3 - The Density and Fragility of the World: Latour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Nothing that is can be subtracted, nothing is dispensable.
Friedrich NietzscheBruno Latour is an anomaly. On the one hand he appears to be a radical exception to the usual forms of affirmationist theory I am delineating. His work is not rooted in the anti- hegemonic struggles of the 1970s and, in fact, he evinces considerable political scepticism with regard to the Marxist or revolutionary tradition: Latour endorses the revisionism of François Furet in regard to the French revolution, pours scorn on the historic attempts of revolutionaries to ‘change man’, and the flavour of his ironic and provocative political stance is indicated by the title of a 2007 interview: ‘We are all reactionaries today’. Also, unlike in the case of the rehabilitation of Deleuze as ‘pure metaphysician’, Latour does not regard himself as a professional philosopher and professes his discomfort with doing metaphysics. On the other hand, Latour might be regarded as a quite quintessential example of the wider mood or tone of the affirmationist consensus. His very refusal to engage in political activity or theory (at least from the ‘Left’ as usually identified), his self- identification as a patient anthropological or sociological tracker of networks, conceived of as material assemblages that include the human and nonhuman in ‘equal’ or democratic terms, and his dismissal of the modernist problematic of critique, make him emblematic.
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- The Persistence of the NegativeA Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, pp. 80 - 105Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010