Camille Chamois

This article is an analysis of a collection of articles published by Gilles Deleuze in 1953 under the direction of Georges Canguilhem. This collection, which has been little read and commented upon, sheds light on the intellectual trajectory of its author by underlining the theoretical hesitations that were his. I show that Deleuze then outlined an ambitious “psycho-sociological” project that he never fully realized. To do this, I reconstitute the psychological and ethological subtext of the book by following his sources; I thus bring to light real theoretical positions often unnoticed in his work (in particular with respect to Henri Bergson, Jakob von Uexküll, and gestaltpsychology). I then argue that the difficulties linked to the theory of perception lead Deleuze to turn away from this project in order to devote himself to more specifically ontological problems. However, I suggest that these difficulties persist throughout Deleuze's works, where notions such as “sign” and “semiotics” both cover and avoid specifically perceptual problems.

This paper by Camille Chamois examines the role played by the notion of “impersonal” in Michel Tournier’s work. The notion is present in the title of the article “L’Impersonnalisme”; however, it is absent from the text itself. We show that Tournier’s article can be compared with three corpuses: the analysis of the “impersonal consciousness” in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century; the Sartrean theory of an “impersonal field of consciousness”; and the Deleuzian theory of a “field of experience”.

Selon Félix Guattari les systèmes de coercition matériels sont progressivement remplacés au XX e siècle par des techniques de « modelage des systèmes perceptifs », à la fois plus douces et plus prenantes. Pour rendre compte de cette théorie de la socialisation de la perception et des ses enjeux socio-politiques nous nous focalisons sur la perception du visage d’autrui en soulignant l’ensemble des biais perceptifs (notamment racistes) identifiés par Guattari. Une étude approfondie des modalités d’apprentissage perceptif permet d’actualiser une dimension souvent inaperçue de la pensée de Guattari.

This article underlines the relevance of Mikel Dufrenne's early works (published between 1946 and 1953) for contemporary social sciences. Indeed, Dufrenne was interested in American cultural anthropology, and in Abram Kardiner's concept of “basic personality” in particular. Dufrenne tested Kardiner's concept against Kant's transcendental tradition and the phenomenological theory of Mitsein (the concept of being-with). More importantly, in this article, I demonstrate that Dufrenne's project raises the psychological question of the historicity of categories of experience.

In Naissance de la clinique, Michel Foucault develops a theory of the socialization of perception called “archaeology of the medical gaze.” According to this model, the everyday gaze is conditioned by a perceptual code that determines both the features worthy of attention and the meaning to be attributed to them, called “regimes of visibility.” The aim of this article is to describe the interests and difficulties of such a project. I will show that Foucault does not develop any real theory of perception, which weakens his model in two ways: first, at the theoretical level, it leaves aside the question of the transformation of the perceptual code that has been brought to light; second, at the empirical level, it is unable to account for contemporary ethnographies of medical practice.