I’ve recently been very taken with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. He is not only a keen reader of Gilles Deleuze but (and perhaps consequentially) shares my preoccupation with concepts.

Recently, in rewatching a seminar that he gave in 2013 at UC Davis I had cause to reflect upon his take on what has been termed the Anthropocene, the “intrusion of Gaia” by Isabelle Stengers or that era in which humanity exists as a geological force. While other Deleuze scholars have tried to theorize the Anthropocene, I find Viveiros de Castro’s work the most intriguing.

For Viveiros de Castro, the current era is not the only Anthropocene. What he terms “the first Anthropocene”, that period wherein, within Amazonian cosmologies, humans and animals were not distinct from each other, can teach us much about the present era wherein humanity exists as a “geological force”, notably because it is an epoch wherein the human impact upon the world was “positive” or in the least genetic of new forms of life. For those unfamiliar with Viveiros de Castro’s work on the various people’s of Amazonia, he describes a situation wherein “when the sky was still to close to the Earth, there was nothing in the world except people and tortoises” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2016, p.61), and through various misadventures and encounters these first people, transformed into the animals, plants etc. that we know today. Non-humans are ex-humans in Amerindian thought.

This has a number of interesting implications at least one of which is a rebuke of human exceptionalism. Following from both this understanding of the “first Anthropocene” and what he describes as  cosmological perspectivism (which we shall have to explore in another entry), we are forced to radically reconceptualize our relationship to “nature”. As Viveiros de Castro suggests of the Amerindians in a recent book The Ends of the World:

“They know that human action inevitably leaves and “ecological footprint” on the world. Differently to us, however, the ground on which they leave their footprints in equally alive and alert, often being the zealously guarded domain of some super-subject (the master spirit of the forest for example).” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2016, p.71)

Within this cosmology, the eschatological system also proves opposed to that which preoccupies the collective imaginary and popular media of Western civilization. Instead of civilization collapsing and catalysing a return of the animal and nature (cities overgrown with vegetation and whatever is left of the human race is left to eek out “bare” and “meagre” existences) animals etc. will revert to their human forms. Our imaginary of “the end of the world” thus reveals not a fear of annihilation but a loss of our “exceptional” status. Within Amerindian though, this status is already in question.

There is much here that I could continue to unpack, but for me, when we talk about generating a philosophy adequate to the contemporary era or about learning to die in the Anthropocene, Viveiros de Castro is one of the few authors offering something interesting.

(I would urge anyone to read the article Immanence and Fear, which represents Viveiros de Castro at his most readable and relatable)