"The Work of Bruno Latour: Exegetical Political Thinking"
Please find below an interview with Bruno Latour by Laurent Godmer and David Smadja: "The Work of Bruno Latour: Exegetical Political Thinking." initially published in Raisons politiques 47.2/3 (2012):
To try to understand the intellectual and scientific itinerary of Bruno Latour is, without question, to undertake the exegesis of an exegete. The task of a generalized exegesis of the sciences that he has aimed for in his anthropological work started with exegesis stricto sensu.
Born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, Latour trained as a philosopher at the University of Dijon, where he developed a passion for biblical exegesis. Passing the agrégation in philosophy (winning first place) in 1972, he became an “anthropologist” in the course of his time at ORSTOM [1] in Abidjan from 1973 to 1975. He presented a doctoral thesis (on Exegesis and Ontology) at the University of Tours in 1975, and obtained his Habilitation (professorial doctorate) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1987. After teaching at the Centre National des Arts et Métiers (1977-1982), and the École des mines (1982-2006), he now teaches at “Sciences Po” [2] in Paris.
Ethnographic fieldwork in California (Laboratory Life, co-authored with Steve Woolgar, 1979) [3] served as the basis for an “anthropology of science” aiming at an exegesis of scientific discourse. He has devoted several works to this question, which combine to formulate “actor-network sociology,” an approach that enables him to understand the place of non-humans within a semiology of scientific activity, but also more generally in the framework of a social semiology. The critique of science, or more precisely the critique of the domination of the centrality of scientific discourse, is at the heart of Bruno Latour’s work. His critical thinking is set out in several works: Les Microbes: Guerre et paix (1984), [4] Science in Action (1987), [5] Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991), [6] Aramis ou l’amour des techniques (1992), [7] La Clef de Berlin et autres leçons d’un amateur de sciences (1993), [8] and Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (1999). [9] A synthesis of these works was published under the title Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005). [10]
This attention to non-humans explains the writing of more “political” texts marked by the quest to understand political ecology (Politique de la nature, 1999 [11]) and institutions (La Fabrique du droit: une ethnographie du Conseil d’État, 2002). Politics is approached first as a type of regime of enunciation, in the same way that one can approach religious speech (Bruno Latour, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious[13]). Bruno Latour’s approach was “put to the test” in a debate with Pierre Favre in the Revue Française de Science Politique in 2008. Finally, the book he published in 2012, Enquête sur les modes d'existence picks up this trajectory, which consists in seeking to understand the plurality of regimes of truth and confirms the exegetical character of his thought.
Laurent Godmer and David Smajda. "The Work of Bruno Latour: Exegetical Political Thinking." Raisons politiques 47.2/3 (2012): 115-48.