La pensée de Bergson dans la genèse de la Turquie moderne : un prisme des transitions lexicales, institutionnelles et politiques de la fin de I'Empire ottoman à la Turquie républicaine

Since the 1910s, the reception of the French philosopher Henri Bergson among the mostly Francophone literary elite of the Ottoman Empire established his thought as a tool of the spiritualist reaction to the dominant positivist and materialist paradigm. While one of the first Ottoman readings of his work associated Bergsonian intuitionism with Sufi spiritualism, epistemological and disciplinary dynamics of the late imperial period created the conditions for its evolvement into a new psycho-philosophy. The War of Independence led by the future Ataturk in response to the collapse of the Empire during the First World War found expression in the review Dergah (1921-1923), which erected Bergsonism to the rank of a salvational philosophy. Alternative and spiritualist rationality, mobilization by the elan vital, and intuitionisn as a means of access to knowledge: the registers mobilized by Bergsonians constituted a psycho-philosophical epistemology seductive in times of crisis, which found its institutional counterpart in the Ottoman Darulfunun and during Republican times Istanbul University. After 1923, translations of Bergson accompanied a transposition of his philosophemes into the socio political field: nourishing a spiritualist yet secularized interpretation of the religious, they contributed to an alternative expression, described as conservative, of Kemalist republicanism and the political notion of time. This work questions, by means of the historicization of Bergsonian concepts, the modes in which the philosophical is envisaged as a discourse order that is actualized through epistemological, linguistic, institutional, religious or political shapings.