Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze’s Lecture Course

Deleuze’s 1960 lecture course at l’Ecole Supérieure de Saint-Cloud on chapter three of Bergson’s Creative Evolution is of interest to us today for a number of reasons. The course can be read in the light of Deleuze’s attempt from 1956 to 1966 to demonstrate Bergson’s importance for philosophy (what we might call “the Bergsonian Revolution”). But it also provides a set of revealing insights into the development of Deleuze’s own philosophical project. Not only does it display Deleuze’s tremendous gifts as a pedagogue, it also contains in embryonic and germinal form some of the essential modes of thought that characterize his contribution in the development of philosophy in post-war France. My intention in this introduction is not to provide a commentary on the lecture course. Instead I want to illuminate two topics that occupy an important place in the Bergsonian revolution and which inform and shape Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson, both in the lecture course and in his published writings on Bergson: Bergson’s relation to Kant, and the endeavour to think beyond the human condition.