fact (it can, when we’re aware of it, cause insomnia): our brain can only imagine its abode on the top of our body – it is not known directly, and any effort to touch a temporal lobe is irrevocably doomed to failure. We cannot begin to imagine the experience. The title of a famous article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’1, 1974, articulated, in a humorous – in order to downplay – and global way, the difficulty in representing a perception that is foreign to us: we know that the bat has a sense of which we are deprived, and that scientists compare to radar (it enables the animal to detect obstacles in the dark). But we will never know what it feels like to live with an addi-tional sense, or a sense of which have been deprived since birth; whether we are in full command of our faculties, or whether life or an illness has deprived us of a particular perception, the only way

we have of approximating the experience that is lacking is called art in our society today: ultimately it is the whole reasoning behind this multi-faceted discipline, to move between the sensitive and intelli-gible, the objective and subjective, and to frequent the unknowable – to ‘see with your eyes closed’, to resume or parody the title (strictly: Celui qui voit les yeux fermés/The one who sees blindly) of a set of pieces produced by Nathalie Talec at the Manufacture de Sèvres in 2011.

They are biscuit porcelain copies of the bust of a young girl, part of the Manufacture collections, and modified by the artist: after carefully moulding it, the artist ‘rectifies’ it (the word is discon-certing, but it is simply one that Marcel Duchamp uses to designate objects or images that he has put to new use) by closing the eyes of the child: this gesture, paradoxically, gives the face much more life than contriving to sculpturally repre-sent an iris with a hollow, and a pupil with

as intelligent beings, conscious of their status, allows us to dream that this was no abdomen and womb, but rather a grand cranial fortress. And yet… If there is one especially puzzling enigma about our organism, it is the sensitive inca-pacity of this viscera, the brain, that is nonetheless where all messages – visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tac-tile – are filtered without which thinking would have no raison d’être (unintelligible beyond sensitivity: the aim of Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voyent (Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can see), was to prove it). The convolutions of brain matter, of which we are so proud, are not even capable of feeling the walls sheltering them and ensure their integrity, imper-meability and regularity… We can cover our ears or hold our noses and shut our eyes: there is nothing more to compre-hending being deprived of one or several senses, than imagining this very simple