• Citer

“The Point of View is in the Body”: On the Leibnizian Turns of Anthropology

par Pelletier, Arnaud
Editeur scientifique Weckend, Julia;Strickland, Llyod
Référence Leibniz’s Legacy and Impact, Routledge, London, Ed. 1, page (225-241)
Publication Publié, 2019-09-05

Partie d'ouvrage collectif

• Accès en ligne
• Détails
• Contenu
• Statistiques

Résumé :

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the issue of perspectivism in anthropology – raised by anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, and according to which each being (not necessarily human) is a centre of agency and subjectivity – has been formulated with explicit references to Leibniz, and especially to the thesis of individuation through bodies. While sharing the thesis that “the point of view is in the body” – according to Deleuze’s rephrasing of Leibniz – both anthropologists refer to it through the two different readings of Leibniz that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in France: that of Gabriel Tarde’s claimed neo-monadology (positing multiplicities without convergence) and that of Emile Durkheim’s otherwise monadological sociology (positing convergent particularities). This essay thus traces the intertwined references to Leibniz in contemporary anthropology back to the initial Leibnizian turns in the then emerging social sciences.