a strange passage in John Caputo’s new book

From The Insistence of God: A Theology of ‘Perhaps’, published last month.

“No wonder, then, [that] the warrior realists are worried by the things Latour says.  No wonder they wonder whether he has fallen like a bad angel into the sin of correlation. Have no fear, Harman and Meillassoux ultimately conclude; Latour is without sin. Huddled like Vatican diplomats over the dangerous words of an outspoken priest –actually it is the nuns who are under attack, since the priests have mostly been cowed into silence– trying to detect the odor of heresy, they decide that although he says dangerous things, he is not a heretic in their self-styled ‘school.'” (Page 209)

It is strange in several ways.

In the first place, Caputo shows no sense of context here whatsoever. In the 1990’s (as a Ph.D. student, at that) I was perhaps literally the only person on the American continental philosophy scene taking Latour seriously and writing about him, back when Caputo was giving us a monotonous “Hail Derrida, Hail Derrida, Hail Derrida, Hail Derrida…” But now Caputo is trying to out-Latour me. OK, at least Latour is being read in these circles now, and that’s the important thing.

Though Caputo footnotes Prince of Networks in his book, he doesn’t seem to get the point of it. In what sense are Meillassoux and I on the same page with respect to Latour? In almost no respect. My book certainly contains criticisms of Latour’s position, but only against the background of calling him the most important philosopher alive today, something you’ll never hear Meillassoux even consider (and probably not even Caputo, for that matter– is Caputo willing to agree with me that Latour is more important than Derrida?).

Caputo seems merely obsessed with the idea that we’re calling Latour a “correlationist.” But we don’t, though Caputo somehow tries to spin this conclusion as the result of a condescending Vatican conclave. (I don’t understand the remark about nuns, but assume it was awkward grandstanding of some sort.) My view is that Latour is a relationist but by no means a correlationist. Meillassoux’s view is that Latour is a vitalist metaphysician à la Whitehead (and à la Harman, for that matter). One can disagree with either or both of us about this, but I’m not sure why philosophical disagreement with Latour on this or that point amounts to a judgment that he is or is not a “heretic.” Caputo’s rhetoric is not only overblown, but misses the target.

As for the “self-styled ‘school'” part, this has already been rehashed endlessly in the blogosphere, but most readers of this blog are well aware that my philosophical position is a heck of a lot closer to Latour’s than it is to Meillassoux’s. In this respect too, Caputo shows an alarming lack of perspective.

Furthermore, Caputo seems to draw very selectively from Latour. He only wants the anti-realist conception of science, not much of anything about actors and networks.

But again, the most important thing to me is that finally, the American continentals are starting to read Latour. And I doubt Caputo’s butter-fingered treatment of Latour will do his reputation much lasting harm.

Caputo has made a habit of being very testy about younger people in the field– see his irritable reaction to Martin Hägglund.