“The Bee Lecture: How Amerindian Perspectivism Psychoanalyzed the Western Symbolic Order And its Historicity And Set A Precedent for a New Kind of Politics.”

Abstract

“The Bee Lecture” is an essay/performance that attempts to make a consistent representation or sketch of Viveiros de Castro’s anthropological description of Amerindian cosmology, which he calls perspectivism, through the persona of ‘the Bee.’ Perspectivism serves as a jumping board for an exploration of performance and some of the implications that perspectivism has for our historical moment of crisis vis-à-vis climate change, mass extinction, and the violent appropriation of nature in the capitalocene (Jason Moore). Walter Benjamin’s critique of modern historicity and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the Real allow for a theoretical staging of the non-human gaze as a performative challenge to the Western symbolic order. I pinpoint an equivalence, between perspectivist equivocation and the experience of transference in psychoanalysis, to argue for the need and possibility of a cure from the Western denial of nature’s gaze. I begin by locating in the language driven culture/nature duality the sign of a repression. Following Benjamin, I suggest that the avoidance of nature’s gaze is tantamount to a delusional game, called progress and/or historicity, that is disconnected from species life and a redemptive History. The theoretical conflation of the non-human, the Real, and History allows me to compare Western and Amerindian metaphysics and contrast their approach to the (Lacanian) Real. I conclude that a perspectivist metaphysics of becoming with the Other as one approaches the Real, is a political alternative that can end the impasse of the Western political and historicist transcendence of nature.