Deconstruction and duration are arguably the two most important theories of time to emerge from French philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet, despite the resurgence of interest in Bergson, scholars have ignored Derrida’s own discussions of Bergson, both positive and negative, throughout his career. This lack of attention obscures an important influence on Derrida’s early thought, and hampers our ability to understand the nature of Derrida’s relationship to fields such as new materialism, posthumanism, and affect studies, that frequently turn to (...) Bergson for inspiration. This paper addresses this gap by tracking Derrida’s readings of Bergson and comparing two related pairs of their concepts: duration and différance, and intuition and spacing. The paper concludes by arguing that Derrida’s critical engagement with Bergson leads to an anti-presentist model of life, which gains new relevance in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This essay considers the possibility that prominent theories of the posthuman may draw problematic forms of inspiration from ideas about the "primitive" human. This would complicate how the post in posthuman is defined by current scholarship. It would also suggest that there are potentially concerning racial politics, hitherto unnoticed, embedded within certain modes of posthuman theorizing. In assessing these concerns, the essay develops an analysis of the unexpected racializing and fetishistic dimensions commonly at work in the idea of networks, and (...) looks at the ways networks and new animistic ontologies may in certain ways perpetuate the same Eurocentric humanist biases that they aim to critique. (shrink)