Imperception

The structural non-givenness of the perceptual levels and backgrounds that make perception possible. "Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of the background" (SW&WE [211]). This is not a deficiency of perception but its constitutive condition: the levels against which divergences are perceived are never themselves given as figures. MP introduces this concept in his 1953 Collège de France course, where it serves as the thesis that unifies the entire rethinking of perception as expression.

Key Points

  • Imperception is the positive complement of écart: if meaning arises as divergence from a level, then the level itself is constitutively imperceptible — it is a site of imperception, not a hidden content waiting to be uncovered.
  • "Consciousness is by definition cross-eyed (louche)" [22] — it has one eye on the figure and another on the background, but cannot focus both at once. This "inverted" or "cross-eyed" consciousness is not a failure but the structural form of all awareness.
  • MP applies the figure-ground structure universally: to perception (the background that makes the figure visible), to psychoanalysis (Freud — jealousy as figure/ground of desire), to ideology (Marx — "truth is not behind ideologies but in their internal movement of realization and destruction" [35]).
  • The concept grounds a "new type of analysis that applies to the understanding itself" 9 — not anti-intellectualism but a radicalization of phenomenological method.
  • Smyth aptly subtitles his Translator's Introduction "Phenomenology of Imperception?" — suggesting the 1953 course inaugurates a project of studying what perception structurally cannot make explicit.

Details

The Structure of Inverted Consciousness

MP's argument unfolds through the simplest Gestalt-theoretical observation: perception involves a figure on a background. But he draws a radical consequence:

"inasmuch as we are in touch with it (inasmuch as it is figure), we are not in touch with it (since there is the implicit background), and inasmuch as we are not in touch with it (inasmuch as we let the background be without thinking about it), we are in touch with it or we reach it (there is figure)" 22

This double movement — contact through non-contact, non-contact as a mode of contact — means that consciousness is never transparent to itself. The background "forms part of the definition of the being" [22], yet it cannot be thematized without becoming a figure and thereby generating a new background.

Application to Freud and Marx

Imperception is not merely a perceptual phenomenon. MP applies it to:

  • Psychoanalysis: "To love X is to love Y that he loves, and this on account of identification" [30]. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are reciprocally implicated as figure and ground — "the truth is not homosexuality all by itself, but homosexuality mediated within an immediate heterosexuality" [30]. The Freudian "unconscious" is not a hidden container but the structural background of conscious life.
  • Ideology: "There is consciousness of the true in the background of false consciousness. (And false consciousness in the background of consciousness of the true: alienation is only deferred, and the process of eliminating it is infinite)" [35]. Speculative philosophy "is false as separate and true as re-integrated into the overall functioning" [34].

In both cases, the structure is the same: what appears as hidden content (the unconscious, the real social relations) is actually the imperceived background of a figure-ground structure. "Consciousness of ambiguity is the opposite of ambivalence" [35].

Relation to Levels and Écart

Imperception is the condition of possibility of écart. Levels — the non-thematic norms against which divergences are perceived — are constitutively imperceptible:

"Vertical and horizontal are not given to us thematically but primarily by the cases where they are disrupted and as levels" [21]

Levels function like dimensions: "To take [anchorage points] as norms is to stop seeing them as figures in order to see them as dimensions" [44]. Once a level is established, it withdraws from thematic awareness — it becomes the transparent medium through which figures are seen.

The Body Schema as Imperceived

The concept reaches its fullest application in the lectures on the body-schema:

"The body schema is not perceived — It is the norm or privileged position in contrast to which the perceived body is defined. It is prior to explicit perception." [112]

The body schema is the paradigmatic case of imperception: it is the ground of all perception (the system of equivalences through which things are perceived) but is never itself perceived as a figure. Like the phonemic system in language, it operates "without explicit knowledge of this principle" 211.

Connections

  • is the structural complement of ecart — écart is meaning as divergence; imperception is the non-givenness of the level from which divergence is measured
  • reworks phenomenal-field — the 1945 "unreflected" (PhP Introduction Ch IV) becomes the 1953 "imperceived"; the shift from epistemological to structural language
  • anticipates visible-invisible — "the invisible as dimension/level/lining of the visible" is the ontological radicalization of the 1953 perceptual thesis
  • anticipates perceptual-faith — the constitutive paradox of perceptual faith (the world is what we see / we must learn to see it) is grounded in imperception
  • contrasts with perceptual-unconscious — Freud's unconscious reconceived as the imperceived background, not a second cognitive system; "there is no unconscious in the Freudian sense" [22]
  • extends passivity — the background's role in perception is a form of lateral passivity: it operates without being willed

Open Questions

  • Imperception and Chouraqui's "less-than-determinacy": Chouraqui 2014 coins "less-than-determinacy" for flesh's mode of being — not fully determinate, not fully indeterminate. This is structurally the same claim: something that is neither fully present nor fully absent. On the Nietzsche side, self-differentiation names the constitutive inner gap between drives (they can never fully coincide). On the MP side, imperception names the constitutive non-givenness of the perceptual ground. "Less-than-determinacy" may be the ontological generalization that covers both.
  • Does imperception resolve or merely rename the problem of the Freudian unconscious? MP's figure-ground model elegantly avoids the "second consciousness" problem, but does it account for the dynamic character of repression?
  • How does phenomenology access what is constitutively imperceptible? MP's answer — through experimental disruption (Stratton, Wertheimer), pathology (Schneider, apraxia), and art — is methodologically suggestive but not defended as a systematic method in this course.
  • What is the relation between imperception and the 1959 retraction of the tacit-cogito? If consciousness is constitutively non-transparent, then the tacit cogito's "pre-linguistic self-presence" is structurally impossible — the 1953 thesis already undermines the 1945 doctrine.

Sources