Mapas, pontos de vista, perspectivas

This essay reviews the genesis of perspective within artistic practices and theories, and considers its developments in philosophy. Nietzsche’s perspectivism fits into this trajectory. The term “perspectivism” designates in Nietzsche the mapping of the modes of interaction and correlation between forms of life. In Viveiros de Castro’s contemporary anthropology, perspectivism is the philosophy elaborated by Amazonian peoples, for whom the world is inhabited by different kinds of subjects or people, human and nonhuman, who grasp realities from different points of view. The work on the multiplicity of nonhuman subjects (or persons) prompts reflection on the cognitive deficits of the human species, which is incapable of perceiving viewpoints, languages and mappings of reality proper to other species.