‘Gaston Bachelard, half-way between science and the object’ (A matter of Bergsonian and Bachelardian judgement)

Abstract

In a recent book published in Montreal, Bachelard ou le Concept Contre l'image, Jean-Pierre Roy suggests that idealists have in recent years attempted a recouping of Bachelard’s works in a way that would proceed from “a humanist ideology of literature” (1977, p.203) and he mentions Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard and Paul Ricoeur. Indeed he sees a rupture between Bachelard’s approach to works of art and his epistemology, which would place him in the camp of rigorous knowledge, and Jean-Pierre Roy refers to Barthes, Genette and Derrida (1977, p.219). The author of the book concludes that the poetics of Bachelard belong to a time which is anterior to that of his epistemology. This is of course a verdict which allows for the rejection of a mode of thinking which belongs to the past and which cannot be seen flourishing in the future channels of what Marxists hold as the sense of history.