ANTHROPO-FICTION

Filippo Scafi

This article argues that Bruno Latour’s compositional program reproduces the pharmaceutical structure his own diagnostic work identified in critique. Latour’s 2004 “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” exposes critique as a pharmakon: a double gesture — antifetishism and determination-talk — that immunizes the critic against what she applies to others. The article shows that Latour’s response — the fifteen modes of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, their conditions of felicity, and the diplomatic protocols for value negotiation — reinstalls the same legislative position: the one that determines, from outside the field it describes, what counts as adequate practice. Seeing the pharmaceutical structure does not suspend it; it escalates it. The article then proposes anthropo-fiction as an alternative mode of inheritance, grounded in François Laruelle’s non-philosophy. Cloning Latour’s descriptive vocabulary while suspending its legislative apparatus, anthropo-fiction is demonstrated through two cases: Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonian perspectivism and Roberto Beneduce’s ethnopsychiatric fieldwork. The figure for this practice is the trickster: the one who inherits without installing.