HOW TO INHERIT FROM BRUNO LATOUR?

Christian Frigerio, Camila Zani

In 2009, in the first book devoted to Bruno Latour, Graham Harman imagined a hyperbolic situation in 2050 in which Latour’s philosophy had become hegemonic. Things happened much faster. «Bruno Latour is, with the possible exception of Thomas Kuhn, the most widely influential student of science and society of the last fifty years», and the actor-network theory he developed alongside Michel Callon and John Law has become the «new orthodoxy in science and technology studies». In the social sciences, too, «moves are afoot to dislodge Bourdieu’s canonical reputation and replace him with Latour as British sociology’s new most-favoured Frenchman»; at the same time, «he is about to condemn Foucault to the same fate to which the latter had condemned Sartre», because compared to both Bourdieu and Foucault, Latour «better equips us to take [nonhuman] entities on their own terms, rather than merely as human accessories». Latour has been one of the few thinkers capable of providing an «ecological grand narrative» for our time, and as if that were not enough, thanks to his reprise of thinkers such as William James and A.N. Whitehead (mediated by the​ all-time friend Isabelle Stengers), he is catching up with Gilles Deleuze as the godfather of contemporary speculative philosophy.