Philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist of science and technology, the professor emeritus associated with Sciences Po died on the night of October 8 to 9. His work, celebrated all over the world, and its reflections on the ecological crisis inspire a new generation of intellectuals, artists and activists.
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The sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour died on the night of Saturday October 8 to Sunday October 9 at the age of 75, learned Le Monde from family sources and La Découverte editions. It is one of the most important French intellectuals of its generation that disappears, after a long fight against disease. “The most famous and most misunderstood of French philosophers”, had written the New York Times, October 25, 2018 .
Famous and celebrated abroad, recipient of the Holberg Prize (2013) and the Prix de Kyoto (2021) for all of his work, Bruno Latour was, in fact, a time misunderstood in France, as his objects of research seemed disparate, which could hide great coherence. It must be said that he touched almost all Domains of knowledge : ecology, law, modernity, religion and, of course, science and techniques, with its inaugural and explosive studies on laboratory life. Especially since, with the notable exception of Michel Serres, with whom Bruno Latour conceived a book of interviews, Lighting (François Bourin, 1992), philosophy in France has often been kept away from thought and science practice.
“He was the first to perceive that the challenge of political thought resided entirely in the ecological question”, recalls sociologist Bruno Karsenti, as evidenced by the publication of nature policies (discovery (discovery ), written in sound with the natural contract of Michel Serres (1990). But these are undoubtedly two books devoted to ecology, delivered in the form of questions, where to land? (La Découverte, 2017) and where am I? (La Découverte, 2021), who made this iconoclastic sociologist know more widely.
Born June 22, 1947 in Beaune (Côte-d’Or), in a large bourgeois family of wine merchants, he has become one of the most influential philosophers of our time, inspiring a new generation of intellectuals , artists and activists anxious to remedy the ecological disaster.
Since “the intrusion of Gaia”, as the philosopher Isabelle Stengers writes, with whom he maintained a long intellectual friendship (told by Philippe Pignarre in Latour-Stengers, a tangled double flight, the impediments of thinking in circles , 2021), Bruno Latour has continued to think of the “new climate regime” in which we live (against Gaïa, La Découverte, 2015). Because “we have changed people”, he explained, since we entered the era of the Anthropocene, in which man becomes a geological force. “We no longer live in the same land,” he said. The moderns believed, from the 18th e century, that the separation between nature and culture, between objects and subjects, was effective. They argued that the “non-human” were things that were foreign to us, when they kept dealing with them. It is in this sense that “we have never been modern”, as he proclaimed in a book of the same name (La Découverte, 1991).
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