Bergson and Affect

This book is a philosophical study of the concept of affect in the thought of Henri Bergson. It provides an account of the place and evolution of the idea throughout Bergson’s works and argues that an understanding of the changing nature of this central concept reveals important ruptures in Bergson’s own philosophical development. As Bergson shows, affectivity plays a central role in philosophical thinking about consciousness. In his early work, Bergson’s describes an embodied, temporal subject whose very subjectivity relies on a productive notion of affectivity. As his thought develops, however, Bergson’s metaphysics take an increasingly utilitarian turn characterized by the minimization of affectivity. Through a series of transformations, disappearances, and displacements, affectivity comes to qualify the way Bergson understands everything from the body, to subjectivity, to life as such. The book concludes by discussing the pivotal role these ideas played in how Bergson was received by 20th Century phenomenology.

Author Biography

Miguel José Paley is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research explores the ideas of affectivity, subjectivity, and the body with particular focus on the thought of Henri Bergson and phenomenology. His publications include Affect, Utility, and Self-Constitution. A Bergsonian Reading of Whitehead and Levinas (Bergsoniana, 2022), The Concept of Substitution in Bergson and Levinas in The Bergsonian Mind (Routledge, 2021) and Bergson and Levinas on the Genealogy of Mind (Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, 2017).