How to safely view a malicious PDF?

Document-based exploits are directed not at the document itself, but rather at some vulnerability in the viewer. If you view the document in a program that isn't vulnerable (or in a configuration that inhibits the vulnerability), then you won't be exploited.

The real issue is knowing whether or not your viewer is vulnerable, which usually means knowing specifically what the exploit is. But there are alternate PDF viewers such as foxit or even Google chrome's built-in viewer that do not necessarily have the same vulnerabilities as Adobe's official viewer. This is not necessarily true for all vulnerabilities, so it's important to understand what you're getting in to ahead of time.

EDIT
If you find yourself frequently dealing with potentially malicious materials, it would be very wise to set up a hardened virtual environment. I'd recommend booting into a Linux system and running your target OS (usually Windows) in Virtualbox or a similar environment. Save a snapshot of the virtual OS, and then revert to that snapshot after you're done interacting with the malicious content. Also, it's not a bad idea to run the host Linux environment from a read-only installation (i.e. Live-CD).

Put it through a PDF viewer that isn't vulnerable to the exploit. If it's someone else's viewer, that's even safer. Try Google Docs, where they will parse it and display it as HTML, so the malicious payload won't harm you. (I'm sure that their PDF parser is extremely secure, so you shouldn't feel bad about possibly infecting them.)

Use pdf.js with a sandboxed browser (such as Chromium) in a virtual machine without network access.

It should be quite tricky for a malware to get out of this.