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Our article takes up the distinction between milieu and ambiance that Leo Spitzer studied in his time. It aims to emphasize the difference between an objectivist conception of the environment and a conception that leaves room for the affective resonance of what surrounds us. The milieu is a medium made sensitive by its affective and influential presence. To this end, our work questions Augustin Berque’s concept of “mediance,” which claims to reform the overly physicalist and deterministic concept of milieu, and nevertheless shows its limits, by arguing for a mediality based on ambiance that would be definitively detached from references to the subject-object structure and the idea of a psycho-physical conditioning of the milieu.