Vivit-uary. How to Inherit Bruno Latour?

Abstract

This text is a vivit-uary—and not an obit-uary—of Bruno Latour: a tribute to his life, not a commemoration of his death. The question is: how do we inherit Latour? The author seeks to avoid the deadly modernization of his rich heritage, to avoid dividing a single network of his projects and statements along the boundaries of modern disciplines: sociology, philosophy, semiotics, anthropology. Instead, it is proposed to articulate and assemble Latour-the-anthropologist, linking together his projects of the anthropology of sciences and technologies, symmetrical anthropology, and the anthropology of the Moderns (an inquiry into the modes of existence). This approach allows us to find the Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinths of his heritage, to learn to follow the trajectory of the transformation of his messages through a variety of topics, disciplines, projects, genres, and formats.