Schizoanalysis and Bergsonism: Matter, Machine, and Abstract Animal.

In this article, I show how an examination of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the abstract machine, can help us understand the relation between matter and mind. I expound Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s method, and specifically how his concept of heterogeneous multiplicity, which corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s machine, progresses throughout Bergson’s philosophy. I explain how this notion — which for Bergson indicates psychological time or durée, movement, as well as the élan vital or the original impetus of life — overcomes the body–mind distinction. I argue, like Deleuze and Guattari, that Bergson develops a machinic worldview, according to which matter always already contains mind, at least virtually, as a ghost waiting to materialize. A description of Bergson’s notion of élan vital then allows me to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine in its relation to its concrete productions. I address the concept of becoming-invisible, as well as of the abstract Animal, the abstract machine of the organic stratum, and its relation to the idea of a diagram or map, which is central to the schizoanalytic project.