Perception and the production of exteriority: vision, body, and being-in-the-world

Abstract

Perception presents the world as external, although what we see depends on processes and mediations that do not appear as such within the experience of seeing itself. Starting from this paradox, the article traces, across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the transformations undergone by the opposition between interiority and exteriority. Neurobiological accounts of vision move perception away from a model of simple copying; habit, action, and perspective call into question the stability and neutrality of the perceived world; phenomenology relocates the body within the sensible field itself; and psychoanalysis introduces the psychic work of differentiating perception, representation, desire, and reality, as well as the decentering of the subject within the field of the gaze. These registers do not constitute stages of a single mechanism. Through different paths, they bring into view a perceptual experience inseparable from the embodied condition of the perceiver and, at the same time, open to a world that cannot be reduced to the perspective from which it is encountered. The contrasts with the camera and with dreaming show, in inverse ways, that neither the production of images is sufficient to constitute a lived world, nor does the force of reality by itself guarantee the presence of an external object. The article argues that exteriority need not be understood as a passage from an internal construction to a world located “outside,” but rather as a dimension of a relation in which what is perceived, although accessible only from an embodied perspective, is not exhausted by that perspective. The world can thus be inhabited and shared without ceasing to exceed any singular perspective.