1. 1. Only Elizabeth Grosz has dedicated a full-length study to their thinking, which takes place alongside Darwin and in view of a contestatory politics. In shorter form, Pierre Montebello, Arnaud François, and Keith Ansell Pearson and Jim Urpeth all explore the intersection of Bergson’s and Nietzsche’s thought on more specific topics. Otherwise, Bergson and Nietzsche make frequent appearances in the works of joint admirers Gilles Deleuze and Keith Ansell Pearson. I have provided my own English translations for all quotations from Bergson. Unless otherwise stated, the page numbers I cite, for both the quotations themselves and in order to indicate other areas in his work where the same idea or similar is discussed, correspond to the Presses Universitaires de France edition of his complete works, Oeuvres. I have retained the original French titles of his books and essays. Citations from Nietzsche’s unpublished writings refer to his Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, compiled under the general editorship of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. I follow the standard reference procedure of providing the volume number, followed by the relevant fragment number and any relevant aphorism (e.g., 10:12[1].37 refers to volume 10, fragment 12[1], aphorism 37).
2. 2. Throughout the article I will refer to Bergson and Nietzsche in that respective order. This also applies to examples, where pairs of quotes or example concepts, for instance, can be assumed as attributable to Bergson and to Nietzsche respectively (e.g., duration and will to power). This counter-chronological convention simply reflects the order in which I researched them, and not a priority of one over the other.
3. 3. L’évolution créatrice was placed on the Catholic Index of prohibited texts in 1914, the same year Bergson was elected to the Académie Française.
4. 4. Bergson and Nietzsche describe the kind of activity described by mechanical explanations as, respectively, “the fossilised residue of a spiritual activity” (1462) and “the semeiotics of the results” (Will to Power 689). In Nietzsche’s view, on the contrary, “all mechanical occurrences, in so far as a force is active in them, are force of will, effects of will” (Beyond Good and Evil 36).
5. 5. See Bergson’s essay “Le souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance” in Energie spirituelle and Nietzsche’s work Thus Spoke Zarathustra III, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” for their “split” accounts of time.