Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Partages de la Perspective

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0961754x-9268249

1538-4578

Thibault De Meyer,

French Literature and Criticism

Abraham Bosse (c. 1604–76) was a well-known French printmaker and a zealous propagator of Desargues's perspectival technique, which basically was an elaboration of the linear perspective invented by Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. For a book of 1647 called The Universal Technique of M. Desargues, Bosse made an etching, untitled but commonly referred to as Les perspecteurs, in which we see an almost empty space with three well-dressed men placed at different distances and in different orientations. They seem to look for something to paint, since they are represented each with an “eye pyramid.” The top of the pyramid—Desargues called it “le rayonnement de la vue” (the radiation of the gaze)—is the point between the two eyes. That point is connected by straight lines to the four corners of the supposed visual field of the viewer. This pyramid is meant to help the artist to calculate the right proportions for the objects in his paintings.Emmanuel Alloa uses this image to illustrate a problem often associated with perspectivism in philosophy: in Bosse's etching, the men do not see one another; their gazes do not meet; each seems to live in a separate world. Those men embody the “banal” or “weak” conception of perspective that Gilles Deleuze criticizes. Instead of connecting people, the notion of perspective as an eye pyramid, a kind of tunnel, induces them to avoid encounter. It corresponds to the notion of perspective used to put an end to discussion by saying that we all have our different viewpoints, thereby dissolving a disagreement instead of learning from each other's standpoints.Contrary to the “perspectivers” depicted by the printmaker, Alloa asks whether we can try to “share perspectives.” By examining that question in response to Deleuze's challenge, Alloa develops a stronger version of perspectivism. He emphasizes that any perspective is a perspective of someone on something—on some thing, quelque chose, not all things, toutes choses—which means that a perspective, intrinsically limited, always cries out for completion by other perspectives. Inspired by Nietzsche (“the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’ ”), Alloa constructs in other ways and independently an epistemology akin to that of Sandra Harding and other proponents of “standpoint theory.” Against recent objections to a perspectivism that is too closely linked to relativism, Alloa advances a “new perspectivism” that demands and even celebrates plurality without abandoning the notions of truth and objectivity.