È REALE CIÒ CHE RESISTE

Patrizio Caldara

This paper investigates the anthropocentric consequences of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), focusing exclusively on his pre-2004 works – The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern, and Politics of Nature. The paper argues that Latour’s anthropocentrism is ontological because political, and political because ontological. The criterion “reality is what resists,” introduced in The Pasteurization of France, establishes a relational and graduated notion of reality that is carried through to the political theory of the collective developed in Politics of Nature. There, the due process to enable the constitution of a well-formed collective requires two fundamental steps – consultation and institutionalization – both of which presuppose the presence of human actors and, crucially, of language as an extrasomatic resource. This dependence is confirmed by Latour himself in a 1987 article coauthored with Shirley Strum, where a group of baboons is denied full political collectivity precisely due to the absence of linguistic resources. The consequence is that non-human collectives are structurally impossible within Latour’s framework: without humans, non-humans cannot be represented, and without representation, they cannot attain full reality.