Delivered by Dr Rebecca Hill (RMIT)
"Feeling make you": Neidjie’s teaching of Country and Bergson’s vision of Maternal Love
This lecture offers a reading of Bunitj clan elder Bill Neidjie’s teaching of Country in Story About Feeling and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s “fleeting vision” of “certain forms of maternal love” as an intuition of the “essence of life” in Creative Evolution. These two thinkers belong to vastly different traditions, and each thinker describes a world that is irreducible to the world of the other. Despite this divergence, both philosophers explicitly contest the enframing of world materialized in industrial modernity and techno-capitalism. I also claim there is a common resonance in their respective elaborations of onto-ethics. Neidjie teaches of the fundamental obligation to care for Country, to love the world. He stipulates that to care for Country is to feel the fundamental mysterious force of feeling that makes the world. Bergson’s Creative Evolution is a work of western metaphysics that strives to think the essence of life through a method of affective intuition. This project has an ethical orientation, and it is the ethical dimension of Bergson’s affective intuition that I seek to relate to Bill Neidjie’s thought. I read Bergson’s “fleeting vision” of “certain forms of maternal love” among many animals and among plants “in solicitude for … [their] seed” as an avowal of a trans-individual and trans-species ethic affirming the creating and nurturing of the coming of life. I suggest that this ethic has an affinity with Neidjie’s teaching of care for Country.
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