Henry Somers-Hall speaks at the Royal Holloway Centre for Continental Philosophy research seminar on Friday 12 February 2021 at 2-3.30pm.
Sartre’s Hidden Bergsonism: The Logic of Multiplicities of Sartre’s Early Work
Henry Somers-Hall
The first session of the Royal Holloway Centre for Continental Philosophy research seminar will take place on Friday, February 12th from 2pm-3.30pm. Henry Somers-Hall will be presenting the first paper, which is entitled ‘Sartre’s Hidden Bergsonism: The Logic of Multiplicities of Sartre’s Early Work’. The seminar will be online (via MS Teams) – if you would like to attend, please email Henry Somers-Hall ([email protected]). Here’s an abstract for the paper:
Despite Sartre’s early enthusiasm for Bergson’s description of consciousness, and the frequent references to Bergson in Sartre’s early work, there has been virtually no analysis of the influence of Bergson’s thought on Sartre’s development. This paper addresses this deficit. The first part of the paper explores Sartre’s analysis of the function of the imagination in his two early works on the subject, The Imagination, and The Imaginary. I argue that many of Sartre’s central criticisms of what he calls ‘the illusion of immanence’ can be traced back to Bergson, and that, despite Sartre’s rejection of Bergson’s account of consciousness, Sartre’s account of the imagination is still heavily indebted to Bergson’s logic of multiplicities. The second part argues that Sartre’s analysis of the imagination leads, in Being and Nothingness, to an account of freedom that still bears traces of his early Bergsonism, showing how these themes connect to the alternative logic of multiplicities worked out by Deleuze and Guattari.
Find out more information about the Centre, as well as the other talks this term here (the website is still a work in progress).