Georges Vigarello, Le Sentiment de soi. Histoire de la perception du corps (Éditions du Seuil, 2014) 336 pp. €.23.00 ISBN: 2020898942
Building upon his life-long corpus of work on the history of the body, Georges Vigarello’s Le Sentiment de soi offers a captivating historical account of the evolving perception of the human body from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. A pioneer in his field of research, Vigarello affirms that ‘there is nothing more historical than this sensory universe, with its mix of intimacy and darkness, but also the sense of self and work on the self’ – a conviction transparently expressed in Le Sentiment de soi.[1]
In his attempt to retrace the genesis of the body’s cohesion to the feeling of ‘self’, Vigarello offers a thoroughly assembled study of bodily feelings as transmitters of interior messages. In the first part of the book, Vigarello depicts the paradigmatic rupture in the widespread perception of the body. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the external senses – namely, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch – were mostly seen as ‘satellites’ of the body, or a window through which one could acquire information from the external world. In this sense, the internal existence can sustain itself independently of the body, and the ‘self’ exists as ‘conscience’ or ‘spirit’. With the dawn of the eighteenth century, Vigarello uses Denis Diderot’s oeuvre ‘Lê rêve de d’Alembert’ (D’Alembert’s dream) to illustrate the transition of a Cartesian ‘je pense donc je suis’ to a new ‘je sens donc je suis’ (11, 26). Indeed, Diderot expresses how deeply related are the perceptions of the body to the perceptions of the ‘self’; in his reasoning, the experiences enabled by the senses, and not the thought, are the source for the formation of an individual. Still in the eighteenth century, experimentation in animal physiology was receiving more and more space, and scientific terms were incorporated into discussions about behavior, personality, and ultimately the ‘self’. It was during this time that the organic body was then taken as the fundamental that allows for the sense of existence – thus turning the body into an extension more than an involucrum of the ‘self’.
The second part addresses new reflections brought to light in the nineteenth century. The body starts to be perceived as indissociable from the ‘self’; it is then that the term ‘cenesthesia’ gets traction, describing a manner of experiencing the body as an internal and cohesive unity. The sense of existence becomes related to the sense of agency over the ‘self’, and the internal senses emerge as a condition for the external. In medical practice, doctors were performing what we now call ‘anamnesis’, analyzing the body and identifying symptoms sometimes not yet felt by the patient; concomitantly, the analysis of the body was taken to the psychological level, and internal sensations were thought to be reflected in behaviors, morals, and even the ways of experiencing oneself. The exploration of internal sensations walks side-by-side with the Romantic tradition of centrality in the personal experience, and looking so thoroughly at the body gives rise to the search for new and different ways of experiencing it. Bodily sensations turn into a hot issue and are given full attention in the account of personal experiences. Dolmancé de Sade writes narrow descriptions of pleasure during a sexual experience, while Théophile Gautier and Stendhal both provide eroticized descriptions of everyday simple acts. George Sand expresses the suffering brought by the lack of pleasure, marking a revolutionary work of a woman revealing such personal experiences in a male-dominated space. Alexandre Dumas, on the other hand, brings novelty by linking the experience of the self to the association with the body of another. Thomas De Quincey, in his turn, provides a groundbreaking work on the description of opium use, followed by many authors and artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, and Alexandre Dumas. Thomas De Quincey’s oeuvre is especially significant herein because it takes the opium from the medical practice into aesthetic and intellectual experience, thus bringing the focus solely to internal perceptions arising from the sensible ‘self’. Mental disorders also started to integrate the whole of pathological possibilities of the organic body, and the connection to childhood experiences with later life’s behavior and mood gained traction throughout the nineteenth century. The idea of a psychological space grew stronger, engendering personal affectivity, individual dispositions, and mental spaces – the consciousness was made psychological and hence the body was taken as a ‘representation’.
In the third and last part of the book, Vigarello marks the opening of the first chapter by introducing Marcel Proust’s conception of the senses as giving life to the body. According to Proust, the senses are the basis for the creation of a personal singular world, and every sensation is by itself an experience of the ‘self’. In this framework, it is through the external that internal senses are formed, and both are so closely tied as to become one. The twentieth century brings the conception of a mutual relation between them – not only that the external gives rise to the internal, but that the internal also directly affects the perception of the world and the ‘self’. Terms such as ‘surmenage’ and ‘neurasthenia’ are ascribed to a mental burden created by the hyperexcitability of the senses – many times related to modern urban life. Therewithal, excessive mental burden began to be thought of as the cause for many altered sensations, such as muscular and mental fatigue, sensory hypersensibility, tremors, and many others. In Proust’s account, the body even keeps memories forgotten by the ‘spirit’. In the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the idea of an ‘unconscious’ starts to be delineated, which means that sensible experiences could alter the body even if unnoticed. Childhood traumas, for example, could be linked to the body causing convulsion crises, as proposed by Désiré Bourneville. By the mid-to-end twentieth century, Vigarello argues for a whole new culture of the body. The goal is no longer to experience different bodily sensations, but primarily to practise other modes of being. Both the body and the mind become objects of ‘training’, either through physical activities, sports, or new relaxation techniques, for example. Through art, the body can turn into a means for self-expression, for the transgression of traditional values. The body can also be made into a tool for trespassing economic social barriers, and the prevailing idea of ‘investing in the “self” for work’ (293-95) turns into a leitmotif of economic discourse.
As Vigarello skillfully demonstrates, a whole new sensitive realm emerged from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The narrative offered in Le Sentiment de soi is as compelling as it is fastidiously crafted. Vigarello uses his signature engaging style to tackle the task of proposing a pertinent genealogy of the ‘self’. Despite its Francocentric focus, the book’s breadth and depth make it a significant contribution to understanding the foundations of modern self-perception. Vigarello’s thesis is coherently built upon not only a historical approach to the bodily ‘self’, but also on philosophical and literary perspectives on the same issue. The book, therefore, stands out in the current literature as a unique and uniquely successful work. Vigarello leaves readers with a profound appreciation of the complex history of body and identity, while also eagerly hoping for further explorations of these themes in the future.
Bruna Lopes Resende, Federal University of Minas Gerais
[1] Georges Vigarello, ‘Inner senses and their old markers’, in Cultural History in France: local debates, global perspectives, ed. by Evelyne Cohen, Anäis Fléchet, Pascale Gœtschel, Laurent Martin, and Pascal Ory; trans. by Andrew Hill and Rosine Feferman (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), pp.87-95 (p.87).
