The sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour died on the night of Saturday October 8 to Sunday October 9 at the age of 75, in Paris, learned The world from family sources and La Découverte editions. He is one of the most important French intellectuals of his generation who passes away after a long fight against illness. “The most famous and misunderstood of French philosophers”, had written the New York TimesOctober 25, 2018.
Famous and celebrated abroad, recipient of the Holberg Prize (2013) and the Kyoto Prize (2021) for all of his work, Bruno Latour was, indeed, for a time misunderstood in France, as his research objects seemed disparate, which could hide a great coherence. It must be said thathe touched on almost all areas of knowledge : ecology, law, modernity, religion and, of course, science and technology, with its inaugural and explosive studies on laboratory life. Especially since, with the notable exception of Michel Serres, with whom Bruno Latour designed a book of interviews, Clarifications (Francois Bourin, 1992), philosophy in France has often kept away from the thought and practice of science.
“He was the first to perceive that the challenge of political thought resided entirely in the ecological question”recalls the sociologist Bruno Karsenti, as evidenced, as early as 1999, by the publication of Nature policies (La Découverte), written in consonance with The Natural Contract by Michel Serres (1990).
Iconoclastic sociologist
But these are undoubtedly two books devoted to ecology, delivered in the form of questions, Where to land? (The Discovery, 2017) and Where am I ? (La Découverte, 2021), which made this iconoclastic sociologist more widely known to the general public.
Born June 22, 1947 in Beaune (Côte-d’Or), into a large bourgeois family of wine merchants, he became one of the most influential philosophers of our time, inspiring a new generation of intellectuals, artists and activists concerned with remedying the ecological disaster.
Since “Gaia’s Intrusion”as the philosopher Isabelle Stengers writes, with whom he maintained a long intellectual friendship (recounted by Philippe Pignarre in Latour-Stengers, a tangled double flightThe Preventers from Thinking in Circles, 2021), Bruno Latour never stopped thinking about “new climate regime” in which we live (Facing Gaia, Discovery, 2015). Because “we have changed the world”he explained, since we entered the era of the Anthropocene, in which man becomes a geological force. “We no longer live on the same Earth”he assured.
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