Crossing Fires Between Deleuze and Viveiros de Castro: A Cartography for Decolonizing Thought

Abstract

The present article intends to embody a political practice of decolonization based on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In order to do so, we will first address Deleuze’s unique conception of the notion of concept and its primordial link with philosophical practice. For the French philosopher, doing philosophy consists in incubating a conceptual creation from an outside. This will lead us to somewhat unexpected drifts. Indeed, its theoretical-practical basis not only justifies, but in our opinion forces us to establish monstrous alliances between Deleuze’s own theoretical machinery and other tribes that are alien to him. Now, is it not the outside experienced by some anthropologies that best challenges the common perimeters of meaning, that is, our most hackneyed onto-epistemologies? Guided by this hypothesis, we will try to gather, throughout the third section, the anthropological tools that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “Amerindian perspectivism” brings into play, the result of long coexistence with indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. Along the way, we will find in the notion of “forced disorientation” not only a key of intersection between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro, but also a powerful instrument for inoculating differences in thought. We will see that both authors conceive their disciplines as a fundamental experience of dispossession. Finally, we will analyze the concept of “point of view” thrown up by this philosophical-anthropological practice.