LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 3 / 2016 – LIFE AND NUMBER 51 The life and the crystal. Paths into the virtual in Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze by GIULIO PIATTI Abstract )n his analysis of memory, (enri Bergson introduces the key concept of Ǯvirtualityǯ, understood as a non - actual reality, an unpredictable and pre-human élan vital. Several years later, the virtual will play a key role in the way that Gilles Deleuze tries t o conceive the notion of a Ǯplane of immanenceǯ, that is, a whole that guides an inexhaustible process of actualisation. Deleuze, however, refers not only to Bergson but to Gilbert Simondon and to his concept of Ǯpreindividual fieldǯ, which corresponds to a metastable state, full of potential energy, from which a structured process can arise. This article undertakes an analysis of the different theoretical pathways leading to the concept of the virtual in Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. It will investigate the transformations of this concept by focusing on the memory of the present individuated by Bergson, then applied to the cinema of the time- image by Deleuze, and on the figure of the crystal as an emblematic materialisation of the virtual, deeply present in the philosophy of both Deleuze and Simondon. The intention is to show – apart from the inevitable differences ‒ the significant continuity between these three authors, who share a common attempt to build an affirmative ontology of life. Combined Bergsonian and Simondonian influences lead in Deleuze to a metaphysics of becoming, where virtuality is always on the point of actualising itself in percepts, affects and concepts. Bergsonian virtuality: from the memory to the universe After presenting his theory of perception, in the second and third chapter of Matter and memory, Henri Bergson introduces the key concept of «pure memory» (2007: 92). Since, in everyday life, perception and memory appear always as indistinguishable, bergsonian methodology, a truly superior kind of empiricism (Deleuze 1991: 133), attempts to dissociate the two lines of tendencies as they appear in usual experience, in order to better show their coalescent nature in the phenomena in which they appear as mixed (Bergson 2007: 103). In other words, between matter and memory there is, according to Bergson, a difference in kind, not in degree: «each time we think in terms of more or less we have already disregarded the differences in kind between two orders, or between beings, between existents» (Deleuze 1991: 20) 1 . As a matter of fact, memory, according to Bergson, is double: on the one hand, there is an impersonal pure memory that registers every event of our life; and, on the other hand, there is also a «habit-memory», situated in the sensorimotor mechanisms of the 1 Bergson will eventually demonstrate, in the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory, that the difference in kind between matter and memory becomes, in the end, a virtual co-existence of the two components: matter is not an inert state, while memory is not just a spiritual entity (Bergson 2007: 233-298).