fun neighborhood

As of last night, I am out of the Quartier Latin and near the (former site of the) Bastille, just off the rue de la Roquette.

This is a fun, lively neighborhood. There is lots of academic stuff over in the Latin Quarter, of course, but there’s also something a bit stiff and overly familiar about the neighborhood. Here it’s a little bit more raw, the people have less money and are younger, and so there’s just a bit more of an edge to it.

This morning I was reading Garcia in a café. It’s a really good book. But rather than continuing to leak bits of it here, I’ll just let you all wait for the review, which should appear in March. I still have a ways to go before finishing Garcia’s book, primarily because I’m still typing up my comments on Latour’s (excellent) new manuscript.

As stated here and elsewhere, Latour’s new system has 14 modes of existence. My basic objection is simple: he claims that they are historically generated, empirically detected, and valid only for Europe (so that other cultures would have to come up with their own lists of modes). And nonetheless– they are arranged in groups of four triads (with two overarching modes dominating the other twelve), just like Kant’s categories. Is that really a coincidence? Is it really just by chance that Europe happens to have historically generated its modes of existence in such a pleasing geometric pattern? I’m not yet sure what Latour’s response to that would be, all I know is that in Cerisy in 2007 he didn’t like it (though he was quite nice about it) when I tried to show the inner reciprocal logic of the 12; he insisted instead that the modes were contingent products of history. The new manuscript doesn’t tackle this question head-on, however.

I’m also still leery of the distinction between quasi-objects and quasi-subjects; not sure if that’s “flat” enough for me, but I’m still digesting it.

Some of the things in the book are completely new. Others have already been previewed in works such as Politics of Nature, “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?,” scattered writings on Souriau, and so forth.

The French version will appear with Découverte in September. The English will appear with Harvard, translated as usual by the very capable Catherine Porter, sometime in 2013.