The first part of the article presents the connection between Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism and Donna Haraway’s concepts of situated knowledges and partial perspective. Nietzsche’s perspectivism means placing oneself in a partial position, which cannot be reduced to relativism. Meanwhile, Haraway writes about taking specific partial positions, from which we can see and notice certain things; these are subjugated positions. Nietzsche and Haraway raise the question of how to “see differently”, but perspectivism also includes the issue of will and the concept of “wanting to see differently”. All perspectives aren’t equally good, which is why both authors emphasize the importance of differentiating between good and bad perspectives. However, neither are reducible to relativism. The problem of different perspectives and the position of the observer, which is characterized by Haraway as “learning to see” from a subjugated position, is not easily achievable and cannot be taken for granted. In the second part, we connect this problem to Benveniste’s linguistic analysis of the position of enunciation and its accompanying definition of subjectivity. In the final part of the article, the author taps the work of Roman Kuhar and Michel Foucault to situate this discourse in the broader context of what it means to speak in one’s own name as opposed to speaking for others, and how pronominal feminist politics can help us avoid the dilemma of choosing between a collective feminist “us” and a supposedly neutral and “nonsubjective” gaze. The author also addresses the problems brought on by romaticising the power that’s supposedly automatically derived from the accounts and confessions of personal experiences in feminism.
