1.See the list of abbreviations and the bibliography for further details on translations.
2.Roch C. Smith, Gaston Bachelard (Boston: Twayne Publishers, a division of G.K. Hall & Company, 1982).
3.Anton Vydra, “Gaston Bachelard and His Reaction to Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review 47(1) (2014): 46.
4.Ibid., 50.
5.Eileen Rizo-Patron, Editor, with Edward S. Casey and Jason Wirth, Adventures in Phenomenology: Gaston Bachelard (in progress).
6.In an editorial entitled “Rediscovering Gaston Bachelard’s Work,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 301(8) (1993): 819–20, Ron Good argues for a reconsideration of Bachelard’s ideas on science. Such invitations from both the realm of science and the imagination are anticipated or answered throughout the English-speaking world over the last three decades and ground the renewal of interest in Bachelard seen today.
7.Mary Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 229.
8.Mary McAllester, Editor. The Philosophy and Poetics of Gaston Bachelard (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, 1989).
9.Alfons Grieder, “Gaston Bachelard: Phenomenologist of Modern Science,” Ibid., p. 29.
10.Henri Lauener, “Gaston Bachelard and Ferdinand Gonseth: Philosophers of Scientific Dialectics,” Ibid., p. 56.
11.Jean-Claude Margolin, “Bachelard and the Refusal of Metaphor,” Ibid., p. 129.
12.Ibid., 113–14.
13.Ibid., p. 106.
14.Ibid., p. 126.
15.John G. Clark, “The Place of Alchemy in Bachelard’s Oneiric Criticism,” Ibid., p. 135.
16.“Unfixing the Subject: Gaston Bachelard and Reading,” Ibid., p. 150.
17.Mary McAllester Jones, Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist: Texts and Reading (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
18.Ibid., pp. 4, 5, and 15.
19.See pp. 133–34 of the present volume, and Colette Gaudin, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, Selections from Gaston Bachelard (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1987), p. xxxiii.
20.Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, Critic of Science and the Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
21.Cristina Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900–1960s (Farnham, UK, Ashgate, 2008), p. 139.
22.Ibid., p. 9
23.Miles Kennedy, Home, A Bachelardian Concrete Metaphysics (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 1–24.
24.Ibid., p. 108.
25.See François Pire, De l’imagination poétique dans l’oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard (Paris: Corti), 1967, pp. 152–66.
26.Joanne H. Stroud, Gaston Bachelard, An Elemental Reverie of the World’s Stuff (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 2015), xix–xx.
27.Ibid., pp. xxvi and 148.
28.Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Rutledge, 1997, pp. 83–97.
29.Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place, A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 292.
30.Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, Modern to Post Modern, 2nd edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp. 96–119.
31.Ibid., p. 100.
32.James Hillman, “Bachelard’s Lautréamont, or Psychoanalysis without a Patient,” in Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont, Trans. Robert Scott Dupree (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 1986, p. 105.
33.Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, ed. Gaston Bachelard, Science et poétique, une nouvelle éthique? (Paris: Hermann, 2013).
34.Edward K. Kaplan, “Imagination and Ethics: Gaston Bachelard and Martin Buber,” International Studies in Philosophy 35 (1) (2003): 75–88.
35.See Renato Boccali, “L’éthique et la main, Pour une phénoménologie de la rencontre,” Wunenburger, pp. 211–31. Boccali makes no specific reference to Kaplan, but the commonality of certain themes in discussions of Bachelard’s work around the world is clearly in evidence here. Bachelard himself contributed to this opening to the world through his numerous references to writers beyond France, in this case to Martin Buber, having written the Preface to I and Thou, translated to the French by G. Bianquis (Paris: Aubier, 1938). Not incidentally, Boccalli’s essay refers extensively to Bachelard’s commentary on Melville’s Moby Dick in Earth and Reveries of Will.
36.Kaplan, pp. 81 and 85.
37.Eileen Rizo-Patron, “Gadamer and Bachelard in Search of the Living Logos,” Translation and Literary Studies (2012): 54–68.
1.Reported by Pierre Thillet, one of Bachelard’s former students at the Sorbonne, in “Table Ronde: Bachelard et l’enseignement,” in Bachelard: Colloque de Cerisy (Paris, 1974), p. 423.
2.According to Jacques Gagey, who recounts this revealing misunderstanding in his Gaston Bachelard ou la conversion à l’imaginaire (Paris, 1969), p. 8n, the colleague in question had not yet read Bachelard’s book.
3.Gaston Bachelard, “Châteaux en Espagne,” in Le Droit de rêver (Paris, 1970), p. 99–121 (“Castles in Spain,” in The Right to Dream, trans. J.A. Underwood ([Dallas, TX, 1988], pp. 75–90). In the same work, see also Introduction à la dynamique du paysage,” pp. 70–98 (“Introduction to the Dynamics of Landscape,” pp. 55–70), and “‘Le Traité du Burin’ d’Albert Flocon,” pp. 94–98 (“Albert Flocon’s ‘Engraver’s Treatise,’” pp. 71–73).
4.François Dagognet, “Brunschvicg et Bachelard,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 70 (1965): 43–54.
5.For an account of the “situation” of French literary criticism during Bachelard’s lifetime, the reader should consult Laurent Le Sage, The French New Criticism: An Introduction and a Sampler (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), pp. 3–22.
6.Following Bachelard’s own practice, the term “poetry” will be used throughout this study to refer to literature in general. Bachelard has an obvious predilection for poetry, but he does not limit himself to that genre.
7.François Chatelet, “Gaston Bachelard, le prophète,” Arts-Loisirs 843 (November 1961): 15.
8.Albert Flocon, “Le Philosophe et le graveur,” Cerisy (1974), p. 274.
9.Gaston Bachelard, “Le Monde comme caprice et miniature,” in Études [Studies], ed. Georges Canguilhem (Paris, 1970), pp. 25–43.
10.Georges Canguilhem, ed., preface to l’Engagement rationaliste [The Rationalist Commitment] (Paris, 1972), pp. 5–6. Dominique Lecourt, in his Pour une critique de 1’épistémologie (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault) (Paris, 1972), p. 14, sees a common ground among Bachelard, Canguilhem, and French historian of thought Michel Foucault in their antievolutionary view of the history of science. To English-speaking readers this may suggest a correspondence between Bachelard and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structures of Scientific Révolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), but, in an introduction to the English edition of his work, entitled Marxism and Epistemology; Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1975), pp. 7–19, Lecourt insists that, despite surface similarities, there is a fundamental divergence between the “materialism” of Bachelard and the “idealism” of epistemologists such as Kuhn. A rather different position is taken by Michel Vadée, who, in his Bachelard ou le nouvel idéalisme épistémologique (Paris, 1975), sees a fundamental idealism in Bachelard that can bring to a halt “the development of dialectical materialism” (287). Our purpose here is not to sort out the obvious ideological overtones of such questions, but merely to call attention to the continuing intellectual ferment that Bachelard’s thought inspires.
11.For example, Georges Poulet, in “Bachelard et la conscience de soi,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 70 (1965): 1–26, maintains that Bachelard is never simultaneously a scientist and a poet, and Jacques Gagey sees Bachelard’s two directions as complementary (258), while Vincent Therrien speaks of the “profound unity of Bachelard’s thought,” in his La Révolution de Gaston Bachelard en Critique Littéraire (Paris, 1970), p. 66n, and Jean-Claude Margolin in his Bachelard (Paris, 1974) clearly “defends … the thesis of the unity of his thought” (10). More recently, as indicated in our Introduction (page xxvii), Jean Libis argues for Bachelard’s duality.
1.Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée [An Essay on Knowledge by Approximation] (1928; rpt. Paris, 1973), p. 9. Hereafter cited as ECA.
2.Gaston Bachelard, Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique: La Propagation thermique dans les solides [A Study on the Evolution of a Physics Problem: Heat Transfer in Solids] (1928, rpt. Paris, 1973). Hereafter cited as EEPP.
3.Georges Canguilhem, ed., Preface to Études, p. 7.
4.Gaston Bachelard, L’Activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine [The Rationalist Activity of Contemporary Physics] (1951; rpt. Paris, 1977), p. 309. Hereafter cited as ARPC.
5.A position more amply developed by Roger Martin, “Épistémologie et philosophie,” in Hommage à Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1957), pp. 56–69.
6.Dominique Lecourt, L’Épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1969), p. 42.
7.A.P. French, “Einstein—A condensed biography,” in his Einstein: A Centenary Volume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 57.
8.Gaston Bachelard, La Valeur inductive de la relativité [The Inductive Quality of Relativity] (Paris, 1929), p. 25. Hereafter cited as VIR.
9.Colin Smith, “The Role of Reason and the Concept as a Dissimilating Force,” in his Contemporary French Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 108–14.
10.Arthur Stanley Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 181.
11.Ibid., pp. 200–01.
12.Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), p. 41.
13.Gaston Bachelard, Le Pluralisme cohérent de la chimie moderne [The Coherent Pluralism of Modern Chemistry] (1932; rpt. Paris, 1973), p. 7. Hereafter cited as PCCM.
14.Georges Canguilhem, “L’Histoire des sciences dans l’oeuvre épistémologique de Gaston Bachelard,” Annales de l’Université de Paris 33 (1963): 24–39, has shown that Bachelard frequently uses a dialectical history of concepts in his epistemology. He attributes this approach to a predominance of rationalism over empiricism in Bachelard that requires that the past be judged according to contemporary scientific knowledge.
15.Throughout his epistemology, Bachelard frequently refers to the “prescientific” and “scientific” ages. While he normally does not claim a sharp temporal separation between the two and recognizes differences in the various sciences, the prescientific era is usually seen as ending with the eighteenth century, as is the case here. See also Chapter 3, pp. 34–35.
1.Gaston Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1934; rpt. Paris, 1968), p. 3; English translation, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston, 1984), p. 3. Hereafter cited as NSS.
2.For an account of the mathematics involved, addressed “to the liberal arts student and philosophy major as well as to the specialist in mathematics,” p. xi, see David Gans, An Introduction to Non-Euclidian Geometry (New York: Academic Press, 1973).
3.Serge Doubrovsky has pointed out the relationship between the new scientific mind explored by Bachelard and structural linguistics in “La Crise de la critique française,” Nouvelle Revue Française 214 (October 1970): 65–66.
4.Jean Piaget, Le Structuralisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. 6.
5.Ibid., p. 7.
6.In her “Ouverture et mobilité, parole et livre: un essai d’amour écrit,’ “ in Cerisy (1974), pp. 246–58, Mary Ann Caws astutely observes that, for Bachelard, the encounter between science and poetry is not based on general principles that lead to immobility but on specific particulars that lead to openness and dynamism, and whose point of departure is “that of transcendence or project” (248).
7.For an additional discussion of creativity as a link between science and poetry, see E. Mary McAllester, “Unité de pensée chez Gaston Bachelard: Valeurs et langage,” in Cerisy (1974), pp. 91–110.
8.The proverb, “dis-moi qui tu fréquentes, je te dirai qui tu es” (Tell me with whom you associate and I will tell you who you are, or “Birds of a feather flock together”) is frequently paraphrased by Bachelard, no doubt because it readily lends itself to comment about the nature of being.
9.Ann-Marie Denis, “Psychanalyse de la raison chez Gaston Bachelard,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 61 (1963):658.
10.Gaston Bachelard, L’Expriénce de l’espace dans la physique contemporaine [The Experience of Space in Contemporary Physics] (Paris, 1937), p. 56. Hereafter cited as EEPC.
11.Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l’esprit scientifique: Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective (Paris, 1938; rpt. Paris, 1972), p. 11; English translation, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, UK, 2002), p. 22. Hereafter cited as FSM.
12.This discussion is somewhat more specific than earlier ones. See Chapter 2, note 15.
13.Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophie du non: Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris, 1940; rpt. 1975), p. 43: English translation, The Philosophy of No: A Philsophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G.C. Waterston (New York, 1968), p. 36. Hereafter cited as PN.
14.Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué [Applied Rationalism] (1949; rpt. Paris, 1975), pp. 119–37.
15.Gaston Bachelard, Le Matérialisme rationnel [Rational Materialism] (1953; rpt. Paris, 1972), p. 223.
1.Gagey, Gaston Bachelard, pp. 43–48.
2.Gaston Bachelard, Les Intuitions atomistique: Essai de classification [Atomistic Intuitions: An Essay on their Classification] (1933; rpt. Paris, 1975), p. 12. Hereafter cited as IA.
3.Jean-Pierre Roy, in Bachelard ou le concept contre l’image (Montréal, 1977), pp. 17, 18, 46, et passim, argues that when the object of Bachelard’s interest shifts from science to the imagination, there is a corresponding change in method from concept to image, although for Roy this transformation does not occur until The Psychoanalysis of Fire in 1938. Our position is that the transformation begins earlier and that it is not as extreme as Roy suggests until The Poetics of Space in 1957.
4.Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant (Paris, 1932), p. 5; English translation, Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Evanston, Illinois, 2013), p. 3. Hereafter cited as II.
5.Gaston Roupnel, Siloë (Paris: Stock 1927).
6.Henri Bergson, “Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,” in Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 1–157. See also, “L’Évolution créatrice,” in Oeuvres, p. 496 et passim. For a discussion of Bachelard’s relationship to Bergson and others see Mary McAllester, “Polemics and Poetics: Bachelard’s Conception of the Imagining Consciousness,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12 (January 1981): 3–13.
7.Bergson, Oeuvres p. 498.
8.Vadée, Bachelard, p. 124.
9.Ibid.
10.France Berçu, “Les Paradis perdus de Proust et de Bachelard,” L’Arc 42 (1970): 62–68, points out that Bachelard, like Proust, uses musical structures as metaphors when language inadequately conveys the reality of time. This is particularly so in Intuition of the Instant, in which Bachelard also makes several allusions to Proust, including a reference to a “search of lost instants” (II, 27; Fr., 47).
11.Described by René de Costa, in Vicente Huidobro y el creacionismo (Madrid: Taurus, 1975), p. 13, as “simply one more name given to literary cubism,” creationism is primarily a post–World War I, avant-garde, poetic phenomenon whose best known exponent is not Pinheiro dos Santos but the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro.
12.Gaston Bachelard, La Dialectique de la durée (1936; rpt. Paris, 1950), p. 142; English translation, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary Mc Allester Jones (Manchester, UK, 2000), p. 147. Hereafter cited as DD.
13.Julien Naud, in Structure et sens du symbole: L’Imaginaire chez Gaston Bachelard (Tournai and Montréal, 1971), pp. 14, 202–03, et passim, sees a similar opposition between vertical spiritual ascension and a material center in Bachelard’s theory of the imagination. Although he confides that it “is not by the path of science that we wish to enter into Bachelard’s work” (11)—thereby limiting his investigation to Bachelard’s theories of the imagination—our examination of the transitional Dialectic of Duration lends specific support to Naud’s thesis and confirms his largely unexplored hunch that Bachelard’s “studies on the imagination seem born of the continuation of the philosophy of science” (ibid.).
14.In La Poétique de l’espace (Paris, 1957; rpt. 1972), p. 12; English translation, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964), p. xxvi, Bachelard berates psychoanalysis because, in seeing the sublimated image as a symptom of the poet’s repressed past, it “explains the flower by the fertilizer.” Hereafter cited as PS.
15.Bachelard, “The Poetic Moment and the Metaphysical Moment,” in The Right to Dream, p. 178; Fr., p. 232.
16.Paul Valéry, Le Cimetière Marin (The Graveyard by the Sea), ed. and trans. Graham Dunstan Martin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), p. 13.
17.Gaston Bachelard, “Le Surrationalisme” [Surrationalism], Inquisitions 1 (1936); rpt. in L’Engagement rationaliste, p. 12.
18.Valéry, Le Cimetière, p. 15.
1.In an interview with Gilles G. Granger, Paru, January 1947, p. 56, Bachelard indicates, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that he wrote The Psychoanalysis of Fire in order to make use of a good bit of literary material left over from his background reading for The Formation of the Scientific Mind.
2.Gaston Bachelard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris, 1938; rpt. 1949), p. 9; English translation, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston, 1964), p. 1. Hereafter cited as PF.
3.François Pire, in De l’imagination poétique dans I’oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1967), p. 43, calls attention to Bachelard’s independence with regard to Freud and to his affinities with Jung and other, more recent, psychologists.
4.First introduced in The Dialectic of Duration, where an “Orpheus complex” was associated with “a primordial need to please and to console” (DD, 152; Fr., 148), it was then applied, as we have seen, to the realist’s miserly attachment to substance as the “Harpagon complex” in The Formation of the Scientific Mind.
5.In fact, the French, “les axes de la poésie et de la science sont d’abord inverses” (La Psychanalyse du feu, p. 10) is more ambiguous than the English translation (PF, 2) quoted earlier would indicate. Both context and semantics suggest the possibility that this sentence may actually mean that the axes of poetry and science are initially opposed.
6.Georges Poulet, in “Bachelard et la conscience de soi,” finds that this closer identification of subject and object leads to increased self-awareness—a goal that had been unattainable in Bachelard’s epistemology.
7.Gagey, Gaston Bachelard, p. 223.
8.In addition to the four elements, Bachelard muses on the possibility of a psychoanalysis of “salt, wine, and blood” (PF, 5; Fr., 15), while Gilbert Durand, in “La Psychanalyse de la neige,” Mercure de France 318 (1953), p. 628, whimsically suggests that Bachelard’s lowland background prevents him from considering the alpine element of snow.
9.Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont (1939; rpt. Paris, 1951), p. 155; English translation, Lautréamont, trans. Robert S. Dupree (Dallas, TX, 1986), p. 90. Hereafter cited as L.
10.Therrien, La Révolution, pp. 66n, 353. Despite his admirably thorough analysis of Bachelard’s literary criticism and his proposition that there exists a fundamental link between the scientific and literary spirits in Bachelard, Therrien makes no sustained attempt to examine Bachelard’s epistemology, as such. In our view it is important to analyze that epistemology directly, not only if we expect to demonstrate convincingly that such a link exists, but if we hope to understand how Bachelard’s work on the literary imagination both continues and reacts to his epistemology.
11.Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves; Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris, 1942), p. 10; English translation, Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, TX, 1983), p. 7. Hereafter cited as WD.
12.According to Jean-Pierre Roy, Bachelard, (16–17), Bachelard’s avowal of a rationalist goal in Water and Dreams is merely an indication that his duality of method, corresponding to the duality of image and concept, requires constant effort. Yet Bachelard applies his struggle to become a rationalist not only to concepts but to “familiar images” (WD, 7; Fr., 10); his purpose at this point is not to work at maintaining a duality of method, as Roy suggests, but to try to treat the disparate realms of knowledge and imagination rationally. While he admits an unreasoned fascination with water images, his rationalist goal does not change. It is, in fact, the underlying purpose of his entire taxonomy of the four elements.
13.Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1933).
14.Thus in Bachelard’s “Introduction to Chagall’s Bible,” in The Right to Dream, “A single painting possesses inexhaustible eloquence. The colors become words” (18; Fr. 16).
15.Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in Tales of Adventure and Exploration, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry (New York: Scribner, 1914), p. 301.
16.A term applied by Gilbert Durand, in “Science objective et conscience symbolique dans l’oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard,” Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme 4 (1964): 48.
17.Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (The Hague, 1966), p. 16.
18.In his Gaston Bachelard et les elements (Paris, 1967), pp. 146–80, undoubtedly the most extensive analysis of the Elements, Michel Mansuy explores Bachelard’s pioneering work in this area and identifies several “laws” of the imagination, although Bachelard himself is never very systematic in codifying such laws. See also Mansuy’s “Gaston Bachelard et les lois de l’imagination littéraire,” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 4 (1966):103–109, for a similar discussion.
1.Lithuanian-born Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz, known as O.V. de L. Milosz, was reared and educated in France, where he wrote poetry during the first third of the twentieth century. He is the great-uncle of Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel prize for literature.
2.Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les songes; Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (Paris, 1943), p. 10; English translation, Air and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Mouvement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas, TX, 2002), p. 7. Hereafter cited as AD.
3.Jean-Louis Backès, “Sur le mot continuité,” L’Arc 42 (1970): 69–75, calls attention to the fact that, in both science and poetry, Bachelard rejects the notion of continuity when it is immobile but that he sees it in a favorable light when, as is the case here, it is dynamic.
4.Bachelard frequently has been criticized for attributing to every writer what Georges Poulet calls the same “coefficient of genius” (“Kritiker von heute,” Schweizer Monatshefte 44 [1964]: 360). The criticism is undoubtedly deserved and should give pause to those inclined to view Bachelard primarily as a practicing literary critic.
5.Suzanne Hélein-Koss calls attention to the problem of the ingenuous application of Bachelard’s theories in her “Gaston Bachelard: Vers une nouvelle méthodologie de 1’image littéraire?” French Review 45 (1971): 362–64.
6.In the concluding chapter of Earth and Reveries of Will, Bachelard will return to Desoille’s theory when he considers anew dreams of ascent and descent in the context of the terrestrial imagination.
7.Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 12: 218–19.
8.E[ugène] Minkowski in “Vers quels horizons nous emmène Gaston Bachelard?” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 17 (1973):424, sees in Bachelard’s attempt to “repoeticize life” in Air and Dreams, a response to the denudation brought about by discursive thought.
9.Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté: Essai sur l’imagination des forces (Paris, 1948), p. 10. (Also published with the subtitle Essai sur l’imagination de la matière); English translation, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas, 2002), p. 7. Hereafter cited as ERW. The subtitle Essai sur l’imagination de la matière attaches to the earlier L’Eau et les rêves. French publisher José Corti, in an apparent lapse, assigned that subtitle to printings of La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté in the 1990s and early 2000s before returning to the original Essai sur l’imagination des forces [An Essay on the Imagination of Strength], which is how it is currently listed in Corti’s catalog. The translation appears to have been based on the anomalously titled printing. See also Stroud, Gaston Bachelard, An Elemental Reverie, p. 35.
10.The reader interested in exploring further the relationship between Bachelard and Sartre should consult François Pire, De l’imagination, for whom dynamism is the primary element of Bachelard’s poetic imagination (93), and who undertakes a careful comparison of Sartre’s theories in L’Imagination (1936) and L’Imaginaire (1940) with Bachelard’s view on the imagination (152–66). For a similar discussion, see also Ronald Grimsley, “Two Philosophical Views of the Literary Imagination: Sartre and Bachelard,” Comparative Literature Studies 8 (1971): 42–57.
11.For further discussion of Bachelard’s comments on La Nausée, see Mechthild Cranston, “Ding and Werk: Heidegger and the Dialectics of Bachelard’s Image,” Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 32 (June 1979): 1302–37.
12.For a detailed and inspired account of the kinship between Bachelard and the surrealists, particularly André Breton, the reader should consult Mary Ann Caws’s imaginative study on Breton and Bachelard.
13.Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos: Essai sur les images de l’intimité (Paris, 1948), p. 320; English translation, Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas, 2011), p. 234. Hereafter cited as ERR.
14.Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 12.
15.Writing on “Gaston Bachelard” in Modern French Criticism: From Proust and Valéry to Structuralism, ed. John K. Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), Robert Champigny calls Bachelard’s increasing interest in language used aesthetically a “conversion to quality” (184).
16.J. Hillis Miller reached a similar conclusion in his “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1976), in which, with a metaphor worthy of Bachelard, he points out that “the chase has a beast in view. The end of the story is the retrospective revelation of the law of the whole” (69).
1.Such empirical reduction to “external” causes of the phenomenon should not be confused with phenomenological reduction, a process by which the phenomenon, defined in its special relationship of consciousness and reality, is reduced to its own “internal” essence.
2.According to the editor of the English translation of The Poetics of Space, “Eugene Minkowski, a prominent phenomenologist whose studies extend both in the fields of psychology and philosophy, followed Bergson in accepting the notion of ‘élan vital’ as the dynamic origin of human life” (PS, xiin). Bachelard’s previous analysis of time, however, in which he attacked Bergson’s notion of duration, argues against assuming that he borrowed anything more than the term from Minkowski. Reverberation (retentissement) acquires a meaning that fits Bachelard’s own phenomenology in The Poetics of Space.
3.Gabriel Germain, “L’Imagination poétique et la notion de métapsychologie chez Bachelard,” in Cerisy (1974), pp. 182–95. See especially pp. 190–91.
4.Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie (Paris, 1960; rpt.1974), pp. 180-81; English translation, The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston, 1971), p. 209. Hereafter cited as PR.
5.Jean-Pierre Roy sees a “refusal of science” (7) in Bachelard’s adoption of a nonconceptual method when dealing with the image. Left unresolved, given Bachelard’s obvious familiarity with science, is the significance of his methodological choice for literary criticism. This issue will be addressed in our concluding chapter.
6.Early twentieth-century technology literally gives the planet a voice through radio. In “Reverie and Radio,” first published in La Nef in 1951 and later included in the posthumous Right to Dream (167–72; Fr., 216–23), Bachelard explores the essential role of reverie within the “logosphere” of radio. See also, Roch C. Smith, “Bachelard’s Logosphere and Derrida’s Logocentrism: Is There a Différance?” French Forum 10 (1985): 225–34.
7.For Pascal the separation between finesse and geometry is related to the distinction between everyday perception and science: “For it is to judgement that perception belongs, as science belongs to the intellect. Subtlety [finesse] is the business of judgement, geometry of intellect” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma, trans. John Warrington [London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1960], p. 266).
9.Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme d’une chandelle (Paris, 1961), p. 1; English translation, The Flame of a Candle, trans. Joni Caldwell (Dallas, 1988), p. 1. Hereafter cited as FC.
10.In his “Du calcul des improbabilités,” Cahiers Internationaux du Symbolisme 6 (1964):69–87, Bachelard’s longtime friend, the poet Jean Lescure, made passing reference to the manuscript of “The Poetics of the Phoenix,” of which he had custody. He later provided excerpts from the introduction of this work to Jean-Claude Margolin, who included them in his study on Bachelard (97–98). Ultimately, as we shall see below, Suzanne Bachelard, Gaston Bachelard’s daughter, his executor, and a philosopher in her own right, established a text based on available manuscripts from “The Poetics of Fire” and “The Poetics of the Phoenix.”
11.Gaston Bachelard, Fragments d’une poétique du feu (Paris, 1988); English translation, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas, 1990). Hereafter cited as FPF.
1.In The Flame of a Candle, recalling his re-readings of Henri Bosco’s novel Hyacinthe, Bachelard acknowledges that “never have I read in the same way twice. … What a bad professor of literature I would have made!” (73; Fr., 105).
2.Roy, Bachelard, p. 175.
3.E. Mary McAllester makes a similar observation in “Gaston Bachelard: Towards a Phenomenology of Literature,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 12 (April 1976): 96. Her related and fundamental view that Bachelard’s epistemology leads to his phenomenology is quite perceptive, although we would take exception to her arguments purporting to show the directness of such a link based on her reduction, in this instance, of Bachelard’s epistemology primarily to portions of La Connaissance approchée.
4.A possibility Jean Ricardou could not, or would not, foresee when he attacked Bachelard’s hermeneutics in “Le Caractère singulier de cette eau,” Critique 23 (1967): 718–33. See also Tom and Verena Conley’s comment on Ricardou’s observations, in their “Ideological Warfare: Ricardou’s Purge of Bachelard,” Sub-Stance 1 (1971): 71–78.
5.In “A Letter to the Translator,” in his and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital, 2nd ed. (London: NLB, 1977), Althusser points out that while “[t]his term [epistemological break] is rarely to be found as such in Bachelard’s texts … the thing is there all the time from a certain point on in Bachelard’s work. … As for Foucault, the uses he explicitly or implicitly makes of the concepts of ‘break’ … are echoes either of Bachelard, or of my own systematic ‘use’ of Bachelard” (323). The term is related to what we have called Bachelard’s “transcendent science.”
6.Gérard Genette, Figures (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 161.
7.Vincent Therrien identifies eight such methods that, however, “are strongly unified in a ‘coherent pluralism’” (p. 344; see also pp. 195–342).