rereading Latour

I don’t mean revising my interpretation, I mean that I’m literally rereading We Have Never Been Modern, and enjoying it now as ever. I always find new things on each rereading; it is extremely rich despite being concise.

This isn’t the usual view, I know, but it gets my vote for the most important work of philosophy since the 1960’s, and one that hasn’t been topped since its appearance in 1991. To be perfectly blunt, I think it’s more important than anything ever written by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, etc. If you haven’t read it, you could be costing yourself 10-15 years of needless spinning of wheels on certain topics. Co,e out the other end of this book, and the entire modern world looks different, as does the future in whatever lies beyond the modern world.

Ironically, Latour himself is no longer especially fond of the book.

The occasion for this re-read is that I will be celebrating the 21st anniversary of the book in Denmark, as the theme of my March 2 keynote there.

This is also a chance to do some marginal note archaeology. The notes from my original reading are in 1998 pencil, which is fading pretty badly by now. Still, it’s pretty remarkable to see one’s own handwriting from 1998– think of how much has happened in the world since then.

There is also some blue ballpoint which I think is from the time I read the book in 2003 on a vacation to Dubrovnik, Mostar, and Sarajevo. I was just rereading it for fun that time.

The red roller-ball ink seems more recent, and is probably from the thorough late 2005 reread I did during the early stages of composing Prince of Networks.