Abstract

For Gilles Deleuze's two essays ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’ and ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, the crucial question is what the perception is, what its fundamental conditions are. A desert island can be a place to experiment on this question. The types of perception are described in many critical works about the history of art and aesthetical reflections by artists. So I will try to retrace some types of perception especially linked to the ‘haptic’, the importance of which was rediscovered by Deleuze. The ‘haptic’ proposes a type of perception not linked to space, but to time in its aspects of genesis. And something incorporeal has to intervene in a very original stage of perception and of perception of time. Thus we will be able to capture some links between the fundamental aspects of perception and time in its ‘out of joint’ aspects.