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In Revolutionary France after the Terror, a debate divides anatomists on the issue of the residual persistence of thought and feeling in the human heads after decapitation. Movements on the face had been observed after the execution. What do they signify? What survives in the head? Does only irritability survive or do sensibility and consciousness also survive? The passive experiment offered by the guillotine dramatically questions the biological mode of existence of the unity of consciousness. Against Samuel Thomas Sömmerring’s thesis advocating a cerebral localization of the conditions of sensibility and consciousness, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis tries to redefine the self as a harmonious totalization of the particular lives of all the fibers of the body.