Eclectic thinker, born in 1947, had questioned the concept of modernity and had characterized himself as one of the most original voices in the environmentalist leader.
Bruno Latour died at 75, the night between 8 and 9 October, in this 2022, the same year that one of his great inspirers, James Lovelock, left us. If, in these times, the word Anthropocene, that is, the epoch in which human beings have become a geological force that dominates the world, has acquired some popularity, an important part of the merit must be attributed to these two authors. Latour, like Lovelock, was with his rich production of essays one of the great inspirers of a new ecology (see his manifesto Let’s make ourselves heardto be released next March for Einaudi Stile libero), starting from a very original research path.
Born in 1947, after graduating in Philosophy, Latour devoted himself to an anthropological investigation rather unusual for the time. In Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, he did a field research in the Orstom Laboratory, the historic French research institute in the overseas territories. How are scientific truths formed? Is science really that land free from values, political choices, cosmological orientations which is presented in modern thought? It would seem the beginning of a skeptical and relativistic path, and in fact Latour has often had to defend himself from these accusations. Actually, as works like show Science in action (Community Editions, 1998) and, much later, Gaia’s challenge (Meltemi, 2020), the goal of this eclectic French intellectual goes much further and has little to do with the skeptical positions, which have become so fashionable today in so-called unscientific populism.
The purpose of Latour philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist of science rather is to go back towards the sources of modern thoughtespecially of that reassuring and misleading division between nature and culture, between a human world made up of affections, intentions, conscious choices and a natural world thought as if it lacked what the British call agencyor the capacity for will and action.
Modernity, Latour reaffirmed in one of his latest interviews (Interviews with Bruno LatourArt, 2022), was a watchword rather than a social and political conquest. Evoke modernity for the most part it meant the order to modernize, an invitation to growth without limits, to technological development without reflection on the conditions of habitability of the planet, a Promethean exaltation of progress understood in purely human terms.
In fact, to quote one of his most famous books, We have never been modern (eluthera 2009), because basically the ideology of modernity as world domination is accompanied by the denial of the rights of others (other populations and other forms of life); and above all the exaltation of the autonomy and strength of the Western individual who has carefully hidden his dependence and relationship with other living beings, human and non-human. Here you are, if the notion of non-humans has become common among scholars today, it is a great merit of Latour who, in the wake of Lovelock and with a constant work of philosophy and critique of science, has shown that the idea of a world of nature understood as a sort of blind set of object beings subjected to inviolable laws is one of the most questionable outcomes of the so-called scientific modernity.
The world we live in with animals, plants, viruses and bacteria, oxygen and methane, a co-constructed world, of which the human being is only one of the innumerable rings. Precisely the pandemic, to which Latour dedicated one of the books that made him more popular (Where am I?Einaudi Stile libero, 2022), reminded us that these invisible beings who stand between the living and the non-livingthat is viruses and bacteria, have built our body and the atmosphere in which we live, that restricted critical area of the Earth in which humans and non-humans live together and which knows how to react to our actions, as shown by the new climatic regime in which we ended up .
Latour has written demanding essays that are almost inaccessible to a lay public; he has signed important scientific papers for the academic communities of which he was a part; however, he was also capable of effective public communication, through popular books (for example Plot the routeCortina 2017), pieces theatricals, artistic productions, participation in a thousand festivals and cultural events. With Latour, science (be it physics or sociology) inevitably becomes political, science, action and above all responsibility. Latour’s ecology is an invitation to definitively overcome modernity and its armed wing represented by arrogant and destructive liberalism, with a responsible action of new composition of our world. Composing the world, a musical metaphor if we want, the invitation to take every step, whether it is new energies or international relations, respectful choices of other humans and non-humans, of the others present with us on Gaia and of other beings to to come.
Towards de-modernity: this is how we could define Latour’s final landing place. The pandemic and the ongoing wars for energy require us to work in the direction of a new paradigm that is both scientific and politicalbased on the notions of interdependence and relationship, rather than on the autonomy of the human.
a revolution that also involves the social sciences, called to extend the notion of society to non-humans. Of course, a new and largely unknown world that we are heading towards and on which we do not know how to land. And yet, already the idea of getting back down to earthto quote a famous expression of Latour, an action program that could lead us somewhere in the future, at least away from that modernity that risks making us disappear once and for all.
October 9, 2022 (change October 9, 2022 | 19:48)
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