Vivit-uary. How to Inherit Bruno Latour?

Abstract

This text is a vivit-uary of Bruno Latour, not an obit-uary: a tribute to his life, not a commemoration of his death. The question is how do we inherit Latour for life? The author seeks to avoid the dead-handed modernisation of his rich heritage, to avoid dividing the single network of his projects and statements along the boundaries of modern disciplines: sociology, philosophy, semiotics, anthropology. Instead, the proposal is to articulate and assemble Latour-the-anthropologist, linking together his projects of the anthropology of sciences and technologies, symmetrical anthropology and the anthropology of modernity (the inquiry into the modes of existence). This approach allows us to find 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.