Meeting with Camille Chamois. “Are other worlds possible?”

What first awakened your interest in metaphysics?

I became interested in this question in the mid-2000s (so rather late), when I was confronted with what then appeared to me as a paradox.

On the one hand, I discovered that there was indeed a very active contemporary metaphysical scene (contrary to what the Heideggerian or Derridean tradition had led me to imagine). In this respect, the work of Elie During was decisive for me, in his ability to hold together authors as distant as Mollâ Sadrâ and Étienne Souriau¹.

On the other hand, I encountered an ethnological practice that consisted in comparing the “implicit metaphysics” embedded in ways of thinking and speaking — and the great tradition of metaphysical comparativism, from Benjamin Lee Whorf to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, immediately fascinated me².

Discovering these two largely opposed approaches at roughly the same time led me to formulate a problem (a “meta-metaphysical” one, if one is not afraid of portmanteau words): should we practice “metaphysics” or study “metaphysicses”? How can we articulate the “critical” and “ontological” dimensions to which the term “metaphysics” may refer (in admittedly contradictory ways)? The question of “perspectivism,” on which I later worked, was for me a way of posing this problem at the crossroads of these two approaches.

Which authors have had a lasting influence on you?

Like many people of my generation, I believe, I had to position myself in relation to three major currents.

First, a properly speculative current, dominant in the contemporary French publishing scene, which thought being head-on, the “world without us” or the great outdoors, and which was already connecting with artistic research³.

Second, a more resolutely analytic current, which presented itself rather as a grammar of being and which mainly played a critical, regulatory role with respect to the first corpus mentioned⁴.

Finally, a current more directly linked to the philosophy of science, which conceives metaphysics as a “second philosophy,” that is, as a theoretical effort to formalize what other discourses (in this case scientific ones) discover⁵.

If these three currents continue to fascinate me, it is undoubtedly in the third that my own work is situated. In this respect, the influence of Gilles Deleuze is certainly the most obvious, if one sees him as a philosopher who seeks to account as precisely as possible for certain scientific works of his time (linguistics, psychoanalysis, etc.) and for the way in which they force us to renegotiate certain major theoretical categories (first and foremost those of “difference” and “repetition”).

Which metaphysical problems most deeply engage you?

My work revolves around the notion of “perspective” or “point of view.” When we say that someone else has “another point of view than mine,” what exactly are we talking about? My intuition (quite banal in this field) is that if “point of view” is only a vague synonym for “opinion,” then it has no interest at all.

I therefore try to define a robust concept of “point of view” that assumes the existential dimension of the notion and attempts to clarify two things. First, the nature of the correlate: if we are points of view, what are we “open” to, and what does “open” mean here? Second, the nature of communication: how do points of view relate to one another? In keeping with the idea of metaphysics as a “second philosophy” mentioned above, most of my work belongs rather to the philosophy or epistemology of science; but at a certain point I am led to renegotiate a number of properly speculative metaphysical categories.

This is where the connection with Deleuze’s philosophy takes place for me. Let me give an example. In Deleuze’s analysis, the “other’s point of view” is conceived as “another possible world”⁶.

With this author, we thus witness a strange coupling between a theory of intersubjectivity inspired by Sartre (where one seeks to describe the effect on me of the other’s gaze) and the traditional metaphysical problem of modal realism. Setting aside the phenomenological questions this raises, the metaphysical issue that emerges is the following: what does “possible” mean when one describes the other as “another possible world”? Two elements seem crucial here.

On the one hand, Deleuze tries to convince us that reality is composed of a diversity of “points of view” or “worlds” that do not overlap or converge harmoniously but rather communicate through a series of partial connections (in the form of a “chaos”). In Deleuze’s strategy of presentation, this idea can be understood by placing it within the history of continental philosophy, where Nietzsche and Whitehead intervene as correctives to Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds: rather than thinking that there was a plurality of possible worlds that could exist and that only one passed into existence (Leibniz), we should instead think that a plurality of worlds co-exist and communicate through modes of relation for which we are responsible for giving an account ⁷.

The theoretical challenge then consists in specifying the modes of “prehension” (in Whitehead’s sense) of one point of view upon another — in short, we must develop a logic of the communication of points of view (if the term “communication” is not taken too irenically). This is what I attempt in a forthcoming book ⁸.

On the other hand, Deleuze pursues a more subterranean aim: he draws our attention to the fact that reality is teeming with possibilities of immanent transformation into which it may (sometimes) be worthwhile to plunge. This leads him to transform the theory of “possible worlds” in what I would call a “realist” or “immanentist” direction. Let me explain.

In his modal semantics, Saul Kripke showed that ordinary language constantly resorts to the idea of other possible worlds in order to think a whole series of counterfactuals — that is, what would have happened if… And David Lewis, in a remarkable speculative move, advanced arguments in favor of the existence of such possible worlds ⁹.

The notion of “possible world” thus designates alternative sets or situations to the current one to which we can connect through thought. With Deleuze, however, things are quite different. Other “possible worlds” are not merely speculatively thought: they are perceived, lived, and constitute a fundamental coordinate of our psychic life. These other possible worlds phenomenally appear (in particular modalities that must be described, such as this face that I perceive as perceiving what I myself do not perceive). It is therefore not our speculative thought that constitutes the modality of “connection” to other possible worlds, but our sensibility (that is, both our perception and our affectivity). It is up to us to think such a theory of the sensible plurality of possible worlds without reducing modal theory to an inadequate notion of possibility…

What led you to undertake the writing of this book?

The work we carried out with Didier Debaise around the volume Perspectivismes métaphysiques stems from a simple observation: the reflections I have just outlined are by no means shared by many colleagues who nonetheless consider that they work on “perspectivism.” It thus seems that the notion of “perspectivism” is subject to a kind of theoretical vagueness that leads to grouping under this label problems that have nothing to do with one another (which is not a problem), but which can sometimes parasitize one another (which is more troublesome).

The aim of the book is to present the different contemporary meanings of the notion of “perspectivism” in order to discuss their respective merits — and, in doing so, the coherence of the concept of “perspective.” Briefly: I believe that the term refers, in an unstable way, to at least three types of theoretical models.

First, it is a matter of elaborating a notion of “intentionality” or “psyche” that applies to all beings. At this point, the notion resonates strongly with contemporary panpsychist or animist metaphysics that “postulat[e] the proto-psychic properties of matter only because they are needed to explain the emergence of consciousness at higher levels of organic complexity” ¹⁰.

Second, the term is mobilized to emphasize the intrinsically relative and situated character of any referential claim, and thus to neutralize certain classical realist ambitions. For example, many authors insist on the strict separation between the domain of facts, which belongs to ontology, and that of their interpretation, which belongs to epistemology. “Perspectivism” blurs this divide by insisting on the irreducible framing effects presupposed by the identification of any fact.

Finally, a third set of problems concerns the structure of reality: if each perspective opens onto its own point of view, what is the form of reality or of the Whole? We are accustomed to thinking this totality under the classical forms of the world or the object (as a synthesis of points of view). But this is far from self-evident: can we really conceive reality as a continuous structure, or must we admit the existence of “holes” and the possible incommensurability of perspectives? If one follows this path, perspectivism would rather lead to a “fragmentalist” position concerning the structure of reality ¹¹.

These three types of problems — which the notion of “perspectivism” points to in contemporary metaphysics — are themselves subdivided into many sub-problems that risk obscuring the coherence of the category of “perspective.” The aim of the book is therefore to try to clarify these different meanings; and my personal contribution consists in situating the specifically Deleuzian stake within this broad constellation.

Footnotes

1. see, for example, the anthology: E. During, La métaphysique, Paris, Flammarion, 1998[↩]
2. E. Viveiros de Castro, Métaphysiques cannibales. Lignes d’anthropologie post-structurale, Paris, PUF, 2009[↩]
3. I am thinking of speculative realism, and more specifically of Graham Harman’s “polypsychist” model, which occupied me greatly. On the link with artistic practices, see for example: R. Khazam (ed.), Objets vivants, Sesto S. Giovanni, Mimesis, 2023[↩]
4. C. Tiercelin, Le Ciment des choses, Paris, Éditions d’Ithaque, 2011[↩]
5. B. Latour, Enquête sur les modes d’existence : une anthropologie des Modernes, Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 2012[↩]
6. I developed this point in: C. Chamois, Un autre monde possible. Gilles Deleuze face aux perspectivismes contemporains, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022[↩]
7. this strategy of presentation runs from Logique du sens to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, via Le pli[↩]
8. C. Chamois, Points de vue, Paris, Seuil, 2026[↩]
9. on the scientific stakes of this problem: Q. Deluermoz and P. Singaravelou, Pour une histoire des possibles. Analyses contrefactuelles et futurs non advenus, Paris, Seuil, 2016[↩]
10. T. Nagel, L’esprit et le cosmos : pourquoi la conception matérialiste néo-darwinienne de la nature est très probablement fausse, Paris, Vrin, 2018, p. 94[↩]
11. K. Fine, “Tense and reality,” in Modality and Tense, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 261-320[↩]