Rhuthmos

Castoriadis critique de Heidegger

Claude Helbling & Olivier Fressard — 2026-04-30T05:00:00Z

Cela fait maintenant plusieurs années que je regrette de ne jamais avoir eu le temps de pénétrer plus profondément dans l'œuvre et la pensée de Cornelius Castoriadis, dont certains aspects rappellent fortement celles de ses contemporains de la « Constellation rythmique ». En guise d'ouverture de ce dossier, voici une présentation extrêmement claire des critiques portées par Castoriadis à la pensée de Heidegger et de tous ses suiveurs plus ou moins inspirés, en particulier en France, à quoi les auteurs ont ajouté un ensemble de textes choisis où Castoriadis rentre dans les détails. Il y a certainement là la base d'une analyse rythmologique de son œuvre, qui reste entièrement à faire. Avis aux amateurs. On trouvera ci-joint une bibliographie de et sur Castoriadis établie par Claude Helbling que je remercie au passage de me l'avoir transmise. – PM.

Ces textes ont été publiés dans la revue Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXVIII, n°2-3 (2023).

Version augmentée (en extraits) de l'article publié (sans les résumés ci-dessous), dans le livre collectif : Métapolitique contre culture. L'Heideggérisme en question, dir. François RASTIER, Édition Lambert-Lucas, juillet 2023.

Castoriadis critique de Heidegger

Résumé. — Cornelius Castoriadis reste surtout connu pour avoir fondé, avec Claude Lefort, le groupe Socialisme ou Barbarie ainsi que la revue du même nom. Dans les années 1950 et 1960, il y a développé, d'un point de vue révolutionnaire, une théorie générale des sociétés contemporaines en termes de bureaucratie et, en particulier, une critique radicale du régime stalinien issu de la Révolution russe. Mais, il a également élaboré, après la dissolution du groupe en 1967, une pensée philosophique originale. Entamée avec un bilan critique systématique du marxisme, elle a pris ensuite la forme d'une philosophie politique articulée à une ontologie du social-historique. Castoriadis a, au cours de son enquête philosophique, lu attentivement Heidegger. Malgré certaines similarités thématiques entre les deux pensées, qui tiennent à l'historisation de la raison et de l'ontologie, Castoriadis a vivement critiqué les principales idées de celui-ci. Il a, en particulier, récusé la thèse de la différence ontologique et mis en cause les interprétations heideggériennes de l'histoire de la philosophie, en particulier celles portant sur la Grèce ancienne. Critique radical des sociétés occidentales contemporaines, Castoriadis n'en a pas moins dénoncé le caractère très unilatéral de l'appréciation négative de la modernité par Heidegger. Enfin, à l'antisémitisme et au nazisme de celui-ci, puis aux conséquences quiétistes de sa pensée d'après-guerre, Castoriadis a opposé, opiniâtrement, une philosophie de l'action et un projet politique qui vise à promouvoir la capacité d'autonomie individuelle et collective.

Mots-clés. — social-historique, imaginaire radical, autonomie/hétéronomie, déterminité, création, critique de la modernité, différence ontologique, histoire de l'Être, oubli de l'Être

« C'est l'activité humaine qui a engendré l'exigence

d'une vérité brisant les murs des représentations

de la tribu chaque fois instituées »

C. Castoriadis, « La ‟fin de la philosophie” ? », 1990.

1. Castoriadis, penseur politique et philosophe

Cornelius Castoriadis est un intellectuel gréco-français né à Constantinople en 1922. Il mène de front des études de droit, d'économie et de philosophie à Athènes. Il s'engage en politique dès l'adolescence en rejoignant une organisation trotskyste. Dans la tourmente de la guerre civile grecque, il est la cible du parti communiste grec stalinien. Suite à l'obtention d'une bourse de l'Institut français d'Athènes, il vient à Paris à la fin 1945 pour y faire une thèse de philosophie. Il milite brièvement au PCI, branche française de la Quatrième internationale, puis fonde avec Claude Lefort, en 1949, le groupe Socialisme ou Barbarie. Dans la revue de même nom, il expose, sous divers pseudonymes, ses conceptions sociales et politiques. Parallèlement, il gagne sa vie comme économiste à l'OCDE. Après la dissolution de S. ou B. en 1967 et sa démission, en 1970, de l'OCDE, il s'installe comme psychanalyste. En 1979, il est élu directeur d'études à l'EHESS où il tiendra, jusqu'en 1995, un séminaire hebdomadaire de philosophie sous l'intitulé générique « Institution de la société et création historique ». Il décède à Paris en 1997.

La pensée de Castoriadis se présente, rétrospectivement, sous deux aspects principaux étroitement solidaires, l'un politique, l'autre philosophique. [...]

Bibliographie détaillée par Claude Helbling

Materials and Concepts of Fluidity : Toward a Critical Cultural Rheology

Marcel Finke & Kassandra Nakas — 2025-12-23T06:00:00Z

This text is the introduction of M. Finke & K. Nakas, Fluidity : Materials in Motion, Berlin, Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH, 2022, 320 p. It is freely available online here.

Fluidity is a common material phenomenon. We encounter it countless times every single day : for instance, when taking a shower, pouring milk into our cereal bowl, drinking a cup of tea, washing the dishes, watering plants, stepping into fog, refuelling the car, and so forth. Fluid phenomena may be familiar, but they are by no means trivial. Examples of the wide-ranging nature, significant consequences, and manifold intricacies of fluidity abound. As we were preparing this volume, the news was awash with innumerable instances of fluid issues that constitute and affect the world we inhabit : There are the melting glaciers, rising sea levels, changing atmospheric flows, and the slowdown of ocean circulation systems due to global warming. Moreover, we were experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, reminding us of the correlations between aerosols, the dissemination of diseases, and fossil-fuelled mobility on a planetary scale. Rivers burst their banks, flooding wns, leaving behind swathes of destruction, and claiming human and non-human lives. A container ship jammed the Suez Canal, interrupting supply chains and the global movement of materials and goods. Elsewhere, sewage polluted with fertilisers and the stagnation of water currents stimulated massive algae blooms and the production of marine mucilage, causing the extinction of sea life. Endocrine disruptors and antibiotics seeped into the environment, polluting groundwater and food products, eventually jeopardising the health of living beings. Waste disposal, broken pipelines, or exploding warehouses brought about the leakage and dispersion of toxic chemicals. The list could go on and on (cf. Chen et al. 2013 : 4–5). The study of fluidity, however, should not be limited to such cases of ecological disasters and hazardous material events ; and it is not only a subject of the natural sciences, either. There is way more to fluidity, since above all, it is about materials in motion – materials active and activated, mobile and mobilised, activating and mobilising. What this volume therefore suggests is a kind of critical cultural rheology that draws a bigger and more differentiated picture of the material complexities, ecological dimensions, political ramifications, and epistemic functions of fluidity.

The image we have chosen for the cover of our publication shows one of the most archaic and sublime representations of fluidity (Figure 1.1). It is a photograph of glowing lava as it flows from Kīlauea volcano on Big Island, Hawaii. In this case, fluidity is a powerful natural phenomenon relentlessly changing and forming the environment. These streams of molten rock might help to develop a more complex understanding of fluidity, particularly with regard to the mobility and mobilisation of materials. First of all, the lava draws attention to the fact that the differences between the fluid and the solid, between flow and stasis are only gradual. [...]

Revisiting rhythmanalysis : How rhythm operates in the work of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson

Jonas Rutgeerts — 2025-07-26T05:00:00Z

Sommaire

We thank Jonas Rutgeerts for the permission to reproduce on Rhuthmos this brilliant article published originally in Parrhesia n° 31, 2019, pp. 85-102.

Introduction

In recent years scholars from different fields have taken up the notion of rhythm to analyse different temporal and spatial phenomena. [1] Despite this turn towards rhythm, however, the term has remained enigmatic. We experience rhythm in everything, but we don't seem to be able to generate a clear understanding of how rhythm operates. As Jacques Derrida mentioned “rhythm has always haunted our tradition, without ever reaching the centre of its concerns.” [2] In this article I aim to explore the operational capacity of rhythm, by analysing the work of two philosophers who devoted a great deal of attention to the concept : Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson. Both agree that rhythm plays a crucial role in the constitution of singular temporal existence : for Bergson it emerges when the omnipresent force of duration expresses itself in and through a distinct phenomenon, for Bachelard, by contrast, rhythm should be considered as the temporal architecture that is constitutive for the durational existence of singular entities. Exploring both theories of rhythm will allow me to come to a better understanding of how rhythms operates and how it relates to our experience of time.

For most of the English-speaking world the concept of rhythm and the method of rhythmanalysis is inherently connected to the theoretical oeuvre of French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre. The translation of his book Rhythmanalysis : Space, Time and Everyday Life in 2012 seems to herald rhythm's appearance on the theoretical stage. [3] The rhythmanalytical project, however, does not begin with Lefebvre's book, but can be traced back to the work of Gaston Bachelard and, more specific, to his book La dialectique de la durée (1936). [4] In the last chapter of this book, which bears the title ‘Rhythmanalysis', Bachelard argues that one should never lose sight of the fact that “all exchanges take place through rhythms.” [5] Building on the work of Portuguese philosopher Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos, from whom Bachelard borrows the term rhythmanalysis, the philosopher here advocates for an active rhythmanalytical theory that never loses sight of the fact that rhythm constitutes “the basis of the dynamics of both life and the psyche” (Bachelard 1950, 128). [6]

Bachelard's conceptualization of rhythm fits in with a broader philosophy of time that the French philosopher was developing during his teaching period in Dijon between 1930 and 1940. This philosophical work resulted in two books, L'intuition de l'instant (1932) and La dialectic de la durée (1936), and two articles, “Instant Poétique et instant Métaphisique” (1931) and “La continuité et la multiplicité temporelles” (1937). [7] Bachelard framed this entire philosophy of time as a critique against Bergsonism and the Bergsonians, which he explicitly characterises as his “adversaries” (Bachelard 1950, 11). [8] Although Bachelard is sympathetic to Bergson's attempt to develop a theory of time that does not understand temporality as abstract clock time, he profoundly disagrees with the Bergsonian idea of duration. For Bachelard time should not be understood as a continuous flow, in which the past is prolonged into the present, but as fractured and constantly riven, the present constantly breaking away from its past. The conceptualization of rhythm fits in this argument against Bergsonian duration. By advancing rhythm as a “fundamental temporal notion” (Bachelard 1950, ix), Bachelard aims to replace Bergson's conceptualization of time as duration with a reading of time in which continuity is the result of a rhythmic interplay.

In recent years Bachelard's philosophy of time and the accompanying polemic with Bergson have received new attention in different books and edited volumes. [9] In spite of Bachelard's explicit critique, these works refuse to frame the discussion between Bergson and Bachelard in terms of a simple opposition. The idea behind this it that in his attempt to pick a fight with his contemporary, Bachelard not only failed to give an accurate account of the subtlety and complexity of the Bergsonian project, but also caricaturised his own philosophy. [10] Indeed, a close reading of both theoretical oeuvres shows more points of convergence than Bachelard seems willing to acknowledge. While I agree that it is important to look for the different affinities underlying the apparent difference between both philosophers, I would however also like to stress the fundamental difference between both philosophers. Although Bachelard takes up and re-reads a lot of concepts that were developed by Bergson, in the end his vision on time is radically different from that of Bergson. As Jean François Perraudin argues, this difference appears most clearly when we look at the “practical and therapeutic perspectives” of the theory, which indicates fundamentally different perspectives on how to relate to time. [11] By exploring how both philosophers develop the concept of rhythm in and through their oeuvre, I want to show the many micro-relations that emerge in-between Bergson's and Bachelard's analysis of time, while drawing attention to the profound differences in their attitude towards it.

Bergson and Bachelard : Continuity, discontinuity and rhythm

A reader of Bachelard does not even need to reach the first chapters of L'intuition de L'instant and La dialectique de la durée to realize the polemic character of both books. The titles already indicate Bachelard's aim to radically rethink key concepts of the Bergsonian philosophy. [12] In L'intuition de l'instant Bachelard connects intuition, described by Bergson as the “direct vision” via which we “experience the uninterrupted prolongation of the past in the present encroaching towards the future,” [13] to the discontinuous instant. In doing so he not only brings together two concepts that are opposed in Bergson's philosophical system, but also blurs the Bergsonian distinction between the intellect, which deals with the instantaneous, and philosophical/artistic intuition, which deals with duration. In a similar fashion La dialectique de la durée provokes the Bergsonian system, as it transforms duration, which Bergson describes as an immediate given of consciousness, into a dialectical movement. Duration is here no longer the ontological primary source of life, but rather the product of a discontinuous alternation of something and nothing. [14]

Bachelard's critique on the Bergsonian project is primarily directed against Bergson's concept of continuity. Bachelard wishes to develop a “discontinuous Bergsonism” (Bachelard 1950, 8), ironically stating that “of Bergsonism we accept everything but continuity” (Bachelard 1950, 7). However, in spite of Bachelard's attempts to break the Bergsonian continuity, the discussion between the two philosophers cannot be reduced to a rigid polemic between homogenous continuity, illustrated by Bergson, and absolute discontinuity, illustrated by Bachelard, for two main reasons. Firstly, Bachelard's theory cannot simply be reduced to a plea for discontinuity, rather one of Bachelard's main goals in both L'intuition de l'instant and La dialectique de la durée is to understand how duration works. While in the beginning of L'intuition de l'instant, he firmly states that “time presents itself as solitary instant”, [15] he later on wonders how this solitary instant can be related to “the becoming of being” (Bachelard 1932, 60), thus trying to understand the “continuity of the discontinuous” (Bachelard 1932, 68). [16] Secondly, Bachelard's characterisation – or caricaturisation – of Bergson's duration as homogeneous continuity, fails to appreciate the fact that Bergson himself continuously critiques the idea of one all-encompassing duration. Already in his first major book Bergson describes duration in terms of “qualitative multiplicity” and “absolute heterogeneity”, stating that a conceptualization of duration as something homogenous would make freedom incomprehensible. [17] In the books that follow Bergson consistently talks about “durations with different elasticity”, [18] or about a “continuity of durations”. [19]

Rather than understanding the distinction between continuity and discontinuity as the end point of the discussion, and choosing one or the other, this distinction can serve as the point of departure for a discussion. For both Bachelard and Bergson concrete duration can only be understood as the outcome of a relation between continuity and discontinuity, or between a “dynamic force” and a “force of resistance”. [20] To understand this relation, both Bergson and Bachelard seek recourse to the mechanisms of rhythm. [21] Connected to both flow and form, to free-flowing movement and the organization of movement according to a beat, rhythm is an apt tool to understand the interaction between the forces of continuity and those of discontinuity. Consequently, both philosophers use it to conceptualize the concrete temporal existence and to analyze the difference between singular temporalities. Advocating neither absolute discontinuity nor homogeneous continuity, both philosophers try to understand the different temporalities that we experience as a complex rhythmic interplay between break and flow. According to Bergson, there is “no unique rhythm of duration”, but a multiplicity of “different rhythms”, which are each marked by a specific degree of tension, or relaxation that “fixes their respective places in the series of being” (Bergson 1939, 232). For Bachelard, on the other hand, it is “impossible not to recognize the need to base complex life on “a plurality of durations that have neither the same rhythm nor the same solidity in heir sequence, nor the same power of continuity” (Bachelard, 1950, viii).

These similarities, however, cannot lead to a simple equation of both theories, or to an understanding of Bachelard's project as a mere rearticulation of Bergson. Both philosophers coin rhythm as a key concept, but they conceptualize rhythm radically different. To understand this, I will have to take a closer look at the conceptualization of rhythm in the work of Bergson and Bachelard.

Rhythm in Bergson : melodies and vibrations

Although Bachelard suggests otherwise, Bergson devotes a lot of attention to the idea of rhythm. It is a key concept in Matiere et mémoire (1896) and already plays an important role in his first major work Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). As is well known, the basic claim of Essai is that our inner experience of time is corrupted by space. Both common sense, science and philosophy have the tendency to reduce our inner experience of temporality to a sequence of now-moments, thus reducing time to a “homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are ranged alongside one another as in space, so as to form discrete multiplicity” (Bergson 1927, 67). However, “when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating, its present states form its former states” (Bergson 1927, 75). This leads to a completely different experience of time, not as the repetition of instants, but as duration. That is, as “nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalise themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number” (Bergson 1927, 77). To illustrate this experience of duration Bergson refers to the metaphor of melody, where the different notes interpenetrate each other to form one heterogeneous unity, an organic and dynamic whole “comparable to a living being” (Bergson 1927, 75). Similar to duration, we cannot understand a melody by breaking it down into discrete unit or notes. In order to understand it we should immerse ourselves into the movement of the music and let ourselves get carried away by its flow.

With the development of melody as one of the dominant metaphors for duration, rhythm also appears in Bergson's discourse. Bergson sees a close relation between rhythm and melody, as both phenomena relate to a durational understanding of time. Take for example Bergson's famous passage of the sounds of the bell :

The sounds of the bell certainly reach me one after the other ; but one of two alternatives must be true. Either I retain each of these successive sensations in order to combine it with the others and form a group which reminds me of an air or rhythm which I know : in that case I do not count the sounds, I limit myself to gathering, so to speak, the qualitative impression produced by the whole series. Or else I intend explicitly to count them, and then I shall have to separate them, and this separation must take place within some homogeneous medium in which the sounds, stripped of their qualities, and in a manner emptied, leave traces of their presence, which are absolutely alike. (Bergson 1927, 64-65 ; my emphasis)

In this passage, Bergson explicitly links rhythm to melody and, consequently, to duration. When we “limit” ourselves to the qualitative impression produced by the whole series, we experience it as rhythmic. Despite this link, however, rhythm should not simply be equated with melody, or with duration. As we will see, rhythm merely suggests or points to melodic duration, but does not coincide with it.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bergson does not make a distinction between rhythm and measure. In the first half of twentieth century, it was common to distinguish artificial measure or meter, which was found in the stomping repetitions of the new mechanic labour, from natural rhythms, connected to the organic pulsation of the heart or the waves of the sea. [22] In Essai, however, Bergson defines rhythm as an aesthetic tool, refusing to connect it to nature : “Nature, like art, proceeds by suggestion, but does not command the resources of rhythm” (Bergson 1927, 12). Moreover, contrary to what we might expect from a philosopher with a clear predilection for gracious organic movement, Bergson states that the aesthetic power of rhythm resides exactly in its repetitive and predictable character. The “regularity of the rhythm” takes “complete possession of our thought and will” and gives us the feeling that we participate in the movement of the work of art (Bergson 1927, 9-10). Referring to poetry, Bergson describes this quality as follows :

The poet is he with whom feelings develop into images, and the images themselves into words, which translate them while obeying the laws of rhythm. In seeing these images pass before our eyes we in our turn experience the feeling which was, so to speak their emotional equivalent : but we should never realize these images so strongly without the regular movement of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream thinks and sees with the poet. (Bergson 1927, p. 11 ; my emphasis) [23]

Through its regular movement rhythm makes us forget ourselves. In turn, this forgetting of the self allows us to immerse ourselves into the movement that is suggested by the phrase and to get carried away by its momentum. This can be connected to the previous example of the bell. It is no coincidence that Bergson uses an example that is markedly amelodic. [24] The monotone and staccato repetition of the strokes serves as the condition for a state of self-forgetfulness, which in turn allows for the experience of real duration. Rhythm thus functions as “instrument of suggestion”, or “vector of hypnosis” [25]. Its repetition, which in itself is quantitative, makes the listener forget her-/himself and lulls her in a state were she experiences the different strokes as one continuous melody. Rhythm, argues Bergson, functions as tool to evoke duration, it is “the quality of quantity” (Bergson 1927, p. 92)

In Matière et mémoire Bergson at the same time takes up this conceptualization of rhythm and changes it drastically. As in Essai, rhythm takes up an ambiguous position, being that in extensive reality that points to intensive duration. Contrary to Essai, however, this ‘pointing to' should no longer be understood in terms of suggestion, but in terms of expression. In Matière et mémoire rhythm is no longer reduced to an aesthetic tool. Rather, it becomes an ontological operation through which duration expresses itself in concrete entities. Bergson here trades the rigid bifurcation, where inextensive time and extensive space are radically separated categories, for a view in which time and space are extremes on a continuum, or opposite forces that are always co-present. As such, every real phenomenon is “something intermediate between divided extension [pure space] and pure inextension [or duration]” (Bergson 1939, 276). In this context, rhythm gets a new function. It no longer suggests pure duration, but expresses concrete duration. Rhythm is here conceived as the specific outcome of the concrete interplay between the forces of extension and inextension that takes place in each phenomenon and characterises it.

In Matière et mémoire, rhythm is the defining feature of the phenomena : not only does everything have its own rhythm, rather, each entity is its rhythm. To understand this, we need to take into account Bergson's understanding of durational movement as vibrational. As we have seen, duration is no longer a specific quality of our inner experience of time, but a force that permeates everything and makes everything move or “vibrate”. What appears stable and solid on the macro-level, “resolves itself into numberless vibration” on the micro-level (Bergson 1939, 234). In other words, everything consists out of vibration. What makes something singular is simply its rate of vibration, or rhythm. Elements that testify to a more powerful presence of the force of inextension, like the mind, have a higher more fluid rhythm. Elements in which the extensive forces are more present, like material objects, have a slower, more solid, rhythm. By introducing these differences in rhythm, or rate of vibration, Bergson not only explains the difference between elements, but he also reveals the reason why we experience stability. According to Bergson, the rhythm of our consciousness is so high that it fails to experience the slow rhythm of material things. To illustrate this Bergson refers to the perception of colours.

May we not conceive, for instance, that the irreducibility of two perceived colours is due mainly to the narrow duration into which are contracted the billions of vibrations, which they execute in one of our moments ? If we could stretch out this duration, that is to say, live at a slower rhythm, should we not, as the rhythm slowed down, see these colours pale and lengthen into successive impressions, still coloured, no doubt, but nearer and nearer to coincidence with pure vibrations ? In cases where the rhythm of the movement is slow enough to tally with the habits of our consciousness - as in the case of the deep notes of the musical scale, for instance - do we not feel that the quality perceived analyses itself into repeated and successive vibrations, bound together by an inner continuity ? (Bergson 1939, 127-128 ; my emphasis)

The fact that we perceive a colour as a stable quality can be explained by the difference in rhythm between vibrations of the colour and of our consciousness. Take for example the perception of red light. According to Bergson, our psychological perception of one second of red light corresponds with 400 billion physical vibrations of waves. Through our perception we habitually contract these vibrations of the “infinitely diluted existence” of the colour into a few moments of our “more intense life”, thus perceiving these waves as one stable quality.

Bergson thus paints a picture of a world were everything vibrates and where the difference between phenomena is reduced to a differences in rhythm. The only reason why we experience stability is because we impose our intense rhythm of duration onto the slower rhythms, thus condensing a dynamic sequence of vibrations into one stable image. In short, “to perceive means to immobilize” (Bergson 1939, 233). In itself, Bergson does not perceive this stabilizing process as problematic. Quite the contrary, in order to analyse our environment and to act upon it we need to create stability, which means that we have to impose our rhythm on the things that surrounds us. However, although this imposition is important for utilitarian ends, we simply need to immobilize the phenomena that surround us in order to survive, it is also a reduction of reality. By forcing the rich polyrhythmic reality to follow one dominant rhythm, we “turn our back upon true knowledge” (Bergson 1939, 222). If we really want to comprehend life, we need to reverse this movement. Rather than imposing our rhythm on the external reality we need to dissolve, or dilate, our rhythm and enter into the rhythms of the durational reality that surrounds us. Bergson defines this method as intuition. In opposition to intelligence, which follows the above-described procedure, intuition allows us to relax our own rhythm and to experience the other rhythms of durance. Here we are “thinking backwards”, so that we can “expand our scope of perception”. [26] According to Bergson this method is native to the artist and the philosopher. Contrary to the scientist who imposes his rhythm on the material, the philosopher/artist tries to penetrate into the inner rhythms of the material that she is dealing with. As such, she is able to express life in all its durational, or vibrational complexity. In Evolution Créatrice (1941) Bergson elaborates this idea, as he describes the higher effort of intuition as a way to coincide with matter “adopting the same rhythm and the same movement”. [27] This effort helps the philosopher/artist to go against “the natural inclination of intelligence”, and to grasp reality from within. [28] Or, as Le Roy states in Une philosophie nouvelle – Henri Bergson (1912) the “absolute revelation is only given to the man who passes into the object, flings himself upon the stream, and lives within its rhythm.” [29]

Bachelard and rhythm : habits and dialectics

Already in the first sentence of L'intuition de l'instant Bachelard clarifies the stakes of his book, as he argues that : Time has but one reality, the reality of the instant (Bachelard 1932, 13). [30] Throughout the book Bachelard comes back to the idea that time can only exist as solitary instant, thus depriving past and future from any ontological reality. This ontological preference for the instant, however, confronts Bachelard with the challenge to understand why we experience time as something that is continuously unfolding. How can we have the impression of duration, when time should, both ontologically and intuitively, be understood as “a reality grafted on the instant and suspended between two nothingnesses” (Bachelard 1932, 13). Bachelard's answer to this question is rhythm. According to Bachelard, the feeling of continuity between past, present and future is created by rhythms, which transform independent moments into “groupings of instants” or patterns (Bachelard 1932, 90). This continuity, however, is not grounded in reality. Past and future are merely dimensions of the present, which is the only reality of time. The past is thus reduced to the retention or echo of what was, and the future to the anticipation of, or intent towards what is about to come. Or, as Bachelard states, “the past is as empty as the future” and “the future is as dead as the past” (Bachelard 1932, 48).

Durational continuity is thus not a “direct force”, but the product of rhythms that establish themselves – and always have to re-establish themselves – in the present. Bachelard stresses that these rhythms are not predicated on a “pre-established harmony”, but that they are habitual : “past and future are essentially no more than habits” (Bachelard 1932, 51). The philosopher's conceptualization of habit, however, differs from our common sense understanding of the term. Traditionally we understand habits as patterns that we establish throughout repetition. We have the habit to say ‘sorry' when we bump into somebody in the streets, or to stop when the traffic light turns red. Habits are here understood as actions that we do. For Bachelard, however, habits are “fundamental” (Bachelard 1932, 70). We don't perform them, but they constitute us. Habitual rhythms construct durational continuity, thus creating a sense of self or an identity. [31] Or, more prosaically phrased :

Global identity is thus composed of more or less accurate repetitions [redites], more or less detailed reflections. The individual will no doubt make an effort to trace its today upon its yesterday, and this copy will be aided by the dynamic of rhythms. […] Life carries our image from mirror to mirror. (Bachelard 1932, 71 ; my emphasis)

Our individual existence and identity are nothing but a habitual rhythm that needs to be re-actualized in every moment : “We should neither speak of the unity of the self nor of the identity of the self beyond synthesis of the instant” (Bachelard 1932, 71). The individual self, in so far as it persists through time, is nothing but “the integral sum of rhythms”

In other words, we don't constitute habitual rhythms, but habitual rhythms constitute us. In condensing different instants into a continuous temporal pattern, they also tie together the individual identity and make that identity persist in and through time. This persistence, moreover, should not be understood as a simple repetition, but as a progression. This leads to a second fundamental difference between our common sense understanding of rhythm and Bachelard's conceptualization of the term. According to Bachelard habit should not be understood in terms of a status quo, something that does not develop through time, but as something that constantly renews itself and changes. Bachelard gives the example of playing the piano. If we want to develop our piano playing, we have to practice every day, incorporating new elements in our technique. A habitual rhythm is thus always a “synthesis of novelty and routine”(Bachelard 1932, 65). In order to be efficient, a habit has to learn. It has to deal with novelty or difference, and to adapt its rhythm in order to incorporate this new element. If it isn't able to do this, the rhythm will no longer be useful and, consequently, no longer be reiterated in the instant. In other words, “what persist is always what regenerates itself” (Bachelard 1932, 83). The past only stays when it is re-actualised in the present and it is only re-articulated in the present when it serves the progression of this present. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, Bachelard here talks about an “eternal reprise”, rather than an “eternal return” (Bachelard 1932, 81-82). [32]

In La dialectique de la durée Bachelard returns to the idea that durational continuity is “constructed with rhythms” rather than being based on pre-established “temporal base” (Bachelard 1950, ix). He picks up Bergson's metaphor of the melody to underscore this idea. According to Bachelard “[w]e must in fact learn the continuity of a melody” (Bachelard 1950, 114). Melodic continuity is thus never experienced instantly. Instead, it is “the recognition of a theme that makes us aware of the melodic continuity”. We have to learn the continuity of a melody. We have to repeat and memorise its theme, before we can experience it as a durational continuity. In line with what we said before, this learning, however, cannot simply be equated with active learning, rather it resembles the way in which our perception is always conditioned by the patterns that we – consciously or unconsciously – inhabit. We don't have to study each individual tune in order to like it, but for us to acknowledge it as a melody, it has to be part of our habit In other words, if we would have been born in a different time or place, we would not recognize its melodic continuity. In other words, melodic durations are always established belatedly (après coup) when we have trained the ear too recognize certain pattern.

In La dialectique de la durée Bachelard not only takes up his earlier conceptualization of rhythm, he also develops it. In this book Bachelard relates rhythm to the idea of dialectics. Rhythm is no longer simply sequential, connecting different moments into a continuous refrain, but develops itself dialectically. [33] This dialectics operate in a double fashion. Firstly, dialectics refers to a “fundamental heterogeneity that lies at the very heart of lived, active, creative duration” (Bachelard 1950, 8). According to Bachelard, duration is constituted by the dual operation of two states : creation and destruction, work and repose, affirmation and negation. This duality is crucial if we want to understand the possibility of change or the introduction of newness in time. For something to appear as new it should always break away from what came before. As such, every change is preceded by a moment of negation. Rather than being a concatenation of instants, rhythm thus appears as the alternation of – or interaction between – two opposite possibilities : “either in this instant nothing is happening, or else in the instant, something is happening. [34] Secondly, dialectics also refers to the fact that every rhythm is dialectally conditioned by other rhythms. Rhythms are always “relative”. They interrupt, build on, take their cues from or syncopate one another. Rhythms are thus always “overlaid and interdependendant” (Bachelard 1950, 123). They constantly interlock and superimpose so as to create a larger harmony of time.

This multiplicity, or density, also explains why we experience time as continuous and things as stable through time. Continuity cannot be found on the level of the individual rhythms, which are always the result of a dialectics between something and nothing, but is experienced at the higher level, where the different discontinuous rhythms are superimposed, and the different states have neutralized each other. Bachelard here refers to another musical metaphor : the orchestra. According to Bachelard the durational continuity of the music is not experienced at the level of the individual musicians, as these musicians are not continuously playing. Rather, it is experienced at the level of the orchestra, where the different instruments, which each play their own discontinuous line, come together to perform an overall harmony. In sum, the overall continuity of time is not connected to “one fundamental rhythm to which all the instruments refer”, but rather to the summation of the different rhythms of the different instruments that “support each other and carry each other along” (Bachelard 1950, 123). There is not one fundamental rhythm to which the instruments obey, but rather different independent rhythms that have to be brought together to form a continuous harmony. [35] Time should thus not be understood as a single thread, but as a tapestry, in which different threads are woven together to form a rich temporal texture.

Conclusion : Bachelard and the creation of new rhythmic textures

Despite the fact that Bachelard throws down the gauntlet to Bergson, there are still clear resemblances between the conceptualization of rhythm in both philosophical systems. Both Bachelard and Bergson coin rhythm as a crucial instrument to understand concrete duration. Rhythm is the pacemaker of our temporal existence. As such, rhythm is not only constitutive for the self, as it creates the temporality in which this self can live and persist through time, but also it is the tool via which we impose our time on the world that surround us and make it our home. In Bergson's case this happens because through our perception, we impose the fast rhythm of our thinking onto the slow rhythm of material things, thus immobilizing them and making it possible for us to use them. In the case of Bachelard it is through our habits that we create a sustainable habitus for ourselves and find our place in the symphony of life.

Nevertheless, both philosophers have a fundamentally different vision on how we should relate to these rhythms. For Bergson, rhythm is an expression of the durational force that permeates everything and gives everything a specific (im)pulse. Consequently, rhythm is not only a tool via which we impose our will on our surrounding world, but also a way to connect to gain ‘true knowledge' about that world, experiencing it “from within” (Bergson 1939 72). When we disengage ourselves from the particular rhythm of our consciousness and tune into the rhythms of duration we will manage to come into contact with the primary forces of life that are lurking underneath the superficial temporality of everyday life. For Bachelard, on the other hand, rhythms should not be understood as the expression of duration, but as that what produces duration. As such, the rhythms of becoming do not express anything natural or immediate. Quite the contrary, rhythms are always constructed. They are habits that, although primary to and constitutive for the individual self, fail to express any deeper truth about that self or the reality it relates to. For this reason, Bachelard is not interested in the search for the originary or primal rhythms of duration, but in the creation of radically new rhythmic constellations. Bachelard is fascinated by the moments of abrupt irruptions, when old rhythms are negated and new temporal structures are created : “Flat horizontality suddenly vanishes. Time no longer flows. It spouts [jaillit].” (Bachelard 1932, 106)

Bachelard finds this attempt to construct new rhythmic constellations in two figures that he holds in the highest esteem : the scientist and the poet. [36] The scientist is the one who says no to tradition, as he abandons the values and interests that guide our practical life. She “must first destroy in order to make room for her constructions” (Bachelard 1950, 14). As Bachelard states in Rationalisme Applique (1966), her method – the “antithesis of the habit” – imposes a “chronotechnique” that “expels lived duration”, thus producing a “suspended time” in which new “significant events” or new rhythmic constellations can emerge. [37] Similarly, the poet has the task to shatter the “simple continuity of shackled time” in order to make new temporalities arise (Bachelard 1932, 58). “Being a poet means multiplying the temporal dialectic and refusing the easy continuity of sensation and deduction” (Bachelard 1950, 124). Contrary to Bergson, for whom poetry should create a regular meter that lulls the listener/reader into a state self-forgetfulness, Bachelard's argues that “the rhythmics of poetry gradually breaks away from ideas of measurement and is arithmetised by grouping together notable instants rather than by measuring uniform durations” (Bergson 1950, 124). Here the reader/listener does not regain contact with the original rhythms of durance, but is confronted with the possibilities of new rhythms, new temporalities that emerge out of the poetic experimentation. [38] As Bachelard mentions in Poetics of Space, the poem here gives us a “veritable cure of rhythmanalysis” : “to charm or to disturb – always to awaken – the sleeping being lost in its automatisms.” [39]

Contrary to Bergson, Bachelard is not interested in the actual time in which we live, but in the possible times that we can think of, or imagine. Rhythms should not be traced back to their temporal origins. Rather, they should be broken up and deconstructed so that new significant rhythms can emerge. Or, as Bachelard argues in the article Surrationalism, which was published in the same year as Dialectique de la durée, we should advocate a new model of thinking : “To turn the rationalism from the past towards the future, from recollection towards the tentative, from the elementary towards the complex, from the logic towards the surlogic these are the indispensible tasks of a spiritual revolution.” [40] It is within this context that we can best understand Bachelard's rhythmanalytical project : not so much as an analytical method, than as a pedagogical project. [41] Understanding how life operates rhythmically will allow us to “regain mastery of the dialectics of duration” and to create new temporal structures (Bachelard 1950, 154). Consequently, the ongoing task of rhythmanalysis is to “look anywhere and everywhere in order to discover new opportunities for creating rhythms” (Bachelard 1950, 148).

[1] See a.o. Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education : Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society. London & New York : Routledge, 2017 ; Tim Edensor, Geographies of Rhythm : Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. London & New York : Routledge, 2010 ; Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare : Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge & London : The MIT Press, 2010 ; Julian Henrique, Milla Tiainen and Väliaho Pasi, “Rhythm Returns : Movement and Cultural Theory.” Body&Society, no. 20 (2014) : 3-29.

[2] Jacques Derrida, “Introduction.” Typography : Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Christopher Fynsk, Jacques Derrida. London : Harvard Univeristy Press, 1989, p. 33

[3] See : Paola Crespi, “Rhythmanalysis in Gymnastics and Dance : Rudolf Bode and Rudolf Laban.” Body & Society, no. 20 (2014) : 30-50.

[4] Lefebvre explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to Bachelard when he traced the emergence of the rhythmanalytical project. Remarkably, he refers to Psychoanalysis of fire (1938) rather than to Dialectique de la Durée, published two years earlier, in which the idea of rhythmanalysis is developed in a more profound and extensive way (see : Henri Lefebvre, Éléments de rythmanalyse. Paris : Éditions Syllepse, 1992, 9).

[5] Gaston Bachelard, La Dialectique de la duree. Paris : Presses Universitaire de France, 1950, 137. We will continue to refer to this book within the text as (Bachelard 1950)

[6] The Portuguese professor in literature and psychology Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos allegedly coined the term rhythmanalysis in 1931, when he wrote La Rythmanalyse. However, up until today the theoretical relevance of this work remains unclear, as the book was never published and the original manuscript is lost. The only in-depth reference to the text can be found in Gaston Bachelard Dialectics of Duration. Moreover, as Bachelard neither intends “to give an over-all view of these nor to describe all the many lines of development”, it is virtually impossible to make claims about dos Santos's own theory.

[7] Bachelard's work on temporality took up a special position in his thinking. As is well known, Bachelard advocates a separation between scientific rationality (the diurnal, the animus) and poetic reverie (the nocturnal, the anima). This plea resulted in an oeuvre that is divided between works on epistemology and science, on the one hand, and works on aesthetics and poetical imagination, on the other hand. His writings on time, however, do not adhere to this strict division. They are neither epistemological, nor aesthetical, but venture into ontological domains. Drawing on both scientific findings (relativity theory, set theory, quantum physics) and aesthetic sources (literature, poetry, musical theory) Bachelard here tries to grasp the reality of time. As Gaspare Polizzi argues, however, this “absence of a dichotomy between rationality and reverie” should not be understood as a limitation, but as a “node of potential problems for the future expression of Bachelard's thinking” (See : Caspare Polizzi, “Rythme et Durée : la philosophy du temps chez Bergson et Bachelard.” In Bachealrd & Bergson : Continuité et discontinuité, by Frédéric Worms and Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, 53-72. Paris : Presses Universitaire de France, p. 71)

[8] Bachelard has a habit of developing his philosophy in and through a polemical debate with other philosopher. In Formation of the Scientific Mind (1967) he even advocates to replace Kant's “architectonic reason” with a “polemical reason” (10). A few years earlier Bachelard fostered a comparable polemic with philosopher and chemist Émile Meyerson in La valeur inductive de la relativité (1929). Using a similar rhetorical strategy as in his books on Bergson, Bachelard's here inverts the title of Meyerson's book La Déduction relativiste, which was published 1925 (cf. infra).

[9] See a.o. Eileen Rizo-Patron, Adventures in Phenomenology : Gaston Bachelard. New York : Suny, 2017 ; Frédéric Worms and Jaen-Jacques Wunenburger. Bachelard et Bergson : continuité et discontinuité. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2008 ; Roch C. Smith, Gaston Bachelard : Philosopher of Science and Imagniation. Albany : Suny Press, 2016.

[10] This misrepresentation of the Bergsonian framework should not be understood as negligence, but as a rhetorical tool that Bachelard uses to make his own theory more clear. Several passages suggest that Bachelard has read Bergson carefully. As Gouhier mentions, rather than a lack of understanding, “Bachelard needs to alter Bergson in order to be Bachelard” (Herni Gouhier, “Discussion.” In Bachelard : Colloque de Cerisy (1970). Paris : Hermann Éditeurs, 1974, 359)

[11] Jean François Perraudin, “A non-Bergsonian Bachelard.” Continental Philosophy Review, no. 41 (2008) : 465.

[12] Cristina Chimisso, “Introduction.” In Dialectics of Duration, by Gaston Bachelard, Manchester : Clinamen Press, 2000, 1.

[13] Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant : Essais et conférences. Paris : Libraire Félix Alcan, 1934, 35.

[14] However, these titles also how Bachelard was not simply rejecting the Bergsonian project but rather rethinks it. As Frédéric Worms points out, Dialectique de la Durée and L'intuition de L'instant establish a relation with the Bergsonian project based on a chiasm rather then on a simple opposition. This entails that Bachelard preserves the “principle stakes” : “there is still intuition, there is still duration, one does not get rid of the categories, nor of the questions” (Frédéric Worms, “La rupture de Bachelard avec Bergson comme point d'unité de la philosophie du xxe siècle en France .” In Bachelard et Bergson : Continuité et discontinuité ?, by Frédéric Worms and Jean-Jacques Wunenburger. Paris : Cairn, 2008, 40).

[15] Bachelard Gaston, L'intuition de L'instant :. Paris : Livre de Poche, 1932, 13. We will continue to refer to this book within the text as (Bachelard 1932)

[16] Similarly, La dialectique de la durée argues for the need to understand “being” in terms of “becoming” (Bachelard 1950, 16).

[17] Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 1927, 127. We will continue to refer to this book within the text as (Bergson 1927).

[18] Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit. Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1939, 232-233. We will continue to refer to this book within the text as (Bergson 1939)

[19] Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant, 237.

[20] Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, “Force et résistance, le rythm de la vie.” In Bachelards & Bergson : continuité et discontinuité ?, by Frédéric Worms and Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, 27-37. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2008, 29.

[21] This conceptualization of rhythm as central concept does not come out of thin air. Quite the contrary, around the turn of the twentieth century rhythm was “one of European's most fetishized keywords” (Lubkoll, Christine. “Rhythmus : Zum Komplex von Lebensphilosophie und ästhetischerModerne.” In Das Imaginäre des Fin de siècle : Ein Symposium for Gerhard Neumann, by christine Lubkoll (ed.), Freiburg : Rombach, 2002). It occupied a central position in the in the theoretical writings of philosophers, natural scientists, psychologist and social theorist and was often framed as a mechanism that underscores all movement (see also : Golston, Micheal. “'im anfang war der rhythmus' : rhythmic incubation in discourses of mind body and race from 1850-1944.” Standfort Humanities Review, 5, 1996)

[22] Michael Cowan, Technology' pulse : Essays on Rhythm in Gemran Modernism. London : Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, 2012.

[23] In Le Rire (1910) we can find a similar passage, when Bergson states that the power of rhythm and assonance in poetry is to “rocks [bercer] our imagination, taking it back from the same to the same in a regular swing, and thus gently preparing it to receive the suggested vision (Herni Bergson, Le Rire : Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris : Felix Alcan, 1910, 62-63).

[24] Christophe Corbier shows how most of the images that Bergson uses to illustrate the intuition of duration are distinctly amelodic : the strokes of the bell, the oscillation of a pendulum, the blows of the hammer ( Christophe Corbier, “Bachelard, Bergson, Emmanuel : Mélodie, rythme et durée.” Archives de Philosophie 75, no. 2 (2012) : 296).

[25] Corbier, “Bachelard, Bergson, Emmanuel”, 298.

[26] Francis C. T. Moore, Bergson : Thinking Backwards. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996, 95-96.

[27] Bergson, Évolution Créatrice, 357.

[28] Bergson, Évolution Créatrice, 29-30.

[29] Edouard Le Roy, “Une Philosophie nouvelle - Henri Bergson.” Périodique : Revue des Deux Mondes 7, no. 6 (1912) : 571.

[30] Bachelard ascribes this statement to Gaston Roupnel. Throughout the whole book Bachelard will come back to the “Roupnelian theory”. We can see that Bachelard here adopts a similar rhetorical strategy as in the last chapter of Dialectique de la durée. Again Bachelard claims to explain and defend the theory of somebody who, although this time it is a published author, most of his readers will not know, thus creating an interesting confusion between first- and second-hand knowledge.

[31] Bachelard was neither the only nor the first philosopher to give the concept of habit an important place in his thinking and to see it as a creative act. Quite the contrary, by conceiving habit as something that is crucial for both the internal organisation of the living being and its relation with the environment Bachelard seems to inscribe himself into a discourse that emerged in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century that was advanced by philosophers like Albert Lemoine, Félix Ravaisson and – as we have seen – Bergson. Contrary to early modernist philosopher like Emmanuel Kant and Rene Descartes, who understood habit as an obstacle for freedom because it reduces human action to the order of the mechanical, these philosophers tried to give a more positive account of habit, understanding it as a creative act that is able to establish stability in an ever changing world (Elisabeth Grosz, “Habit Today : Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body & Society 2/3 (2013) : 217-239 ; Mark Sinclair, “Habit and time in the nineteenth-century French philosophy : Albert Lemoine between Bergson adn Ravaisson.” British Jounral for the History of Philosophy 1, no. 26 (2018) : 131-153). Gilles Deleuze is one of the more recent authors to have build on this line of thinking. In Difference and Repetition he connects habit to the passive synthesis of the present, arguing that habit is constitutive for our experience of the living present (Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répetition. Paris : Presses Universitaite de France, 1968).

[32] Bachelard continues to connect the idea of constant renewal with the idea of progression. Habits are not only dynamic, constantly changing as they synthesize the memory of the old and the emergence of the new, but they are also progressive. Throughout its repetition, rhythms are gradually becoming more rational, more righteous and more beautiful. (Bachelard 1932, 94-95). Although, the rhythmic patterns that emerge are in themselves completely accidental, only the patterns that propel us into a better future will be preserved. All the other habitual patterns will eventually disappear. In other words, progression is not driven by a force that pushes it in a certain direction, but by a project that pulls us : “What compels us to preserve in being is then not so much a set of forces as it is a set of reasons” (Bachelard 1932, 74).

[33] Although Bachelard refers only a few times to science in Dialectic, we can see a close relation between Bachelard's philosophy of time and his philosophy of science when he talks about the dialectics of time. For Bachelard the dialectical method is inherently to the scientific approach to knowledge production, where new scientific experiments always comes aims to negate, or falsify existing theories in order to come to new knowledge (see : Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophy du non : Essai d'une philosophy du nouvel esprit scientific. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 1966.).

[34] Bachelard here again enters into a polemical debate with Bergson. In Creative evolution Bergson argues that negation does not really exist, as it is simply “an affirmation of the second degree” (Bergson, Évolution Créatrice, 288). Negation simply indicates the operation where “I add ‘not' to an affirmation” (Bergson, Évolution Créatrice, 289). This ‘not' should not be understood in terms of absence or emptiness, but in terms of difference. Stating ‘X is not there', is actually the same as saying ‘something different that X is there'. For Bachelard, by contrast, negation is not an affirmation of the second degree, but rather an essential part of the dialectical movement of time.

[35] For this reason we should make a distinction between rhythm and measure. Measure does not express the fundamental rhythm of the piece. It divides the whole piece into standard units of time, marked by the bar, but these units are simply pragmatic and secondary tools that enable the weaving of different rhythmic patterns into a complex harmony. Metronomes can indicate the measure, but they can never really describe the “fabric of time” (Bachelard 1950, 118). They are nothing but “crude instruments”, “the magnifying glasses with which weavers count the threads [compte-fils] and not the looms themselves” (Bachelard 1950, 117).

[36] Perraudin argues that Bachelard sees the figure of the artist and the as “heroic types” as they animate the history of human progress. “These heroes benefit other individuals through their own dynamisms” (Parraudin, A non-Bergsonian Bachelard, 471).

[37] Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalimse Appliqué. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 1966, 26.

[38] As an example of this type of poetry, Bachelard refers to the surrealists. With their clear preference for poems that do not follow a pre-defined metrical pattern and their associative rhythmic strategies.(See : Bachelard 1950, 125-126)

[39] Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l'espace. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1957, p. 17

[40] Gaston Bachelard, L'engagement rationaliste. Préface de Georges Canguilhem. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 1972, 7.

[41] Chimisso, “Introduction”, 10.

Nietzsche & la rythmique grecque

Carlotta Santini — 2025-07-19T05:00:00Z

C. Santini, « Nietzsche & la rythmique grecque. Une approche philologique & anthropologique », Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, n° 40, 2016, pp. 113-142.

Résumé : Dans les leçons sur la rythmique ancienne de F. Nietzsche, le rythme est objet d'une étude philologique, lié à l'expérience de la parole et du texte, mais aussi et surtout d'une étude anthropologique, parce que son action sera repérée dans les moments originaires de l'organisation religieuse, sociale et civile de l'homme. Le lien entre ces deux approches s'éclaircit quand on comprend que le discours sur le rythme est d'abord un discours sur la forme (en un sens aristotélicien) et sur la norme (la normativité), ou bien sur la convention et sur son rapport avec la nature. Le rythme est une forme qui a une capacité normative, capable d'informer la matière, conçue aussi bien comme poésie et musique ou comme âme, caractère et habitus de l'homme.

Dans le panorama actuel de la recherche, la question du rythme est devenue un des thèmes centraux de la Nietzsche Forschung, et cela non seulement aux yeux des spécialistes du rapport de Nietzsche avec le monde grec, mais aussi chez les chercheurs qui en étudient les répercussions dans les ouvrages de la maturité du philosophe allemand. Au cours des dernières années, la redécouverte des leçons sur la rythmique ancienne de Nietzsche a suscité un débat assez vivace à l'intérieur de la Nietzsche Forschung1. L'intérêt de Nietzsche pour le rythme constitue une constante qui accompagne, quoique souvent d'une manière implicite, la réflexion du philosophe2. Or, pour mesurer la présence et les effets du discours sur le rythme dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, il est indispensable de prendre conscience des différents plans autour desquels cette réflexion s'articule. Il faudra donc distinguer au moins deux modalités d'approche de la question : d'une part l'étude philologique du rythme, d'autre part l'analyse de sa valeur anthropologique. Il faudra commencer par cette dernière. [...]

Philosophy and Sonic Research : Thinking with Sounds, Rhythms, and Music. An Editorial Introduction

Vít Pokorný & Martin Nitsche — 2025-07-14T05:00:00Z

This text has already been published by De Gruyter Publishing under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License on December 10, 2021.

Together with Bernd Herzogenrath, we can define the sonic thinking that we are trying to partially map with this issue as follows : “a thinking with and by means of sound, not a thinking about sound, which eventually does not deal with the question what music is, but rather what music can become. And from this vantage point, research and art, theory and practice, are coextensive.” [1] Thanks to all the participating authors, we managed to collect texts that do not only try to define sound, sonority, or music, but texts which are inspired by music and sound, which seek for philosophy's allies outside strict scholarly boundaries of philosophy – in art, in everyday experience, in technologies, and in nonhuman aspects of reality.

Therefore, we do not understand sound, sonority, and music only as objects of research. Encounters with this area of reality may also take a form other than theoretical. The Greek theory, of which we are still bearers and users, is connected with looking, with distance, with observation, grasping, measuring, determining. It is associated with the ocularcentrism of Western culture, with its emphasis on visuality, which implies a supervising, technocratic, and power-oriented attitude to the world. Thinking along with sound, through sonority, through or perhaps from within music and sound is associated with a different approach. With an attitude that favors listening, which is receptive and not controlling, for which meeting its subject has the nature of interaction and permeation, which does not understand sound as an object, but as an aspect of the environment in which we are immersed, which passes through us and thus shapes the very conditions of our presence in the world. The studies included in this issue therefore approach sonority in terms of various forms of sound and music practice – hearing and listening practice, everyday experience, music and sound practice, and only then, guided by sound experience and its structure, formulate theoretical statements about the nature of sound and methodological claims concerning the sonic thinking.

Martin Nitsche in his text attempts to situate sonic thinking within a phenomenological methodology. Here, based on a careful critical reading of Husserl's texts, he presents his topological–phenomenological interpretation of sonic environments. Nitsche shows that sounds are not some secondary qualities, that they are not appended to the things that produce them, nor are they just subjective experiences. According to him, the analysis of sonority opens up an access to a different understanding of the perceived environment than the one traditionally based on visuality. A sonic environment cannot be interpreted only objectivistically as composed of sound objects and events, nor only subjectivistically as a system of experiences. Instead, it should be conceived as a dynamic network of multisensory relationships developing in space, which is both a system of places and a system of localizations, i.e., movements, neighborhoods, and transformations. In this way, a sonic environment actually forms a medium within which sound events can appear.

Jiří Zelenka, Nitsche's doctoral student, analyzes the subjective pole of the auditory perceptual field, focusing on the difference between hearing and listening activities and asking whether it can be understood on the basis of the contrast between activity and passivity of phenomenological synthesis. If we understand hearing and listening not as subjective acts of consciousness but as a reversible dynamic relationship between the listening passivity of our exposure to the world and the listening activity of our intentional concentration, we have access to sonority as a dynamic field that is established in the intertwining of perceptual activities.

In his text, Ivan Gutierrez then thematizes the layer of sound environments that is connected with the auditory cultural practices and sound technologies. He does not understand technology naively as a system of things and procedures, but as a system of social relations that include subjects and objects, institutions, and events. Here, Gutierrez critically links post phenomenological accents with the actor–network theory (ANT) and existential hermeneutic interpretations. In today's societies, human sonic environments are fundamentally shaped technologically. From the point of view of media theory, it is true that specific communication medium creates specific forms of socio-cultural relations. The key to the creation of modern sonic environments was the invention of sound recording, which enabled the separation of sound and, together with other cultural practices, led to the creation of privatized media fields that are constantly connected to communication networks but in fact separate from others and from physical environments.

Vít Pokorný examines the lived environment in general from the perspective of rhythmanalysis. He connects rhythmanalysis with phenomenological analysis of rhythm and with deleuzo-guattarian processual thinking. On specific analyzes of the rhythmicity of the organism, the garden, and the city, he shows various modalities of the rhythmic formation of the living world, which go beyond the mere sonicity toward the more general principles of the structure of the environment. He does not understand rhythm as a linear sequence of beats, but as a general organizational principle. He understands rhythmically formed environments in accordance with Lefebvre's original rhythmic analysis as polyrhythmic bundles, i.e., as multilayered complexes of intertwined and interacting human and inhuman, natural and cultural rhythmical arrangements.

Following these phenomenological and post-phenomenological explorations, this topical issue contains another group of texts that are based on various types of experimental sound or music practices and that seek to explain various aspects of sound linked to these practices.

Lona Gaikis is amazed by the works of media artist Iona Moser called arboreal receptors and by the thinking of the Wood Wide Web team, which aims to “develop new technology enabling humans to increase their contact with nature by physically connecting people with trees and plants via the Mycorrhizal network or by sensors located directly on the( tree(/plants.” [2] In her philosophical interpretation, which is based primarily on the work of Susan Langer, and in general on Whiteheadian processual philosophy, she shows that in terms of today's experimental artistic approaches combined with an ecological perspective, the understanding of sonority cannot be based solely on human perception. Sound is for her a passageway for the synthesis of the self with the outside world. She therefore understands sound as something that transcends mere hearing and that takes the form of an imperceptible undercurrent. Trees do not respond to audio signals but can perceive undersonic vibrations. Such eco-phenomenological perspective reveals non-anthropomorphic patterns present in the constitution of our lived environments.

Vincenzo Zingaro reflects a different kind of music, resp. sound practice and, as for Gaikis, sonority means for him an area that transcends music and human perception and leads us to understand sound as an autonomous factor. The starting point of his thinking about the nature of sound is the emergence of a digital sampler and the emergence of sound design. Thanks to these technologies, sound has freed itself from its physical form, from hearing and haptics, and has become an infinitely transformable data event that can be manipulated using even visual technologies. From the perspective of digital sound design, the sound is then converted to its very basic form, which is a sinusoidal wave common to every sound event. Zingaro then connects this basic view with Leibniz's contemplations about the nature of the monad and arrives at the notion of a sound monad, i.e., at an understanding of sound as a substance and the nucleus of both active and passive forces.

Edwin Østergaard, a composer and theorist, bases his research of sonority and sonic thinking on his own composing experience and, from this perspective, reflects on the relationship between listening and music. He convincingly shows that composing cannot be understood as purely intellectual creation, which is governed only by the will and intention of the composer. The composer's intentional creative activity is conditioned by the ability to listen to a musical work that is not yet finished : in its arrival it is no longer just a passive notation, but an active element to which the composer must tune. This knowledge is then the basis for a more general analogy, which concerns the human creative experience in general meaning that as humans we are not sole creators of meaning, because then only our voice would sound everywhere and the rest of the world would be silent. Real creation is a dialogue based on the relationship between the ability to hear and the ability to express.

The team of authors – Damián Keller, Luzilei Aliel, Marcos Célio Filho, and Leandro Costalonga – approach the thinking of the nature of music from the perspective of so-called Ubiquitous music. Ubiquitous music is a new area of sound research that combines ubiquitous computing, mobile and network music, eco-composition, and cooperative composition. The research presented in this article is a direct response to the changes that the Covid situation means for music creation and shared experience. The authors point to a conception of musicality that is limited neither by the idea of a written musical structure, nor by only traditional human musical activity. They do not see music as the ability to manipulate sound material in any way as something exclusively human, nor as something that only musicians do. Rather, they understand music as situated sonic information that can traverse a shared environment and can be based on a distributed and dispersed agency. Such a conception of musical practice can then be a model for a new understanding of shared culture and social interaction.

Another text based on the reception of own experimental practice is authored by Luca Soudant. She reflects on her artistic research and asks how sound design relates to the constitution of gender roles. She thinks of sound as a social and spatial event in relation to how sound can inhabit and territorialize the shared living space. In this context, she understands sonic manspreading as an activity where the sounds produced by males and male groups colonize the common space where women are symbolically and physically encouraged to be quiet. According to Soudant, the sonority of our corporeality and the sonority of the things we cope with are interconnected in the processuality of inter-corporeality and inter-sonority. In her experimental work, she shows that sounds are not only situated in perception, but that they pass through bodies and materials and connect the human with the inhuman. This mutual sound-based intertwining of all organic and inorganic bodies then opens the way to sonic thinking as a transformative event that allows us to approach newly the formation of our own identity.

Louisa Collenberg also addresses the problem of the relationship between human and inhuman sonority, that is directly themed by Soudant and Gaikis, in her interpretation of D. Rothenberg's musical experiments, which take place on the borders of the human and animal realms. Rothenberg's musical improvisations cannot be understood as representations of animal sounds in music, nor as musical compositions inspired by animal sounds, but rather as the direct foundation of a musical/sound conversation between humans and non-human organisms. This approach calls into question not only the outdated boundaries between nature and culture, but specifically also the difference between an artistic creation and a natural sound expression. In fact, Rothenberg practically decentralizes the anthropocentric model of music, art, and culture with his improvisations and opens up space for a reassessment of the human place in the world.

Most of the texts published in this topical issue, in various ways, consider sonority and musicality as a counterweight to the preference of sight. Hannah Eßler and Jim Kallenberg speak in this context of “visualist ocularcentrism,” “supremacy of the eye,” “hegemony of vision,” or “visual regime.” Thinking through sound or music is then understood by the proponents of sound thinking as a way how to avoid this preference for distance and human, resp. male supervisors and replace it with another type of relationship to reality that is more receptive, more immersive, and that allows for a new approach in terms of new materialism, post-phenomenology, post-feminism, or critical theory. However, Eßler and Kallenberg point out that the enthusiasm of sonic thinking has a certain blind spot, which is the experience of the deaf. From the perspective of deafness, it is quite possible to speak of audio-centrism, a world that is intended primarily for the hearing. However, if we take the experience of the deaf seriously, not just as a shortcoming or disease, we get to the limits of sonic thinking. Eßler and Kallenberg examine these boundaries through the interpretation of the mythical meeting of Odysseus with the Sirens and call it sirenic thinking. This complex concept, in which sirens act both as a machine, as a myth, and as something human and inhuman, serves them to critique sonic thinking, which believes that by emphasizing sonority we can free ourselves from the visual metaphysics of the present, but which in reality confirms it.

In the final paper of the topical issue, Salomé Voegelin finds a possible way out of this stalemate in her project of singing philosophy. Her text undoubtedly represents the most radical and the most challenging, in terms of traditional philosophy, approach to sonic thinking in this issue. In it, Voegelin systematically encourages us not to think about music or sound, but to let sonority enter directly into the nature of philosophizing. Singing philosophy is supposed to break free from the hegemony of vision, which is based on comprehensibility and meaning, on the ability to measure and abstract. Instead, singing thinking should open up to the chaotic formation of a world that emerges only on the fringes of countable, normalized, and manageable. It should open up to a spontaneity in which there is no training, no standard, no predictability. Singing philosophy thus does not want to replace vision with hearing, instead it “[P]roduces the sonic time of music that creates a simultaneous space without bars or a meter. It invites us into a dark motility to dance not on the surface but within ‘unconventional dimensions,' which we inhabit in sounding and listening and through which we can deviate from historical traditions and decolonialise philosophy's view, not by proposing another, but by seeing everything at once : traveling by Churten into a transiliential reality, whose margins never end.”[S. Voegelin, “Singing philosophy”, p. 289]

Acknowledgements

The editors of the topical issue would like to thank the managing editor of Open Philosophy, Katarzyna Tempczyk, for her insightful and helpful approach to shaping the issue, to the editor-in-chief, Graham Harman, for his encouraging comments, to all anonymous reviewers for the thorough and critical reading of all manuscripts we received, and, last but not least, to our English language editor, Kyle L. Barbour, for his careful and precise work with our difficult texts.

References

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed). Sonic Thinking : A Media Philosophical Approach. London, New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 10.5040/9781501327193

Voegelin, Salomé. “Singing Philosophy : Deviating Voices and Rhythms without a Time Signature.” Open Philosophy 4 (2021), 284–91. 10.1515/opphil-2020-0186.

[1] B. Herzogenrath, Sonic Thinking, 2017, pp. 9-10.

[2] https://woodwideweb.no/

Le rythme de croissance. Qualité temporelle de l'existence et expérience esthétique chez John Dewey

Stéphane Bastien — 2025-01-04T15:00:00Z

S. Bastien, « Le rythme de croissance. Qualité temporelle de l'existence et expérience esthétique chez John Dewey » in C. Thérien & S. Foisy (éd.), Temporalités esthétiques et artistiques, Rennes, Presses univ. de Rennes, 2019, pp. 27-48.

Devenirs et individuations. L'hommage de Whitehead à Bergson

Didier Debaise — 2024-12-12T16:43:05Z

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la revue Noesis — Quine, Whitehead et leurs contemporains, n° 13, 2008, pp. 269-282. Nous remercions Didier Debaise de nous avoir autorisé de le reproduire ici.

L'inscription spéculative de la durée

Devenirs et rythmes

L'émergence de la continuité : devenirs et durées

Conclusion : les deux formes de l'empirisme

Cet article a pour principal objet de tenter de donner sens à l'hommage qu'a rendu Whitehead à Bergson dans sa préface à Procès et réalité : « je suis aussi largement redevable à l'égard de Bergson, de William James et de John Dewey » [1]. Nombreux sont les lecteurs, particulièrement en France [2], qui ont pris cet hommage pour l'attestation d'une continuité. Cette impression se justifiait d'autant plus que, dans Le Concept de nature, Whitehead avait déjà rendu un hommage similaire à Bergson :

Je crois être en cette doctrine en plein accord avec Bergson, bien qu'il utilise le mot temps pour le fait fondamental que j'appelle passage de la nature [3].

Tout semblait donc indiquer un mouvement similaire, une orientation commune de pensée qui, si elle s'était bien exprimée à partir d'autres concepts, n'en relevait pas moins d'une même intuition. De L'Évolution créatrice à Procès et réalité il y aurait cette vision, exprimée par Bergson, selon laquelle « nous comprenons, nous sentons que la réalité est une croissance perpétuelle, une création qui se poursuit sans fin » [4]. Certes, les mots diffèreraient : là où Bergson parlerait de durée, d'élan vital et d'événement, Whitehead parlerait, dans Procès et réalité, de préférence de devenir, de créativité et d'entité actuelle. Mais en deçà des mots, il y aurait une trajectoire commune.

Cette lecture, qui semble de prime abord cohérente et qui a l'avantage de faire valoir une double continuité — de Bergson à Whitehead et du Concept de nature à Procès et réalité [5] — ne peut se faire qu'au prix des trajectoires respectives sur lesquelles Bergson et Whitehead se sont engagées. L'hommage de Whitehead ne désigne, comme nous voudrions le montrer ici, nullement une continuité, mais au contraire la mise en évidence d'une bifurcation. Elle a comme point initial l'idée qu'il faudrait substituer aux différentes formes de substantialisme qui ont déterminé l'histoire de la métaphysique une pensée qui serait adéquate à « cette croissance perpétuelle » dont parle Bergson et qui formerait l'élément central d'une nouvelle philosophie de la nature. Cette nécessité leur est commune, mais la manière par laquelle ils ont tenté de lui donner sens a déterminé deux lignes divergentes dont la différence s'est cristallisée autour de la place et de la fonction du concept de durée. [...]

[1] A. N. Whitehead, Procès et réalité. Essai de cosmologie, Paris, Gallimard, 1995, p. 39.

[2] J. Wahl est sans doute celui qui s'est engagé avec le plus de cohérence dans cette lecture bergsonienne de Whitehead, notamment dans son livre fondamental Vers le concret, Paris, Vrin, 1932. On en retrouve l'héritage chez G. Deleuze, notamment dans Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris, Minuit, 1988. Deleuze y décrit la philosophie de Whitehead comme une pensée de l'événement dont il énonce les trois composantes : 1. Un événement a une extension, c'est-à-dire qu'il « s'étend sur les suivants, de telle manière qu'il est un tout, et les suivants, ses parties » (p. 105) ; 2. Un événement est composé de séries extensives qui « ont des propriétés intrinsèques (par exemple, hauteur, intensité, timbre d'un son, ou teinte, valeur, saturation de la couleur), qui entrent pour leur compte dans de nouvelles séries infinies […] » (idem) ; 3. Un événement est un individu. Si « nous appelons élément ce qui a des parties et est une partie, mais aussi ce qui a des propriétés intrinsèques, nous disons que l'individu est une “concrescence” d'éléments » (idem). Deleuze, suivant l'interprétation de J. Wahl, attribue aux événements les qualités des entités actuelles et réciproquement. La possibilité de les confondre repose, selon nous, sur le fait que la pensée de l'événement de Whitehead n'a pas été assez distinguée des autres philosophies de l'événement, et notamment de celle de Bergson.

[3] A. N. Whitehead, Le Concept de nature, Paris, Vrin, 1998, p. 73.

[4] H. Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice, Paris, P.U.F., 2003, p. 240.

[5] Dans le Concept de nature, il est exact que Whitehead utilise un langage très proche de celui de Bergson : événements, passages et durées. La nature y est décrite comme une réalité continue dont nous faisons l'expérience par des « tronçons », des découpages qui sont les événements. Ainsi, Whitehead écrit-il : « la continuité de la nature est la continuité des événements » (A. N. Whitehead, Le Concept de nature, op. cit., p. 90). Mais à partir de Procès et réalité les notions de nature et d'événement perdent leur caractère ultime au profit de la créativité et des entités actuelles. À cela s'ajoute le fait que Whitehead ne place plus la continuité, mais la discontinuité comme caractéristique fondamentale de l'univers. Il nous semble donc que l'idée selon laquelle il y aurait un prolongement et une généralisation du Concept de nature à Procès et réalité ne va pas de soi. Nous ne nions pas qu'il y ait entre les deux livres une profonde cohérence mais elle ne peut être située, selon nous, dans la reprise d'un même problème.

Search for Stability: Rhythm in the Philosophies of Husserl, Deleuze & Guattari

Ineta Kivle — 2024-05-27T10:40:29Z

Sommaire

This article has already been published in The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Numer 61 (2/2021). We warmly thank Ineta Kivle and The Polish Journal of Aesthetics for the permission to republish it here.

Abstract : During the pandemic situation while the usual order changes and the search for new elements of security become more active, rhythm studies may provide a deeper understanding of human and ongoing processes. The current study views rhythm as a force of stability in the context of Husserl's and Deleuze & Guattari's philosophies. It seeks common substantiation for sociality, humanity, art, and nature, showing the organic connection between a person's internal constitution and outer environment, the rhythmic centre's manifestations, and surroundings.

Keywords : Philosophy, Rhythm, Territory, Horizon, Husserl, Deleuze, Guattari

Introduction

In the search for stability during a global emergency, rhythm studies promote new philosophical ways of conceptualizing and reveal the common ontological ground for philosophy, art, the environment, and humans. The current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic confirms how important is that the rhythm of one`s own mind-body is in harmonious connection with surroundings. How does the rhythm of people's lives change in unusual situations ? How do rhythm's manifestations vary in philosophy, art, and nature ? During the pandemic emergency, when the usual order changes, a search for new elements of security becomes more active. Rhythm studies give a deeper understanding of the human and ongoing processes by developing original characterizations of the current situation in the world. The study reveals essential rhythmic components at the centre of rhythmic manifestations, the territory of pulsing space-time, belonging surroundings, and mutual movements. These components concern existential and ontological formations, human existence and being, and artwork structures and societal processes. Rhythm is a pulse that goes through various metric structures of music, paintings, poetry, and philosophy. It organizes the order of the mind-body, insinuates social processes, and determines nature. In the current study, rhythm will not be analyzed as a fundamental element of artwork composition. It will be explored as a thinkable concept for searching for new philosophical approaches and conceptualizing different processes, including art objects and music.

The notion of rhythm has been used in philosophy since its origin. In ancient times, it was mentioned in connection with the cosmos, nature, the internal constitution of the human, speech and language, poetry, sculpture, and music. Initially, rhythm was used as a technical term to describe order, movement, and changes. [1] As a uniting force, rhythm holds together different relations of different things : music and education, melody, voice, and motions of the body, virtue, and soul. Ancient times contain ideas that are still relevant in the 21^st century. In the previous decades, rhythm was regarded as an immanent element of audial-visual spaces and times, a permanent research object in the social sciences, humanities, arts, information technologies, and meta-sciences.

Studies of rhythm relate to different spheres, but simultaneously they form a complex application of appropriate and encompassing philosophical technique. The theoretical approach to rhythm transforms and changes together with conceptual ambitions ; therefore, they broaden the scope of the concept's definition in correspondence with the explored philosophical stances. A multidisciplinary approach deepens the understanding of rhythm and shows the role of rhythm in the world around us. It gives new opportunities for philosophical reflections and makes human activities clearer. In general, rhythm donates to meter, sequence, repetition, order, measured time, and space, thus showing quantitative assessments. Differently from the mathematically measurable, world philosophy studies the immanence of rhythm and opens the deepest levels of the human constitution (Kivle 2021, 312-319).

This article aims to show two different philosophical approaches to rhythm. In the first approach, the intensity and space of rhythm are mainly determined by the human, where subjective activities create a centre of rhythmic surroundings. In the second approach, rhythm is seen as an immanent force of surroundings, and centres of rhythmic manifestations formed by individual and social activities, and the natural and even cosmic processes. Both philosophical approaches show the human role in the organization of processes and the world's response to human activities, even in pandemic emergencies. In this case, Husserl's phenomenology and Deleuze & Guattari's philosophical vitalism are viewed as two different philosophies that show rhythm as a subject matter of investigation and a methodological instrument for opening rhythmic structures in the world even in unusual situations. Thus, this view shows the more profound philosophical aspects at work. These two philosophical approaches meet and cross each other, characterize the current situation in the world and the vibrant life of people, and are concerned with the processes of art and culture. Human constitution is not always in the same rhythm with outer reality, and the capability to form stability following one's subjectivity is fragile and transformative : a human and the world around them can confront each other and develop deconstructions. Pascal Michon, [2] a French philosopher of Rhythm Studies, writes :

It is no coincidence that ‘rhythm' has become, since the 1990s, in a growing number of disciplines, both a subject of investigation and a methodological instrument. Its success is so remarkable that it seems now on the verge of becoming a new scientific paradigm, somewhat like system, structure, individual or difference in the second half of the 20^th century (Michon 2017, Back Cover).

The Methodological Approach

The present study examines only one form of rhythm's manifestation that shows movement between centres (a human, a central point in the territory) and surroundings (belonging territories, spaces, places, horizons). Rhythmic structures with only three essential components—the centre, surroundings, and joint movement—make it possible to compare different philosophical approaches : those who view rhythm directly as an immanent force of art, society, nature, cosmos and those who do not write about rhythm directly, although they maintain a structure of the centre, and surroundings. The study shows how in both cases, the elements of a rhythmic structure and its field of activity are revealed : 1) how rhythm can be related to Husserl's philosophy ; 2) how certain aspects of rhythm's manifestation are marked in Deleuze & Guattari's philosophy. The article is structured by the introduction and methodological approach, two unrelated parts : the presence of rhythm in the phenomenology of Husserl and rhythm's manifestations in the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari. Husserl's phenomenology makes it possible to consider rhythm as an experienced phenomenon like meaningful sound in the flux of internal time consciousness. It is distinct from Deleuze & Guattari's approach to rhythm as an immanent force of surroundings. These two different immanences of rhythm : rhythm as immanently given to subjectivity and rhythm as an immanent force of the cosmos, nature, chaos, et cetera, determine the layout of the present paper. The phenomenological approach is viewed separately from philosophical vitalism. A common principle for both is the relation between a center and the belonging surroundings. This principle permits the analysis of rhythmic interactions related to the pandemic disaster's time. The conclusion presents common aspects and differences of Rhythm Studies in philosophical approaches and tries to show their concern about emergency.

Rhythm and Its Surroundings in the Context of Husserl's Phenomenology

Following the rhythmic manifestations between a centre and the surroundings, phenomenology shows bilateral directions between “I” and meaningful rhythmic worlds. The intentional “I” constitutes the world and corresponds to it with the individual rhythms of one's own, in such a way the mutual relations of a typical meaningful horizon form. Rhythm unites those who have an akin sense of rhythm. “I” is in the centre of forming meaningful worlds, and by mind-body activities and empathy to others, an intentional intersubjective continuity is constituted. A person is viewed as incorporated in a We-unity by a shared experience of rhythmic manifestations.

The interactions of We-unity form rhythmic pulsations, including everyday rhythm, mind-body rhythm, artistic rhythm, and such fundamental components of being as silence, sound, light, dark, peace, and movement. Silence, as opposed to sound, and light, as opposed to dark, maintain the rhythm of music and painting. By entering in or passing away from audible and visible horizons, a work of art maintains a rhythmic dynamic. Sound and silence are intentionally connected : sounds flux, then they are interrupted by silence. They organize a specific rhythm of speech, talk, or any other performance. Likewise, we can listen to silence overwhelmed by incoming sounds. A meaningful silence has adhered exclusively to the sounds determined precisely by this silence : the sound touches the silence and, conversely, the silence touches the sound. Absolute silence and absolute sound dwell into imagination, and experience is not possible. The living body always meets the rhythm of meaningful silence and meaningful sonority (Kivle 2018, 370-373).

Rhythm appears as a perceptual series of movements and vibrations, as repetitions of time-space fragments of a flowing experience. The phenomenology of internal time consciousness relates to the temporal experience of rhythm as the temporality of experience. The temporality of rhythmic experience insinuates and surrounds the perception of rhythm, bodily awareness, spaces of rhythmic vibrations, sounds and colours, human voices, and other people. Employing Husserl's cognitions, Don Ihde widens phenomenology with an existential experience of voice. He connects sound, rhythm, and stability in a common temporal background : the rhythms of sounds are structured by their auditory temporality where rhythm manifests repetition that Ihde calls “an index for auditory stability” (Ihde 1976, 108). By focusing not only on the manifestations but also on an experienced rhythm, phenomenology binds the multiplicity of different durations of rhythms. All these grasped durations are meaningful acts that constitute a particular experience. The rhythms of bodies, languages, sounds, and voices take intersubjective dimensions, including sensations and kinaesthetic perceptions, the flow of internal time duration and constituted space-time. The rhythm of dance occupies the body and mind, and via the body, movements forms sounding and rhythmic territories. It also relates to voice ; the body vibrates with a rhythm that spreads out of speech and intentionally binds all elements included in the appropriate territory of the speaker.

On the one hand, the performer belongs to the created territories of dance, music, or speech. On the other hand, the artworks' intentions continue in a performer weaving and creating a rhythmic unity. While widening a sound with the existential experience of the voice and connecting sound, rhythm, and the voice in a common temporal background, it is seen how the rhythms are structured by their auditory temporality and repetition, forming particular stability of the current fluxing event ; simultaneously acting meanings and impressions form a world of rhythm belonging to a concrete situation. All kinds of constituted phenomenological worlds (theoretical, surrounding, intentional, intersubjective, life-world) have a common designation, a meaningful horizon :

Every subjective process has a process “horizon” which changes with the alteration of the nexus of consciousness to which the process belongs and with the alteration of the process itself from phase to phase of its flow—an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the process itself (Husserl 1982, 109).

Horizons of human thoughts, intentions, and experiences show how a meaningful world fuses, changes, and expands. Applying the phenomenological usage of the horizon to a musical concert shows how the intentional territory of sonority changes, giving meaningful intersubjective and audible events and a thinkable horizon and common intellectual experience. Any concert is characterized by its rhythms, circumstances, and activities that make their environment and implement their forms : the sonority of words and music makes precisely this or that performance. Creative activities unite silence and words and sight, contemplation, and thinking, justifying that the human constitutes related spheres of sonority, visibility, sensitiveness, and understanding (Kivle 2009, 59-70).

The horizon is changeable, open, conditioned. It widens and narrows depending on what we are “focusing on” and what appears in it. A person is a listener and spectator, a contemplator, thinker, and performer open to the world and others. The centre of a horizon is formed by what is heard, understood, said, and perceived. It could be a conversation between two or more participants of the intersubjective world or a meaningful world of the inner speech of the self. A horizon is a field as it is seen from the centre. It is the limit of an extreme type of “observation” : “Beyond this limit is a region of the invisible, because whatever becomes visible does so only within the field of vision and must be given to that field. Outside the field lies nothing visible” (Ihde 1976, 106-107). Opening and transforming horizons allow the invisible to become visible, the silent to become audible, and form particular rhythmic environments. Silence and invisibility belong to the infinite side of intentionality, and owing to this unexplainable emptiness, they form rhythmic relations with visibility and audibility appearing in different manifestations : music, speech, and everyday life. For example, Husserl's concept of the lifeworld affords the feasibility of interpreting rhythm in everyday life and fortifies that human life is understandable from what is heard and listened to, what is seen and what is touched, and what is contemplated, thought and performed. The lifeworld widens the interpretations of rhythm with the surrounding world as the realm populated by all kinds of things that present themselves to us in our everyday experience.

A centre is formed in dependence of realized activity ; not only subjectivity governs a situation, but so does that what makes the central role : “The notion of a centre, however, calls for a preliminary and general location. Centre partly, but only partly, relates to the previously developed notion of a focal core within some dimension or the totality of global experience” (Ihde 1976, 150). The centre does not stand alone but is always located in one or another place of a belonging environment. It moves from a centre to the periphery, turns around, takes the central role, or detaches itself. The stability of rhythm is not determined solely by making a static centre but also by balanced rhythmic movement inside the territory per the significance of all included elements.

The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of the narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth (Gadamer 1989, 302).

The horizon opens the flexibility of understanding and interpretations, giving exclusively empathic concern to others where the rhythms of the life of one's own include all the complexity of experience open to transformations. This opening is only one aspect of the phenomenological analysis of rhythm.

Rhythm studies related to phenomenology have not yet been widely developed. The reason for it may be in the fact that Husserl does not write about rhythm directly. However, phenomenology gives an impulse for various interpretations of rhythm : rhythms of intersubjective communication ; the flux of internal time, time-objects ; rhythms of the internal constitution of man and rhythms of surrounding worlds ; bodily and sensory perception of rhythm, et cetera. Phenomenology of rhythm is based on direct experience, therefore, giving feasibility for analyses of how rhythm is given, how its meanings are constituted and how rhythm differs from other meaningful phenomena (Kivle 2021, 312-319).

Rhythm's relations between the centre and surroundings also show the importance of human capability to control and maintain harmonious rhythmic interactions with world processes even in unusual situations like a pandemic emergency. “I” not only determines one's rhythms towards an outreach but also “listens to” the surroundings. These bilateral relations mark a joint approach with other philosophical branches, in this case, the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari.

Deleuze & Guattari's Views on Rhythm

The article considers two aspects of rhythm present in Deleuze & Guattari's philosophy : rhythm as an activity that creates stability and rhythm as a force of becoming other. By separating chaos and establishing a centre of stability, rhythm maintains the order of belonging territories, and by becoming other, territories transform and obtain expressive qualities. These two aspects are intertwined and include crucial concepts that complement and relate to rhythm : refrain, milieu, chaos, territory, centre of stability, becoming other, repetition, circle of belonging, and in-between. These concepts have particular meanings, and their translation into English unites various interpretations : “milieu” means “surroundings,” but in combination with “medium” and “middle” ; “power” look as if it is a “capacity for existence,” “a capacity to affect or be affected,” et cetera (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, xvi-xviii).

Territory as a directional space and a circle of belonging has its own centre of intensity that is at once within the territory and outside it, and around what cosmic forces come together. Activities of such centres are not subjectively directed : the circles of a belonging move to other regions not by intentionality but by their capacity to be open themselves by themselves once over again. Opening a circle of belonging in another region means displacing and moving made by different elements such as lines, figures, sounds, et cetera. In other words, by including different milieus, various kinds of the exterior, interior, and other milieus are also included in moving and opening new territories.

Rhythmic manifestations concern correlations between three positions dedicated to the migration and the pulsations of territories : 1) territorialization—the taking of territory by separating from chaos and shaping boundaries ; 2) deterritorialization—the decontextualization of an actual territory and leaving it ; 3) reterritorialization relates to the establishment of a new relationship and the beginning of a new process and new territories. These fluid processes show “becoming” as fragile and penetrable structures maintained by refrain and rhythm. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shaping of boundaries makes crucial actuality for the the maintenance of the safety of a territory :

The territory is, first of all, the critical distance between two beings of the same species : Mark your distance. What is mine is, first of all, my distance. I process only distances. Don't let anybody touch me ; I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 319-320).

The territory is marked by a refrain that entertains internal relations and forms a continuity with other territories by three components : 1) a point of order, the centre of stability, or an inside : it can be home, song, voice, or a space of safety ; 2) a circle of control that includes a safe inside as well as a containable outside ; 3) a line of an outside, a movement of transformation and migration. It is impossible to divide these three components into separate parts. They increase each other, pass over to go to the outside, and flow together. Refrain organizes and marks territory, connects territory with internal impulses and external circumstances, identifies and reorganizes functions, and regroups forces to centralize the territory or go outside it.

The refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, the sound of light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function : not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that, which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. The refrain is, therefore, of the crystal or protein type (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 348-349).

Territories—material, intellectual, musical, or spiritual—maintain relevance to the existing rhythm and refrain because they are created and maintained by rhythm and refrain : “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive of milieu components that have become qualitative” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 315). The notion of “expressive qualities” refers to feelings and emotions. It shows relations of one another and expresses dynamics of interior–exterior circumstances. Not only rhythm and refrain but centre and frame also mark territory : there can be no territory with no frame or boundary, no art. A territory always comes together with spatio-temporal coordinates (location, concreteness, actuality) and immeasurable qualities. There are various kinds of rhythms, but one feature is shared : rhythm is immanent to a milieu initially. It is not directed subjectively ; it is the primordial force that separates milieu from chaos.

Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is their in-between : between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos : “Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression […] In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to. Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm but the milieu of all milieus” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 313).

These binary aspects of rhythm to be in day and night, to be in the world of animals and the world of humans, justify rhythm's possibility to be in-between two or more different milieus. Rhythm is in-between milieus and in-between milieus and chaos. A milieu is separated from chaos by rhythm, and “rhythm is milieus' answer to chaos.” Rhythm and milieu can be considered an inseparable couple : one milieu relates to another by rhythm over one another, where every milieu is vibratory, constituted by the periodic repetition of the components. Kindred components limit every milieu. In other words, it would be a potency for opening and serving as a basis for another :

Thus, the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code defined by periodic repetition, but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it, or is constituted in it (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 313).

Even in the situations where rhythm lies hidden, it takes place and stands “beyond” audibility and visibility. However, though being silently presented and hidden, rhythm maintains its substructures that come out from a milieu by becoming other where muteness takes visual and auditory shapes. That could be considered a movement from background to becoming other : to occur, possess something in a new quality, and be in rhythm.

Becoming is undoubtedly not imitating or identifying with something ; neither is it regressing-progressing ; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations ; neither is it producing, producing a filiation, or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all of its own ; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equalling,” or “producing” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 239).

There are various forms of becoming : voices alter from tenor to soprano by becoming-woman or becoming-child, birdsongs of Messianen's music take musical quality by becoming-animal. Language becomes other by human voice activity and occurs differently in music, talk, or performance. Becoming other is compared to becoming quality : philosophy measures chaos and puts it in the form of a concept, science develops function to exchange with chaos, art is a response to chaos producing percepts and affects. These boundaries of becoming others are not self-protective but define a stage of performance that becomes property and territory quality. The approach to chaos is not controlling it but cutting fragments of chaos into philosophical discourse, into a work of art or experiment. Art generates sensations and perceptions never before experienced : the visual arts render visual forces that are themselves invisible, the musical arts render non-sonorous forces sonorous. In such an approach, art is not the activation of the sensation of a lived body, but art transforms the lived body into an unliveable power. Art intensifies resonance and dissonance between bodies and the cosmos, opens the universe of becoming-other : from the finite to the infinite, from the body of the living being to the universe itself. Creative activity shapes an artwork as the centre of dynamic processes that organizes chaos by words, sounds, colours, bodily movements, and others. Colours and sounds make frames of painting and music. Music becomes an open structure that permeates and is permeated by the world developing rhythmical relationships of sonic territories. Refrain wards off chaos by creating a rhythm, tempo, melody and creates a musical frame for musical territory. It shapes the vibration of milieus into harmony.

We are not saying that the refrain is the origin of music or that music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The refrain is rather the means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But music exists because the refrain also exists, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as content in a form of expression because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 300).

Refrain gives music territory and brings together sights, sounds, rhythms, and material objects in organized-sounding totality. However, music is an escape from the refrain ; music intensifies the refrain by creating new forms and shapes, new sounds. That, what is deterritorialized from the refrain, now is reterritorialized as music. Music is not only self-sufficient sonic territory marked by the circulation of the refrain, but also territory open to the outside, and it develops as “deterritorialization”—the territory of music embraces any field of activity that conforms to rhythmic recomposition—the social field, the organic and the natural world.

By moving, colouring, and sounding, rhythm establishes territories of artworks. Rhythm governs the body to the implacable movements of the universe itself and transmits force through every structure of performance or dance. Art and philosophy are rooted in chaos. They can both ride the waves of a vibratory universe without directions, and they enlarge the universe by framing affects and concepts. “Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory, or from which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 206).

In shaping and framing artworks, two kinds of rhythms express themselves. Cadence-repetition, where conformity and the symmetry of lines and spaces take physical place and remain arithmetically static, is seen in spatial territorialization and the regular division of architecture ; and rhythm-repetition, where the vibration of rhythm to be more oriented temporally, includes inequalities and different rhythmic events of music based on internal intensities and characterizes the rhythm of living's evolution. In “Difference and Repetition,” Deleuze notes that studies on rhythm confirm a duality between arithmetic symmetry, which refers back to scale and is static and cubic, and geometric symmetry, based on proportion, appears in a living “evolution” as vital, positive, and active movements. With no frame made by rhythm, there can be no art : colours and sounds refrain artwork, and, in such a way, painting or composition becomes a centre of a milieu and separates from chaos. Rhythm's capacity of framing and separating from chaos relates to different situations, including a time of emergency. If it is possible to control and predict rhythmic manifestations, it is possible to localize chaotic activities. “A mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 311). Human life, art and science, sociality and nature function and change in fluid and interdependent conditions : milieu, rhythm, becoming expressive, and taking territory.

Conclusions

Philosophical approaches to rhythm and stability are diverse depending on the explored theoretical stances : for Husserl, the centre of stability is an intentional “I,” rhythm is experienced by the lived body, and surroundings relate to intentions of subjectivity. For Deleuze, stability is formed by refrain and rhythm, establishing a centre and territory by separation from chaos. In contrast to Husserl, Deleuze & Guattari's characterization of rhythm is integrated with interpretations of art, society, nature, and philosophy and is rooted in nonhuman forces emphasizing the cosmic and natural dimensions of the philosophical environment to metaphysical vitalism than to phenomenology. Contrary to the phenomenological approach, coming from the “I-perspective,” the postmodernity of Deleuze & Guattari excludes the dominant role of the subject and develops self-generated functions of rhythm. In a situation of a pandemic disaster, both these philosophical approaches are valuable. Husserl's phenomenology focuses more on the inclusion of subjectivity in the formation of stability in the world. For Husserl, the world's stability is grounded in intentional activities. At the same time, Deleuze & Guattari's philosophy gives the reversed view : overcoming pandemic time is based on situations to be “in-between” milieus where the capacity of becoming other, expressiveness, and taking of territories maintain distance from chaotic forces. For Deleuze & Guattari, stability is established by separating chaos where human activities and forces of milieu (rhythm and refrain) frame directional spaces.

The difference between Husserl and Deleuze & Guattari is seen in various aspects : in using concepts and themes, in interpretations of human beings and life, in the way of thinking, and in creating different philosophical environments. Deleuze & Guattari do not accept a phenomenological environment where the subject is the centre of belonging territories but include the philosophy of rhythm in nonhuman forces of the cosmos that insinuate in different realms and various life forms. They cover human and animal life, art, the cosmos, and nature. The phenomenology of rhythm starts from rhythm as given in experience, relating to an internal constitution of humans and its intentions directed to the surrounding environment. The experience of rhythm characterizes the primordial faculty of the human : to be inside of the self and simultaneously percept an environment around themselves, making a relatively limited horizon of spatiotemporal situations.

However, such concepts from Deleuze & Guattari's philosophy as a centre of stability, territory, becoming other resonate with Husserl's approach to the self as an intentional centre, forming meaningful worlds, the openness of horizons. Correlations of these concepts maintain rhythmic structures, including humans, the world around them, and one's own world in different ways.

Both phenomenological and postmodern thinking open three comparative aspects for the development of philosophical interdisciplinarity : 1) the formation of rhythmic horizons and territories ; 2) viewing territories in the context of fluxing space and time ; 3) a transformative function of territories and an openness to new interpretations and the future. Rhythm frames boundaries of its belonging territory and transforms and decontextualizes it to create a new one and migrate to another territory. Flexible attention to processes governed by the current emergency shows how human intentions change in forming new typical meaningful horizons and how processes in the future are foreseen.

Rhythm is a fundamental component of being, and existence makes it possible to seek a standard explanation of sociality, human, philosophy, art, and nature, showing the organic connection between a person's internal constitution and outer environment. It is also proven in the pandemic situation, which changes the rhythm of life and determines communication and different processes of belonging to surroundings. For Husserl and Deleuze, reality is changeable. Their views, so different in the basic stances, justify a common sense that rhythm ensures the safety and strengthens the relations between the centre and peripheral, between similarly corresponding elements.

Bibliography

1. Deleuze Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York : Columbia University Press.
2. Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix (1987), A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London : University of Minnesota Press.
3. Gadamer Hans-Georg (1989), Truth and Method, (2^nd ed.), London : Sheed & Ward.
4. Husserl Edmund (1964), Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Bloomington : Indiana University Press.
5. Husserl Edmund (1982), Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
6. Ihde Don (1976), Listening and Voice. A Phenomenology of Sound, Athens : Ohio University Press.
7. Kivle Ineta (2021), “Book Review : Cheyne P., Hamilton A., Paddison M. (eds.), Philosophy of Rhythm : Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, New York : Oxford University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-19-934778-0”, Horizon, 10 (1), St. Petersburg State University, p. x.
8. Kivle Ineta (2020), “Choice to Be Happy : Rhythm of Flourishing in Aristotle's, The Nicomachean Ethics and Hanna Arendt's, The Human Condition”, [in :] K. Boudouris (ed.), The Possibility of Eudaimonia (Happiness and Human Flourishing) in the World Today, Athens : Ionia Publications, pp. 139-148.
9. Kivle Ineta (2009), Skaņas filosofija, Rīga : Latvijas Universitāte.
10. Kivle Ineta (2018), “Auditory Phenomena and Human Life : Phenomenological Experience”, [in :] S. Smith, J. S. Smith & D. Verducci (eds.), Eco-Phenomenology : Life, Human Life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos, Springer International Publishing AG, pp. 367-373
11. Michon Pascal (2017), Elements of Rhythmology : Antiquity, Paris : Rhuthmos.
12. Welton Donn (ed.) (1999), The Essential Husserl. Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, USA : Indiana University Press.

[1] Sub-concepts such as measure, number, or periodicity were introduced in the definition of rhythm only by Plato during the first half of the 4^th century. Before Plato, rhythm never denoted the order of a sequence of time but meant the temporary disposition of something flowing, a form that was itself changing during its performance. The Platonic approach to rhythm is concerned with education, the constitution of person, society, state control, the sacred, and mathematical order : The Republic, The Laws, Philebus and Timaeus. Rhythm is viewed as a human reflection of Heavenly numbers in Plotinus' Enneads. Aristotle writes : “all rhythm is measured by definite movement.”

[2] Pascal Michon, founder of the website www.rhuthmos.eu and the publication “Rhuthmos”, is the author of three volumes of research, “Elements of Rhythmology” (2018–2019), and many other publications about rhythm including analyses of Deleuze & Guattari and ancient philosophers.

Rhythmanalysis and Psychoanalysis

Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos — 2023-03-03T20:12:09Z

This text was first published by Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in the newspaper O Jornal, July 29, 1945 — Trans. Vinícius Castro Portella & Pascal Michon. I warmly thank Vinícius Castro Portella for making this republication possible.

Man can suffer from his spiritual incapacity. He can suffer from a bondage to confused and unconscious rhythms which are a true lack of vibrational structure. But he can suffer, above all, from the conscience of his infidelity to the elevated spiritual rhythms: man knows he can exceed himself, and he has the necessity, and the taste to exceed himself. Sublimation is not a simple impulse, it is an appeal. Art is not a relief from the sexual tendency. On the contrary, the sexual tendency is already an aesthetic tendency profoundly implicated in a set of creationist tendencies which seek an active sublimation. Sublimation is a metamorphosis that transports to the heights of the aerial light of the kiss, where the ideals of our creative imagination present themselves, and to the winged movements of the poetic spirit, reflected on the mirror of the waters of our birth, the obscure impulses of the instincts of life. [1] Like the sculptor, each one of us makes of the “other” an internal image, taken of ourselves, like his creator, and that image offers us a mirror to our internal creation, general and human – which is the only source of human enrichment for our meager personal existence.

It is the lack of this active sublimation, which is attractive, emergent and positively creationist, [2] that confuses the balance of ambivalence and disturbs the game of psychic values. Creationism imposes on the psyche an effective undulation between the acquired plane of the real and the inaccessible mobile plane of the ideal. Does the function want to leave its habitual state? Should it risk a part of its potency, of its energy? Immediately, it feels the need to “go back to what it was,” assuring a support for new and future impulses. On the contrary, does it intend to stabilize itself in its state? Then, the monotonous rhythms, which characterize this state, closer to matter, tend to become more and more dampened, and the creationist reaction appears as more likely and more necessary, and at the same time easier. Necessity, the creator of probabilities, is the origin of new realizations: this is the basis of a far-reaching philosophy of negativity, indicated by us, which ranges from scientific philosophy to moral philosophy, and to which Bachelard, of the Sorbonne, has given the necessary developments. [3]

Without the creationist reaction of the living being, its future would fall into the torpor of a deadly routine. The whole of creative evolution, taken not in its statistical summary, which is the evolution of the species, but in the individual, and above all in the youth of the individual, is necessarily an undulating evolution: a fabric of boldness and setbacks, of successes and errors. It is clear that, on the moral plane, repression is released or corrected, as Freud indicates, by the cathartic method—and it is necessary to insist that repression does not represent any kind of moral value as the sacristy moralists think. However, psychoanalysis does not go far enough. It forgets the essential. When the repressed event is brought to clear consciousness, it seems to the psychoanalyst that this enlightened consciousness, forgiving this long-hidden fault, will erase the“remorse” for the spontaneous omission: but how can one ensure that the painful process does not reconstitute itself, of its own doing, in the unconscious?

To avoid this repetition, the essential thing is to prepare in the conscious mind the clear system of an “intimate forgiveness,” which makes remorse useless and no longer depends on anyone's absolution, not even that of the doctor himself. This system of systematic and conscious forgiveness, faced with the automatism of bad conscience, and in opposition to the inclination of the harmful tendency that “cultivates sin,” should form the clear pole of a moral dialectic. The healing of the soul leads, in superposed levels, of speculative heights, to the old-fashioned cynical asceticism of a Bernard Shaw; and from there, by inversion of negativism, to the divine spheres of the wisdom of Socrates, or, in modern and realist terms, the human and realist mysticism of the Prince of Sagres or of Joan of Arc, prolonging itself in the great liberating souls of the current world. But one thing surely does not exist: morality which belongs to only one person and which is the property of the “Master of morals.” In this erroneous assumption, live the mediocre, the saviors, the mystifiers, the sinister Savonarolas of a false Middle Ages, who lower education and politics to the levels of their mediocrity.

Psychoanalysis, many have pointed out, has regrettably underestimated the conscious and rational life, the constant action of the spirit, that, whatever it may be, always gives shape to the shapeless and provides an interpretation to desires and obscure instincts, consolidating the secretly preferred tendency. It is through the human interpretation of man, comparing man with other men, to the point of forgetting himself, and taking his share of the animation given to the soul by the creative syntheses of thought, that the regeneration of the spirit is only possible. Everything else is illusory and is often a mystification: there is no regeneration that depends on another, but only on the individual himself. The comparison between “I” and the “other,” socially, is the fundamental principle of all moral proof. The tendency towards human equality is the potential strength of human societies. True moral emotion is of all the most undulating and difficult to direct intellectually. When copied from a model, it loses all moral value.

In our works we have exposed a Rhythmanalysis, the doctrine of a rhythmic phenomenology, in the terrains of physics, biology and psychology, following the recent progresses of mathematical Physics: and we present this doctrine as an internal discipline to the free life of the creative spirit that favors the regeneration of the original powers of the spirit and favors new and fecund spiritual élans. This, over centuries of detours, leads us closer once more to the thought of Greece and brings light to the intelligence of mythology as the art of poetical symbols in their magical ordering, in the mirrors of a creative imagination, presenting us with a classical model of a temporal psychology at overlaid levels. In this light, the complexes are more understandable and represent psychological figures more worthy of the man who, in his living tragedy, aspires to poetic greatness, confronting himself with myths, and aspiring to the tallest height of human consciousness in which man gathers the truth of all men. This aspiration is humanely worth more, infinitely more, than priestly persuasion or the suffiency of the scientific or of the teacher of the graduated students. What does man aspire to if not to exceed himself by seeking to surpass himself in moral and poetic beauty? Isn't this the very poorly hidden mystery of Beauty?

However—as Aldous Huxley said—the worshiper of life is also, in his own way, a man of principle, a man consistent with himself. To live intensely, that is his guiding principle. His diversity is the indication that he tries, in consequence, to live up to his principle; this is his human, moral and intellectual test, because the harmony of a life—of that single life that persists as a unit, gradually changing through time—is a harmony constituted by the numerous elements of diversity and this unity would be mutilated by the suppression of even one of the parts of this essential diversity, whose gem reaches fullness in man. Among the interwoven melodies of human counterpoint (by means of which all men live in solidarity) are love songs and Anacreontic arias, marches and wild dancing rhythms, hymns of hate and loud, joyous refrains. Odious voices for the ears of those who sincerely wanted, like Pascal, their music to be entirely celestial—“wanting man to be more than man”—but also for those who, dedicating themselves to the authoritarian speculation of historical cultures, wanted man to forget that he is man, relegating him to intellectual slavery and making himat best contribute, passively, to the easy celebrity of the doctors of the law, the scholars and the captains of the order, who charge all their services. That is why, in all crises and all countries, rise above the masses to be burned on the day of Judas, the doctoral officiant, the last Savonarola, convinced and unshakable, and at his side his psychological replica, the unquiet and mundane Rasputin, head of a sect, also intoxicated with ideas and cultural superstitions, who talks about finding freedom again, being himself lost in the debauchery of ideas. The life of the spirit is no mere accident and poetry is no sheer entertainment for the wealthy. Poetry is the very principle of creative evolution, and that is why, on this Earth, man sings eternally the dialectics of Joy and Pain.

We all know the terrible efforts that life demands of us, outside of poetry, but we need to go back to poetry in order to put the soul back into life. And the spirit gains in resisting all charms and raptures. Enthusiastic asceticism is that which promises the pleasure it does not give, and makes it inaccessible and all the more precious. Poetry, liberated from its cheap fabric of personality and passion, which is the contribution of horrible poets, is the luminous gem through which every light of the spirit shines; it is a model of rhythmic life and thought, the medium that is most ready to give its own dialectic to the spirit and the mastery of the dialectics of duration that realizes the comprehension of the world in man himself.

ORIGINAL: O Jornal, 29 de julho de 1945.

O homem pode sofrer de sua incapacidade espiritual. Pode sofrer de uma escravidão a ritmos inconscientes e confusos que são uma verdadeira falta de estrutura vibratória. Mas pode sofrer, sobretudo, da consciência da sua infidelidade aos ritmos espirituais elevados: o homem sabe que se pode exceder, e tem a necessidade e o gosto de se exceder. A sublimação não é um simples impulso, é um apelo. A arte não é um desafogo da tendência sexual. Ao contrário, a tendência sexual é já uma tendência estética, implicada profundamente num conjunto de tendências criacionistas que procuram uma sublimação ativa. A sublimação é a metamorfose que transporta às altuas da aérea luz do beijo, onde se apresentam os ídolos da nossa imaginação criadora, e aos movimentos alados do espírito poético, refletidos do espelho das águas do nosso nascimento, os impulsos obscuros dos instintuos da vida (1). Como o escultor, cada um de nós faz do ‘outro' uma imagem interior, tirada de nós mesmos, como seu criador, e que nos oferece um espelho à nossa criação interior, geral e humana – únia forma de enriquecimento humano de nossa exígua existência pessoal.

É a falta desta sublimação ativa, atrativa, emergente, positivamente criacionista, que confunde o equilíbrio da ambivalência e perturba o jogo dos valores psíquicos. O criacionismo impõe ao psiquismo uma ondulação efetiva entre o plano do real, adquirido, e o plano móvel do ideal, inacessível. Quer o serviço sair de seu estado habitual? Arrisca uma parte de sua potência, de sua energia? Imediatamente, sente a necessidade de “voltar ao que estava”, de se assegurar um apoio, para novos e futuros impulsos. Pelo contrário, pretende estabilizar-se em seu estado? Então, os ritmos monótonos, que caracterizam esse estado, mais vizinho da matéria, tendem a amortecer-se, cada vez mais, e a reação criacionista aparece como mais provável e mais necessária, e ao mesmo tempo mais fácil. A necessidade, criadora de probabilidades, é a origem de novas realizações: esta é a base de uma filosofia da negatividade, indicada por nós, de grande alcance, que vai da filosofia científica à filosofia moral, e à qual Bachelard, da Sorbonne, tem dado os necessários desenvolvimentos (2).

Sem a reação criacionista do ser vivo, o futuro do ser cairia no torpor da rotina mortal. Toda a evolução criadora, tomada não em seu restumo estatístico, que é a evolução das espécies, mas no indíviduo, e sobretudo na juventude do indivíduo, é uma evolução necessariamente ondulada: um tecido de ousadias e de recuos, de acertos e de erros. É claro que, no plano moral, o recalcamento é liberado ou corrigido, como Freud indica, pelo método catártico – é preciso insistir em que o recalcamento não representa qualquer espécie de valor moral como pensam os moralistas de sacristia. Entretanto, a psicanálise não vai bastante longe. Ela esquece o essencial. Quando o acontecimento recalcao é trazido à consciência clara,parece ao psicanalista que a consciência esclarecida, perdoando a falta por longo tempo escondida, vai apagar o “remorso” pela omissão espontânea: mas como assegurar-se de que o processus doloroso não se reconstitua de sua própria tendência, no inconsciente? Para ficar ao abrigo desta repetição, o essencial é preparar no consciente o sistema claro do “perdão íntimo”, que torna inútil o remorso, enão depende mais da absolvição de ninguém, nem mesmo do próprio médico. Este sistema de perdão sistemático e consciente, posto em face do automatismo da má consciência, em oposição à inclinação da tendência nociva que “cultura pecado”, deve formar o polo claro da dialética moral. A cura da alma leva, em níveis sobrepostos, de altura especulativa, ao ascetismo cínico, à maneira antiga, de um Bernard Shaw; e daí,por inversão do negativismo, até as esferas divinas de sabedoria de um Sócrates, ou, em termos modernos e realistas, ao misticismo realista e humano do infante de Sagres ou de Joana d'Arc, prolongando-se nas grandes almas libertadoras do mundo atual. Mas uma coisa não existe: a moral que stá na posse de um só e é propriedade do “mestre de moral”. Nesta errada suposição, vivem os medíocres, os salvadores, os mistificadores, os sinistro Savonarolas, de uma falsíssima Idade Média, que rebaixam a educação e a política aos níveis de sua mediocridade.

A psicánalise, muitos o tem dito, subestimou lamentavalmente a vida consciente e racional, a ação do constante do espírito que, valha o que valha, sempre dá forma ao informe e dá uma interpretação aos desejos e aos instintos obscuros, consolidando a tendência secretamente preferida. É pela interpretação humana do homem, comparando-se o homem com os outros homens, até o ponto de se esquecer de si próprio, e tomando sua parte da animação que dão à alma as sínteses criadoras dopensamento, queé unicamente possível a regeneração do espírito. Tudo mais é ilusório e é muitas vezes, uma mistificação; não há regeneração que dependa de outrem, mas somente do próprio indivíduo. A comparação do “eu” e do”outro”, socialmente, é o princípio fundamental de toda a prova moral. A tendência à igualdade humana é a força potencial das sociedades humanas. A emoção moral, verdadeira, é de todas a mais ondulante e difícil de dirigir intelectualmente. E, copiada do modelo, perde todo o valor moral.

Em nossos trabalhos expusemos uma Ritmanálise, a doutrina de uma fenomenologia rítmica, nos terrenos da física, da biologia e da psicologia, acompanhando os progressos modernos da Física matemática: e apresentamos essa doutrina como uma disciplina interior à vida livre do espírito criador favorecendo a regeneração dos poderes originais do espírito e favorecendo novos e fecundos élans espirituais. Isto, por cima de séculos de desvios, aproxima-nos, de novo, do pensamento da Grécia e ilumina a inteligência da mitologia como arte de simbólos poéticos em sua ordenação ma´gica, nos espelhos de uma imaginação criadora, apresentando-os um modelo clássico de uma psicologia temporal em níveis sobrepostos. Nesta luz, os complexos são mais compreensíveis e representam figuras psicológicas mais dignas do homem que, em sua tragédia viva, aspira à grandeza poética, confrontano-se com os mitos, e aspira à maior altura da consciência humana em que no homem se reúne a verdade de todos os homens. E esta aspiração vale humanamente mais, infinitamente mais, que o convencimento sacerdotal ou a suficiência do científico e do professoral dos escolares graduados. A que aspira ohomem senão a exceder-se procurando exceder-se em beleza moral e poética? Não está nisto mesmo o tão mal oculto mistério que tem a Beleza?

Entretanto – como disse Aldous Huxley – o adorador da vida é também, à sua maneira, um homem de princípios, um homem consequente consigo mesmo. Viver intensamente, eis o seu princípio diretor. Sua diversidade é o indício de que ele tenta, com consequência, viver de acordo com seu princípio; e está é a sua prova humana, intelectual e moral, porque a harmonia de uma vida – dessa vida única que persiste como unidade, gradualmente mutável, através do tempo – é uma harmonia constituída pelos elementos numerosos da diversidade e a unidade ficaria mutilada pela supressão de uma só que fosse das partes dessa diversidade essencial cuja gema atinge a plenitude no homem.

Entre as melodias entrelaçadas do contraponto humano (por meio do qual todos os homens vivem solidariamente) há canções de amor e árias anacreônticas, marchas e ritmos de danças selvagens, hinos de ódio e estribilhos alegres e ruidosos. Vozes odiosas para os ouvidos daqueles que quiseram sinceramente, como Pascal, que sua música fosse inteiramente celeste - 'querendo que o homem fosse mais do que o homem' - mas também para aqueles que, dedicando-se à especulação autoritária das culturas históricas, quiseram que o homem esquecesse de que era homem, rebaixando-o à escravidão intelectual e ele melhor contribuir, passivamente, para a fácil celebridade dos doutores da lei, dos literatos e dos capitães da ordem, que a todos pagam em seus serviços; por isso, em todas as crises, em todos os países, se levantam acima da massa para serem queimados no dia dos Judas, o oficiante doutoral, o último Savonarola, convencido e inabalável, e a seu lado sua réplica psicológica, o inquieto e mundano Rasputine, chefe de seita, ébrio também de ideias e de superstições culturais, que fala em voltar a encontrar a liberdade, sendo ele um perdido da libertinagem das ideias. A vida do espírito não é um mero acidente e a poesia não é um simples divertimento da gente de algo. A poesia é o próprio princípio da evolução criadora, e por isso, na Terra, o homem canta eternamente a dialética da Alegria e da Dor.

Todos sabem os terríveis esforços quea vida exige, fora da poesia, mas para voltar à poesia para voltar a por a alma na vida. E o espírito ganha em resistir a todos os encantos e a todos os arrebatamentos. Ascetismo entusiasta é este que promete o prazer que não dá, e o torna inacessível, e tanto mais precioso. A poesia, liberada de sua ganga pessoal e passional, que é contribuição de horríveis poetas, é a gema luminosa onde brilham todas as luzes do espírito; é um modelo de vida e de pensamento ritmados, o meio mais pronto para dar ao espírito sua dialética própria e o domínio das dialéticas da duração que ralizam a compreensão do mundo, no próprio homem.

(1) São estes fundos de uma imaginação original, comum a todos os homens, que explicam os símbolos mais impenetráveis à compreensão direta, seguindo leis secretas de analogia. Os símbolos tema sua correspondência mágica na linguagem poética. As asas são o símbolo da libertação do espírito, acima doimediatamente obetivo, figurada no vôo poético das abelhas e das aves, figuras definitivas dos répteis alados. Em todas as línguas, as palavras tais como “a ribeira” e “duas aves” são tabém palavras de uma linguagem universal em que a coisa, significada não nos pode ser presente senão no mistério poético de nossa “dupla vida” interior, dupla como no sonho, e posta acima de qualquer princípio de ação interessada. Este símbolo da “ave” é aquele que a Cabala declara que está acima doentendimento humano: - “a ave e oMessias” Zohar II, 8-9 etc: “as duas aves” Munda-kaupanishad III: “a ribeira a passar” Psalmos: CXXIII onde há também uma referência à “ave”.

(2) Ainda agora nos anuncia a “Philosophie do Non”

[1] It is these foundations of an original imagination, common to all men, which explain the symbols that seem most impenetrable to direct understanding, according to the secret laws of analogy. Symbols have their magical correspondence in poetic language. Wings are a symbol of the liberation of the spirit, above the immediate objectivity, figured in the poetic flight of bees and birds, and definite figures of winged reptiles. In every language, words like “the stream” and “two birds” are also words of a universal language in which the thing signified cannot be present to us if not through the poetic mystery of our internal “double life,” double as in the dream and placed above any principle of interested action. This symbol of the “bird” is the one which the Kabbalah declares to be above human understanding: “the Bird and the Messiah,” Zohar II, 8-9, etc.; “The Two Birds,” Mundaka Upanishad III; “The rivulet flowing,” Psalm CXXIII, where there is also reference to a bird.

[2] This is not a reference to “creationism” in the sense of a religious belief in the supernatural origin of the universe, but rather to the philosophy of the Portuguese Leonardo Coimbra, who seems to have exerted a powerful influence on Pinheiro dos Santos [translator's note].

[3] Who has just announced a “Philosophie du Non.”

Notes sur quelques précurseurs de la théorie du rythme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Pascal Michon — 2023-01-01T07:30:00Z

Sommaire

Après avoir connu un essor important au cours de la seconde moitié des années 1970 et le début des années 1980 [1], puis un relatif effacement au cours des années 1990, la théorie du rythme bénéficie depuis une dizaine d'années d'un renouveau sensible qui se manifeste à travers toute une série de publications et de colloques [2]. Cette reprise est très certainement liée aux effets sur nos sociétés et nos représentations, y compris scientifiques, de la mondialisation et de l'émergence d'un nouveau capitalisme flex-réticulaire [3].

Mais ce n'est pas la première fois dans l'histoire occidentale que se développent, en lien avec les transformations sociales mais aussi avec celles des sciences et des arts, des mouvements théoriques visant, soit à saisir des flux organisés, soit à fluidifier, sans toutefois leur dénier toute organisation, les opérations qui permettent ce saisir, soit encore, dans les meilleurs des cas, l'un et l'autre à la fois.

On connaît déjà assez bien la mutation scientifique des années 1880-1940 [4] ; on saisit également l'apport déterminant des penseurs allemands de la période 1785-1805 [5] ; on en sait beaucoup moins, en revanche, sur celui de leurs prédécesseurs des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles quant aux deux principes qui sont au cœur de la théorie du rythme : activité et manière. Ces quelques notes ne prétendent à rien d'autre que poser quelques jalons pour une recherche encore à faire sur ce sujet capital.

Spinoza et Leibniz : l'activité comme dynamisme de la ou des substances, les manières comme modes ou monades

On peut supposer que quelque chose d'un genre proche de ce qui est en train de se passer est déjà en cause au XVII^e siècle dans les conclusions que Spinoza et Leibniz tirent à la fois des transformations rapides de la société et de l'État, et des progrès des sciences naturelles, de la physique et des mathématiques.

Certes, les modes apparaissent, chez le premier, comme les affections d'une substance unique, alors que le deuxième considère au contraire les monades comme les substances les plus simples dont la composition rend compte des choses – le « pluralisme » de l'un s'opposant clairement au « monisme » de l'autre [6] . Mais dans les deux cas, on trouve une volonté de caractériser l'être comme agir et infinitude, donc comme fluence. De même que la substance unique est vue par Spinoza comme essentiellement dynamique et productrice, de même les substances multiples leibniziennes sont à la fois soumises à un changement continuel qui vient de leur propre fonds, et sources vives de toutes les choses qu'elles composent. Les nouvelles formes de monisme et de pluralisme qu'ils proposent, loin de considérer la ou les substances, soit comme un tout un qui n'est jamais rien d'autre que lui-même, soit comme des entités unitaires continument identiques à elles-mêmes, introduisent dans la conception même de l'être une temporalité fondamentale. Pour Spinoza, l'essence de Dieu enveloppe son existence. La substance possède donc nécessairement un caractère dynamique et proliférant qui la fait se manifester sous une infinité de modes. De même pour Leibniz, qui, parce qu'il cherche à sauver la figure d'un Dieu créateur, rejette le monisme spinoziste et prône une ontologie pluraliste compatible avec l'idée d'une finalité globale de l'ordre du monde, ce caractère dynamique et proliférant est la caractéristique principale des substances monadiques. Pour la première fois en Occident depuis Platon, l'être réapparaît sous la forme proprement rhuthmique qui le caractérisait chez la plupart des présocratiques à l'exception notoire des Éléates.

En même temps, Spinoza et Leibniz à sa suite inaugurent une manière de connaître rhuthmiquement l'être qui aura une immense postérité. Dans la mesure où l'âme et le corps ne sont plus opposés ni hiérarchisés mais apparaissent comme les deux attributs de la ou des substances, les idées s'enchaînent dans l'entendement selon le même ordre et avec la même nécessité que les choses se produisent dans la nature. L'organisation du déroulement de la pensée est rigoureusement « identique » ou, chez Leibniz « parallèle », à celle des mutations de l'étendue. Le monde fluent, ses modes ou ses monades ne sont donc pas connaissables parce que nous nous opposons à eux sous l'espèce d'un sujet libre et capable d'objectivité a priori, en les considérant quant à eux comme de simples corps ou ensemble de corps dénués d'âmes, mais parce que nous participons au contraire, sous les deux attributs à la fois, de la puissance et du déploiement de la substance dont ils sont eux aussi des modes, donc comme des sujets dont la liberté et l'objectivité sont à construire, à illustrer et à défendre en permanence dans et par notre commerce avec les autres modes ou monades. C'est cette participation, sous les deux aspects « de la pensée et de l'étendue » ou « de l'âme et de la matière », au dynamisme de l'être, qui rend possible, en dernière analyse, la connaissance rationnelle non seulement des lois immuables de la nature, mais aussi de l'essence des choses singulières, c'est-à-dire de leur individualité fondée en Dieu, conditions nécessaires pour Spinoza de toute joie et de toute action libre.

On pourrait penser que ces formes d'ontologie et d'épistémologie préfigurent, dans une certaine mesure, celle(s) proposée(s) par Hegel au début du XIX^e siècle sous la forme d'une logique dialectique unifiée. Mais si l'être, comme chez ce dernier, y est fondamentalement rhuthmique et peut être connu grâce à notre participation à son fluement sous ses deux attributs, cela n'implique, contrairement à ce que pense Hegel, aucune téléologie, aucune finalité, aucun progrès, et condamne au contraire par avance l'idée selon laquelle l'Être devrait et pourrait un jour se ressaisir lui-même subjectivement dans un Savoir absolu. L'être est fondamentalement multiplication ou prolifération. Cela condamne par la même occasion – au moins pour Spinoza car le cas de Leibniz se distingue ici nettement en ce qu'il suppose une harmonie préétablie – toute conception de l'être comme Puissance potentielle ou comme Sujet de l'histoire du monde. Pour Spinoza, la substance n'est ni cause finale, ni cause première. Elle sort du paradigme aristotélicien dans lequel Hegel continue à la penser. Elle est essentiellement causale c'est-à-dire qu'elle est constante activité d'enchaînement des causes et des conséquences. Comme l'a montré Pierre Macherey, l'ontologie et l'épistémologie hégéliennes conjointes dans la logique sont redevables d'une critique spinoziste bien plus que l'inverse, et c'est finalement l'esquisse d'une « dialectique matérialiste », c'est-à-dire d'une dialectique débarrassée de son idéalisme et de la réduction du devenir à la négation de la négation, qui apparaît chez Spinoza [7] .

Reste la question de la nature et du rôle attribués au langage dans cette doctrine de l'unité de la substance, de l'âme et du corps, de la pensée et de la connaissance. Dans son livre Spinoza. Poème de la pensée [8], Henri Meschonnic a prétendu trouver chez celui-ci une « théorie du langage », une « poétique de la pensée », une « poétique de l'affect », voire une « poétique du divin » (p. 299), ce qui ferait de lui l'un des premiers penseurs occidentaux à avoir considéré non seulement la substance et les modes mais aussi le langage de manière rythmique. Or, il faut bien le reconnaître, rien de tout cela n'apparaît dans les textes, sinon sous la forme de projections de l'analyste sur son objet.

Les propositions spinozistes concernant le langage qu'il évoque ne sont certes pas négligeables (par exemple, le rôle des affects et du corps dans le langage à travers la voix et les expressions du visage, la critique des discours du pouvoir et des prêtres), de même celles qu'il n'évoque pas (l'origine collective des mots et catégories de la langue (TTP, VII ; TIE, 88), la collusion des mots et de l'imaginaire (TIE, 88)), mais elles sont loin de s'organiser en théorie explicite ou, pour reprendre le vocabulaire spinoziste, en idées à la fois adéquates, claires et distinctes, de l'essence du langage ou de la littérature.

On peut également accorder à Meschonnic que le latin de Spinoza n'est pas un médium neutre et qu'il porte de nombreuses marques signifiantes vecteurs d'affects (p. 284-296), mais, d'une part, les exemples qu'il donne ne nous apprennent en fait rien de neuf sur sa pensée, dans la mesure où ils sont repérés par l'analyste à partir d'un sens déjà connu par le seul jeu des énoncés et dont ces exemples apparaissent dès lors comme de simples soulignements ; d'autre part, le fait que le discours de Spinoza porte de nombreuses marques signifiantes n'implique évidemment en rien qu'il ait ne serait-ce que commencé à remettre en question le schéma du signe et à poser les bases d'une théorie rythmique du langage cohérente avec son ontologie de la substance comme activité. Meschonnic est d'ailleurs obligé de reconnaître que Spinoza s'appuie massivement sur le schéma du signe, son dualisme et son discontinu (p. 267), dénie toute autorité aux accents bibliques des « Massorètes oisifs » (p. 250-51 et 300) et qu'il réduit tout le langage au nom (p. 265-66). Il aurait pu ajouter, ce qui l'éloigne de nombre des positions qu'il professe pour sa part, que « la connaissance du troisième genre » atteint ou plutôt participe aux « essences des choses » par « intuition » (intuitu) (E II, 40, sc. 2), ce qui fait de Spinoza, en dernière analyse et en dépit de son nominalisme sémiotique, un penseur réaliste cherchant à atteindre les choses mêmes en dépit des multiples pièges que dispose le langage devant les pas du philosophe. Puisque les mots condensent des souvenirs et des affects liés aux usages passés de ceux qui s'en sont servis, et qu'ils sont la plupart du temps investis par des forces qui cherchent à les utiliser pour exercer un pouvoir sur ceux qui les écoutent, il faut en épurer l'usage par des définitions exactes et par une manipulation soumise aux règles de la démonstration mathématique [9].

Comme Meschonnic le dit lui-même, dans un bref moment de réalisme, sa lecture « détourn[e] le sens voulu par Spinoza vers celui d'une théorie du langage qu'il n'a pas exprimée » (p. 271). Il ne va pas toutefois jusqu'à reconnaître que ce détournement le mène à d'évidents contresens, comme lorsqu'il affirme que, « dans l'écriture de la démonstration », le sujet « tend à, et s'étend jusqu'à, s'absorber dans et absorber Dieu ou la Nature. L'immanence mange la transcendance » (p. 279). Tout d'abord, la « manducation de la parole » n'émergera que bien plus tard, chez Jousse. Ensuite, on ne voit pas comment les êtres humains, qui n'en sont que des modes finis, pourraient « absorber » ou « manger » la substance absolument infinie de laquelle ils participent. Ainsi, la prosodie du se in Deo esse, qui imbrique Deo entre deux se et sur laquelle se clôt son livre (p. 295 sq.), est une jolie trouvaille prosodique, mais elle ne dit en fait rien de plus que cette participation des modes à la substance dont ils ne sont que des affections. On pourrait d'ailleurs opposer à cet exemple une autre formule de Spinoza qui inverse très précisément l'ordre que Meschonnic trouve si significatif et place le es/se clairement au sein de Dieu, en le coupant d'ailleurs en deux comme si le soi était à la fois encerclé par Dieu et toujours orienté vers Lui : Deum es/se unum (Cogitata metaphysica II, chap. 2, « De l'unité de Dieu », De unitate Dei). En réalité, Spinoza n'a pas produit la théorie du langage qui aurait correspondu à ses avancées ontologiques et épistémologiques, et ce n'est qu'au siècle suivant qu'apparaîtront, à la fois sur le plan poétique et sur le plan philosophique, les premiers éléments d'une théorie du langage cohérente avec la théorie rhuthmique de l'être comme substance essentiellement active.

Contrairement à ce qu'affirme de manière péremptoire Meschonnic, qui confond parfois la discussion des arguments avec un procès ad hominem (voir, par exemple, p. 26), au XVII^e siècle, c'est plutôt chez Leibniz que l'on trouve les racines d'une théorie rythmique du langage [10]. Certes, Leibniz est principalement connu pour sa recherche d'une characteristica universalis inscrite dans le paradigme rationaliste et logicien de la grammaire de Port-Royal, paradigme lui-même inscrit dans une conception religieuse du langage, dans la mesure où cette caractéristique serait aussi une image de la lingua adamica perdue depuis la malédiction babélienne.

Mais ce n'est pas cela qui en a fait l'inspirateur d'une majorité des spécialistes et penseurs allemands du langage au XVIII^e siècle. À la différence de Descartes ou de Locke, qui le considéraient encore comme un instrument dont la fonction est purement mnémonique et communicationnelle, Leibniz souligne le fait que le langage « sert encore à l'homme à raisonner à part soi » (Nouveaux Essais, III, I, 2), c'est-à-dire à la fois en lui-même et par lui-même. Par là, il le sort du paradigme cartésien d'origine aristotélicienne et met en évidence sa vertu cognitive et créative.

Ensuite, Leibniz engage une critique de l'arbitraire du signe au sens conventionnel de l'expression, qui attaque le fondement même du dualisme âme/corps, esprit/étendue – le dualisme sémiotique d'origine aristotélicienne du son et de l'idée : « Les langues ne sont pas arbitraires et fondées quasiment par une loi, mais elles sont nées d'un instinct naturel des hommes, qui leur fait mettre les sons en harmonie avec les affects et les mouvements de l'esprit. » (Brevis designatio meditationum de originibus gentium, ductis potissimum ex indicio linguarum, 1710) Contre les cartésiens mais aussi les empiristes, Leibniz fait valoir que l'association arbitraire d'un mot et d'une idée ne vaut que pour les langues artificielles. Mais il ne tombe pas pour autant dans un cratylisme absolu qui verrait les mots comme de simples images des choses. Dans les langues réelles, tout est mêlé d'arbitraire et de nature ou de hasard. Les significations sont déterminées autant par des raisons naturelles que par des raisons morales. Les mots sont dus à un jeu de la nécessité et de la liberté, du naturel et de l'arbitraire. Autrement dit, le langage n'est ni un produit de l'arbitraire des locuteurs, ni une simple image du monde ; il dessine une sphère intermédiaire dans laquelle niche « la merveilleuse variété des opérations de l'esprit », ce que Humboldt appellera plus tard « la variété des visions du monde ».

Enfin, comme le fait remarquer Jürgen Trabant, sans toutefois souligner assez la contradiction flagrante avec la recherche d'une caractéristique universelle, « Leibniz oppose au pessimisme du mythe de la tour Babel, où la diversité des langues apparaît comme une punition, un malheur et un obstacle, son optimisme de la pluralité dans l'esprit de la Pentecôte, la joie provoquée par la multiplicité conçue comme richesse » (J. Trabant, op. cit., p. 82). Comme Descartes et une longue suite de penseurs avant lui, Locke se plaignait que les mots des langues naturelles masquent la vérité, que leur obscurité et leur désordre répandent « a mist before our eyes » (Essay, III, IX, 21). À ces plaintes, Leibniz rétorque que les langues sont « le meilleur miroir de l'esprit humain » et de « la merveilleuse variété de ses opérations ». C'est cette attention à la diversité des langues et à leur aspect concret qui inspirera d'innombrables savants au XVIII^e siècle. Et la joie qu'éprouvera un peu plus tard Humboldt face à la diversité des langues sera, elle aussi, très clairement « le reflet de la monadologie dans le domaine de la théorie du langage. De même que la pluralité des monades sert à réfléchir l'univers et à le multiplier, de même la pluralité des langues est création de richesse » (J. Trabant, op. cit., p. 82).

Diderot : l'activité comme dynamisme de la matière, les manières comme hiéroglyphes

Au XVIII^e, Béatrice Didier a montré l'effet des mutations des pratiques musicales et chorégraphiques sur les conceptions du rythme [11]. Chez Rousseau et chez Diderot, dans les articles de L'Encyclopédie, le Dictionnaire de musique et Le Neveu de Rameau, le rythme musical n'est plus seulement mesure ou même succession d'accents calquée sur la métrique poétique et sur les scansions du langage, il devient mouvement fluide – tout en gardant malgré tout un ordre fondé sur une succession de temps forts. Mais on sait également, grâce aux travaux d'Anne Elisabeth Sejten et Marie Leca-Tsiomis sur la Lettre sur les sourds et muets, que Diderot redéfinit au même moment le rythme poétique d'une manière dont les conséquences vont se montrer encore plus radicales, dans la mesure où cette redéfinition remet en question non seulement la réduction du rythme au mètre mais aussi celle de l'activité du langage à un usage de signes conventionnels [12].

La poésie ne relève plus pour lui, comme le soutiennent encore ses contemporains, d'une série de signes, d'une suite de métaphores visuelles ou même d'une simple succession de mètres, mais d'« hiéroglyphes poétiques », combinant d'une manière harmonieuse les syllabes, que ce soit dans leurs durées, leurs accents ou leurs timbres : « Le discours n'est plus seulement un enchaînement de termes énergiques qui exposent la pensée avec force et noblesse, mais […] un tissu d'hiéroglyphes entassés les uns sur les autres qui la peignent. [13] ». Plus loin : « Je me suis convaincu que [...] l'harmonie syllabique et l'harmonie périodique engendraient une espèce d'hiéroglyphe particulier à la poésie. [14] »

Ces hiéroglyphes transcendent la succession à la fois des signes et des accents de la ligne parlée et ils sont souvent présentés par Diderot sous le signe de la simultanéité comme « la figure qui d'un seul coup visualise et fixe le sens ou le sentiment d'un ensemble textuel » [15]. Mais en réalité, cette simultanéité n'est ni finale ni figurale, mais permanente et génétique. L'hiéroglyphe est coprésent à la succession des moments de la chaîne parlée et constitue comme « un esprit qui en meut et vivifie toutes les syllabes » [16]. Il est un principe d'organisation (au sens actif) à la fois élémentaire et organique qui définit le caractère propre d'un passage voire d'un texte entier. Diderot peut ainsi considérer un poème à la fois comme un « tissu d'hiéroglyphes entassés les uns sur les autres » et comme un seul et unique hiéroglyphe qui les rassemblent tous : « L'emblème délié, l'hiéroglyphe subtil qui règne dans une description entière, et qui dépend de la distribution des longues, et des brèves dans les langues à quantité marquée et de la distribution des voyelles entre les consonnes dans les mots de toute langue : tout cela disparaît nécessairement dans la meilleure traduction. [17] »

Or – et ce n'est évidemment pas un hasard –, cette préoccupation s'inscrit chez Diderot au sein d'une pensée, proche sur ce plan de celle de Leibniz et de Spinoza, qui vise à surmonter les limitations du dualisme cartésien en accordant une part plus importante aux flux de la perception, des affects et des sentiments, mais sans renoncer pour autant à tout ordre rationnel. À la différence de ses deux prédécesseurs, Diderot identifie il est vrai la substance première à « la matière », mais son matérialisme est très éloigné de celui de l'atomisme antique et de son aspect mécanique. À l'instar de ses deux prédécesseurs, il rejette l'opposition de la pensée et de l'étendue, et considère la matière comme une source dynamique d'où émanent non seulement les différents corps mais aussi la sensibilité, l'imagination, la conscience et l'esprit dont ceux-ci sont dotés [18]. Celui-ci ne peut donc pas être réduit à un intellect pur et calculateur, et doit au contraire être saisi comme génétiquement lié aux parts sensible, imaginative et affective de l'âme [19]. On retrouve ainsi, chez Diderot, une interaction entre le corps et l'esprit, qui rappelle la souple « proportion » spinoziste, plus, du reste, que le strict « parallélisme » leibnizien. C'est l'ensemble complexe, c'est-à-dire à la fois unitaire et différencié, formé par l'âme et le corps, qui connaît, apprécie et goûte les choses du monde.

Mais il faut ajouter à cela que Diderot tire aussi de cette stratégie « moniste » les conséquences langagières, que Spinoza n'avait pas encore atteintes, nous l'avons vu, et auxquelles Leibniz avait en partie tourné le dos en privilégiant la recherche logiciste d'une caractéristique universelle. L'existence des hiéroglyphes poétiques montre que le langage n'est pas un instrument composé de signes par lequel l'âme exprime ses idées ou ses sensations, ou reçoit celles exprimées par les autres âmes ; et qu'il n'est pas non plus un écran opaque et fautif qu'il conviendrait de rendre transparent en le réduisant à des nombres et des figures calculables. Lors de l'activité de langage, le son, la sensation, le souvenir, l'imagination et le sens apparaissent ensemble à l'esprit, dans ses différentes facultés, et conspirent à un effet de sens qui est indissociablement poétique et philosophique, esthétique et épistémologique :

C'est lui [l'hiéroglyphe poétique] qui fait que les choses sont dites et représentées tout à la fois ; que dans le même temps que l'entendement les saisit, l'âme en est émue, l'imagination les voit, et l'oreille les entend. [20]

Il n'est donc pas possible de séparer la matérialité des signes, les sensations qu'ils évoquent, les souvenirs et les images qu'il fait apparaître et le travail conceptuel de l'esprit connaissant. Tout cela s'entrelace d'une manière qu'on ne peut redécouper sans mutilation. C'est dans le langage que se fait l'aventure de la pensée qui est aussi indissociablement une aventure du corps :

Pour nos philosophes, ou bien les beautés de la langue poétique ne sont que des mots harmonieux, et ce n'est plus qu'une affaire d'oreille ; ou ces mots parlent à l'esprit, et c'est une affaire d'idées ; dans le second cas on peut toujours faire passer des idées d'une langue dans une autre ; dans le premier, ce n'est que de l'harmonie ou du bruit perdu. Ils ont tort dans l'un et dans l'autre. L'harmonie fait peinture […]. La pensée la plus rare, sans l'harmonie qui lui convient, reste sans effet ; la pensée la plus commune avec l'harmonie qui lui convient, devient une chose rare et précieuse. [21]

Tout se passe donc comme si Diderot complétait – mais aussi, du coup, transformait dans une mesure qui reste à établir – les philosophies de la substance spinoziste et leibnizienne en leur ajoutant le volet langagier qui leur manquait encore. Si une « proportion » ou un « parallélisme » s'établit entre les enchaînements propres aux corps et ceux propres aux pensées, c'est parce que le langage permet cette mise en relation bijective. C'est par l'activité signifiante langagière et seulement par elle, dans la mesure où elle conjoint le matériel et le spirituel, le son et le sens, le corps et l'âme, dans une dialectique matérialiste débarrassée de tout finalisme, que les êtres humains peuvent participer au dynamisme de la ou des substances sous leurs deux attributs, pensée et étendue, et donc comme des sujets dont la liberté et l'objectivité sont à construire, à illustrer et à défendre en permanence dans et par leur commerce avec les autres modes ou monades.

[1] On peut observer à cette époque l'apparition et la disparition plus ou moins rapide de deux constellations de réflexions concernant le rythme : la constellation d'inspiration critique des travaux de Foucault, Serres, Barthes, Deleuze-Guattari et Meschonnic et la constellation d'inspiration phénoménologique, des travaux de Maldiney, Garelli et, d'une manière qui le classe à part, à la fois critique et phénoménologique, de Lefebvre. M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975 ; R. Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble – 1^er cours au Collège de France (1976-77), Paris, Seuil, 2002 ; M. Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce, Paris, Minuit, 1977 ; G. Deleuze et F. Guattari, Mille plateaux, Paris, Minuit, 1980 ; G. Deleuze, L'Image-mouvement, Paris, Minuit, 1983 ; G. Deleuze, L'Image-temps, Paris, Minuit, 1985 ; H. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1982 ; H. Maldiney, Regard, Parole, Espace, Lausanne, L'âge d'homme, 1973 ; J. Garelli, Rythmes et Mondes, Grenoble, Jérôme Millon, 1991 ; H. Lefebvre, Éléments de rythmanalyse. Introduction à la connaissance des Rythmes, Paris, Syllepse, 1992.

[2] P. Sauvanet, Le Rythme grec, d'Héraclite à Aristote, Paris, PUF, 1999 ; P. Sauvanet, Le Rythme et la Raison, Paris, Kimé, 2000, 2 vol. ; C. Couturier-Heinrich, Aux origines de la poésie allemande. Les théories du rythme des Lumières au Romantisme, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2004 ; P. Michon, Rythmes, pouvoir, mondialisation, Paris, PUF, 2005 ; P. Michon, Les rythmes du politique. Démocratie et capitalisme mondialisé, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2007 ; P. Petitier et G. Séginger (dir.), Les Formes du temps. Rythme, histoire, temporalité, Strasbourg, Presse univ. de Strasbourg, 2007 ; C. Doumet et A. Wald Lasowski (dir.), Rythmes de l'homme, rythmes du monde, Paris, Hermann, 2010 ; O. Hanse, À l'école du rythme... Utopies communautaires allemandes autour de 1900, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2011 ; M. Formarier, Entre rhétorique et musique. Essai sur le rythme latin antique et médiéval, Turnhout, Brepols, à paraître en juin 2013.

[3] « Note sur le renouveau des études rythmiques », Rhuthmos, 21 juillet 2010 [en ligne]. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article134

[4] P. Michon, Rythmes, pouvoir, mondialisation, op. cit.

[5] C. Couturier-Heinrich, Aux origines de la poésie allemande. Les théories du rythme des Lumières au Romantisme, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2004 ; P. Michon, « Aux origines des théories du rythme. L'apport de la pensée allemande des Lumières au Romantisme », Rhuthmos, 11 juin 2012 [en ligne]. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article632.

[6] Je prends, comme le fait d'ailleurs Spinoza lorsqu'il discute de l'unicité/unité de Dieu, ces deux termes dans le sens défini par leur opposition et sans préjuger de la nature du « pluralisme » et du « monisme » très particuliers proposés respectivement par Leibniz et Spinoza. Il est clair, par exemple, que ce dernier ne peut pas être réduit, comme on l'a fait régulièrement depuis Hegel, à l'affirmation parménidienne d'une unité et d'une immobilité de la substance. Voir la mise en garde à cet égard de P. Macherey, « Spinoza est-il moniste ? », Spinoza : puissance et ontologie, Kimé, Paris 1994, p. 39-53.

[7] P. Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza ?, Paris, La Découverte, 1979, 2^e éd. 1990.

[8] H. Meschonnic, Spinoza. Poème de la pensée, Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002.

[9] Pour une introduction à la théorie spinoziste du langage, L. Bove, « La théorie du langage chez Spinoza », http://www.spinozaetnous.org/article16.html#r7 (cons. le 25/06/2012).

[10] Je m'appuie ici sur J. Trabant, Traditions de Humboldt, trad. M. Rocher-Jacquin, 1^re éd. all. 1990, Paris, Maison des Science de l'Homme, 1999, duquel je tire la plupart des remarques qui vont suivre.

[11] B. Didier, « Le rythme musical dans l'Encyclopédie », Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, N° 5, 1988, p. 72-90, également sur Rhuthmos, http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article475.

[12] A. E. Sejten, Diderot ou le défi esthétique. Les écrits de jeunesse 1746-1751, Paris, Vrin, 1999. On trouvera la section de ce livre intitulée « Une pensée de l'oreille. L'hiéroglyphe poétique chez Diderot » sur Rhuthmos, http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article484 ; M. Leca-Tsiomis, « Hiéroglyphe poétique. L'oreille et la glose », Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, N° 46, 2011, p. 41-55, également sur Rhuthmos, http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article490.

[13] D. Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, Paris, Flammarion, 2000, p. 116.

[14] D. Diderot, op. cit., p. 133.

[15] A. E. Sejten, op. cit., p. 192.

[16] D. Diderot, op. cit., p. 116.

[17] D. Diderot, op. cit., p. 118.

[18] A. Thomsen, « L'unité matérielle chez la Mettrie et Diderot » in A.-M. Chouillet (dir.), Colloque international Diderot, Paris, Aux amateurs de livres, 1985, p. 61-67, cité par A. E. Sejten, op. cit., p. 178, n. 2.

[19] A. E. Sejten, op. cit., p. 178.

[20] D. Diderot, op. cit., p. 116.

[21] D. Diderot, « Traductions de l'allemand en français de diverses œuvres composées en vers et en prose par M. Jacobi », 1771, AT VI, 425 – cité par M. Leca-Tsiomis, op. cit., p. 52.