Perspectivismo amerindio, canibalismo y metamorfosis en Eduardo Viveiros de Castro y Severo Sarduy: hacia una cosmopolítica de la inmanencia neobarroca y latinoamericana

• Main Author: María José Rossi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) 2020-01-01
• Series: Antípoda: Revista de Antropología y Arqueología
• Subjects: cannibalism; eduardo viveiros de castro; metamorphosis; neo-baroque; perspectivism; severo sarduy
• Online Access: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/full/10.7440/antipoda38.2020.02
• ISSN: 1900-5407; 2011-4273

The purpose of this text is to develop and compare the philosophical-anthropological notions of perspectivism, cannibalism and metamorphosis in Cannibal Metaphysics, by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and in various essays and novels by the poet-essayist Severo Sarduy. Both describe universes inhabited by bodies and affections, in which a single plane of immanence folds (Deleuze) multiplying perspectives. The intertextual crossing has the following objectives: to critically review the binary categories of thinking; to formulate a neo-baroque reading / rewriting method; and to propose a cosmopolitics as an affective framework of humans, non-humans, artifacts and things. Methodology: The texts have been approached from a material and productive hermeneutic of immanence. Conclusions: The notion of Amerindian perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro is consistent with the dissemination of the views of Sarduy. In both approaches, the planes are juxtaposed and cross-linked without a guiding center (neo-baroque); the figure of a neutral point of view disappears. In Amerindian cannibalism, the division within the self is realized by the absorption of the other in a ritual of devouring. In the literary anthropophagy, the destitution is given by the power of a narrative plot that swallows the author and turns him into a character. In one case, it is the enemy’s body that is devoured to swallow its relative position and fissure the ego in its unity; in the other, it is the textual body that absorbs and divides. Both positions derive in a cosmopolitics: intersocietary narrative transformations. Originality: The originality of this work lies in the application of the counterpoint method, inspired by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima. Said method allows the emergence of differences and similarities in texts that contrast each other given their origin and register.