He was a sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher all at the same time: Bruno Latour left his mark on almost all areas of knowledge through his teaching and his works. Died on the night of October 8 to 9 at the age of 75, the one that the German weekly The time present as “one of the great innovators in the field of social sciences” had above all become a “key thinker” ecology and climate change, according to the Southgerman newspaper : “One of the last philosophers who, as the founder of his own school of thought, changed the worldview of many students and readers.”
First a sociologist of science and theorist of “regimes of truth”, Bruno Latour had come to plead for a radically new relationship between man and the planet, explains the Dutch daily. NRC Handelsblad. “While flying over Greenland, he had seen something unusual. He had come to marvel at the spectacular mass of ice, but it seemed to him that Greenland wanted to send him a message: the melting ice had taken on a form that evoked Edvard Munch’s famous painting called ‘The Scream’. Latour wanted to grab his mobile phone to capture this image, but suddenly realized that his presence there was part of the problem: it was the CO2 emitted by his plane that was melting the ice.
“The most misunderstood of French philosophers”
For the Dutch newspaper, Bruno Latour was a remarkable thinker above all for his ability to constantly bring new perspectives, “to rock the existing thinking about people, knowledge and land – and always to do so with great verve”.
In the 1980s, Latour was able to emerge as a controversial thinker following a series of books in which he argued that scientific facts should rather be considered as products of science. In 2018, the New York Times still presented him as a “post-truth thinker” and like “the most famous and misunderstood of French philosophers”. “But these criticisms did not prevent Latour from soon appearing among the most quoted thinkers in the world, alongside Michel Foucault or even Marx”, note the NRC Handelsblad.
“Learning to become earthlings”
As early as 1991, in a new book entitled We have never been modern, he pleaded in particular for a “alternative democracy” in which regions such as the Amazon rainforest and all the human and non-human actors living there would be equally represented within a “Parliament of Things” : indigenous peoples, botanists, soil scientists, but also the forest industry and finally the trees themselves. A concept developed eight years later in Nature policies and taken up since by both lawyers and thinkers from various backgrounds – notably, in France, by the anthropologist Philippe Descola.
In Facing Gaia, published in 2015, Bruno Latour tried to think the “new climate regime” into which the Anthropocene plunges us. But it is especially with his book Where to land? How to orient yourself in politics? (2017) that the philosopher succeeded in reaching a wide audience. He defends the idea that “we don’t understand anything about political positions for fifty years if we don’t give a central place to the question of the climate and its denial”.
Beyond his teaching at the École des Mines then at Sciences Po Paris, Bruno Latour has collaborated with theater creators, artists and environmental activists. He was the curator of two landmark exhibitions: “Critical Zones” at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-2022) and “You and I don’t live on the same planet” at the Center Pompidou-Metz (November 2021-April 2022).
The supreme ambition of this “anthropocene thinker” whose influence is now exercised throughout the world will have been “teaching us to become earthlings”, summarizes the NRC Handelsblad.