéressent. Comme
chez Épicure, la physique du temps a une fin pratique. La discontinuité temporelle
fonde une certaine tranquillité: elle possède une vertu prophylactique qui nous
libère tout simplement de la crainte de l’avenir et du poids du passé. Elle permet
l’«oubli», la vie intempestive, qui est, selon Nietzsche, la faculté première du
surhomme, ce danseur d’avenir.
La contribution de Bachelard aux principes de la physique épicurienne
concernent Les notions d’éveil et de repos. Il est remarquable en effet que,
                                                 
15
 La dialectique de la durée, p.128.
16
 Morel P.-M., Les ambiguïtés de la conception épicurienne du temps, Revue philosophique de
la France et de l’étranger 2002/2, Tome 127 - n° 2, p. 195-211.
dans La dialectique de la durée Bachelard fasse jouer ensemble le couple
mouvement/repos et le couple éveil/repos. Ce jeu peut nous éclairer sur la
nature de ces «lacunes» constitutives de ce qu’est le temps. Les lacunes (ou
discontinuités) sont bien des «repos», surtout au sens grammatical du terme qui
nous enseigne qu’un point, qu’une virgule, servent à reposer la voix. De même la
ponctuation réalise la dialectique d’une écriture, de même le repos (la sieste, la
détente, le farniente... etc.) réalise la dialectique de la durée. Le repos est tout
simplement nécessaire, au même titre que le mouvement, et ce bien qu’il soit la
force qui le nie, bien qu’il soit une «vaporisation d’être» plutôt qu’une
concentration. Et nous pensons que Bachelard ne veut pas dire autre chose
lorsqu’il annonce dans l’avant-propos de La dialectique de la durée sa conviction
que «le repos est inscrit au cœur de l’être, que nous devons le sentir au fond
même de notre être, intimement mêlé au devenir imparti à notre être intimement
mêlé au devenir imparti à notre être au niveau même de la réalité temporelle sur
laquelle s’appuient notre conscience et notre personne.»
La dialectique propre à la durée n’est donc pas une dialectique au sens strict
qui verrait s’opposer deux déterminations logiques absolues. Il s’agit d’une
dialectique de forces subtiles, d’une dialectique héraclitéenne. Cette dialectique
de la différence, Bachelard veut la penser comme un rythme: «Le rythme est
vraiment la seule manière de discipliner et de conserver les énergies les plus
diverses. Il est la base de la dynamique vitale et de la dynamique psychique. Le
rythme et non pas la mélodie trop complexe peut fournir les véritables
métaphores d’une philosophie de la durée». Les dernières pages de la Dialectique
de la durée pourraient assurer le lecteur qu’il y trouverait matière à penser et
à repenser le monde, la vie et l’esprit. Il nous suffirait alors de retenir l’aspect
polémique de cette nouvelle science du rythme, comme l’affirme David Macey17,
dans l’article Le «moment» Bergson-Bachelard18 en contredisant toutes
les affirmations qui veulent faire du temps une donnée métaphysique: 

        «La matière n’est pas étalée dans l’espace, indifférente au temps; elle ne
subsiste pas toute constante, tout inerte, dans une durée uniforme. [...] Elle
est, non seulement sensible aux rythmes; elle existe, dans toute la force du
terme, sur le plan du rythme, et le temps où elle développe certaines
manifestations délicates est un temps ondulant, temps qui n’a qu’une
manière d’être uniforme: la régularité de sa fréquence».

Toute l’éthique de l’instant vécu, dont nous n’avons essayé qu’une analyse
dans l’espace restreint d’un article, devra donc être une pratique personnelle du
rythme de l’éveil et du repos, une libre éthique nos rythmes intérieurs, un travail
exigeant de condensation et de dilatation, de tension, de détente, de concentration,
et de sublimation de l’être. Voila pourquoi, L’Intuition de l’instant reste encore un
livre à déchiffrer et à approfondir.

                                                
17
 David Macey, "Le «moment» Bergson-Bachelard", Acta Fabula, Essais critiques, URL:
http://www.fabula.org/revue/document5315.php
18
 La dialectique de la durée, p.130.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE SÉLECTIVE

1. Bachelard G., (1950), La Dialectique de la durée, Paris, PUF, (1936). 
2. Bachelard G., (1970), La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Paris, Vrin,
(1938). 
3. Bachelard G., (1970), Le Rationalisme appliqué, Paris, PUF, (1949). 
4. Bachelard G., (1973), L’intuition de l’instant. Etude sur la Siloë de Gaston
Roupnel, Paris, Gonthier, (1932), Recherches en Education - n° 4 octobre 2007 -
Michel Fabre 84.
5. Barthes G., (1970), Lautréamont, Paris, José Corti, (1939). 
6. Barthes R., (1973), Le plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil. 
7. Berger G., (1964), Phénoménologie du temps et prospective, Paris, PUF. 
8. Bergson H., (1965), Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,
Paris, PUF, (1889). 
9. Fabre M., (1989), L’enfant et les fables, Paris, PUF. 
10. Fabre M., (1995), Bachelard éducateur, Paris, PUF. 
11. Fabre M., (2001), Gaston Bachelard. La formation de l’homme moderne,
Paris, Hachette. 
12. Houde O., (1995), Rationalité, développement et inhibition, Paris, PUF. 
13. Husserl E., (1964), Leçons pour une phénoménologie de la conscience
intime du temps, Paris, Puf, (1905). 
14. Merleau-Ponty M., (1945), Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris,
Gallimard. 
15. Pineau G., (2000), Temporalités en Formation, Paris, Anthropos. 
16. Reboul O., (1980), Qu’est-ce qu’apprendre?, Paris, PUF. 
17. Roupnel G., (1927), Siloë, Paris, Stock.