“The Later Latour”

While discussing Latour’s new Souriau-inspired project recently, I overlooked the obvious, and forgot to post this description of the book from his website:

XIII : 200- Résumé d’une enquête sur les modes d’existence ou bref éloge de la civilisation qui vient (en préparation) (le manuscrit de cet ouvrage en chantier a fait l’objet d’une semaine de discussion à Cerisy la Salle au cours du colloque du 23 au 30 juin 2007).

“For now twenty years, a systematic study has been conducted of the various regimes of enunciation or modes of existence ; this book is a summary of that long term inquiry and allows for a more positive anthropology of modernity than the one that begun with the argument that « we have never been modern ». It begins to answer the question : « if we have never been modern, then what has happened to us ? » and how can we inherit from a different tradition of rationality. Fourteen successive modes of existence are contrasted with one another, the general idea being that the various modernist traditions have each extracted one or two of those modes but also, because of the hegemony of one mode over the others, precluded the deployment of all of them simultaneously. This deployment is the task of a diplomatic use of philosophy or philosophical anthropology and « civilisation » the name given to such a deployment. The key question being to know whether or not the former « westerners » may become at last civilised… (The manuscript of this book will be discussed during the Cerisy week in June 2007)”