Bruno Latour in Pieces

Henning Schmidgen is Professor of Media Studies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Gloria Custance lives and works as a translator in Berlin.

"Schmidgen's level-headed and comprehensive survey of Bruno Latour's career offers contemporary readers a desperately needed aid to navigate the multi-pronged and disparate engagements of this important contemporary scholar and public intellectual. Schmidgen excavates the role of exegesis dating from Latour's training in philosophy, showing how it shapes his ethnological studies of the practices of science and his contributions to the sociology of science and science studies, as well as his theorization of the Actor-Network constellation and his recent makeover as a philosopher of "modes of existence." Schmidgen's Latour is a thinker of many faces, and like the Whiteheadian actuality Latour so admires, his thinking comes from prehending the thought of a host other thinkers: thinkers with whom he resonates, like Deleuze and Guattari and Michel Serres, his friend Isabelle Stengers, but also the Catholic philosopher Charles Peguy , the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann, and the philosoher Etienne Souriau, as well as thinkers from whom he seeks distance, philosophers of historical epistemology like Canguilhem, Pierre Macherey and Dominique Lecourt, the ethnographer Marc Auge, Foucault and Lyotard. What emerges from Schmidgen's portrait is a nuanced and complex understanding of the vicissitudes of Latour's career that will do much to help English-speaking readers get to the heart of what makes Latour tick." -- -Mark Hansen Duke University, author of New Philosophy of New Media "In this accessible study of Bruno Latour's wide-ranging thought, Henning Schmidgen covers the waterfront, from Latour's early writings on exegesis to his recent studies of ecology, technologies, and modes of being. Henning Schmidgen has given us a diagram, as it were, of Latour's ever-evolving work, which Schmidgen always returns to the back and forth between Latour's empirical studies and his reflections on the idea of a network connected particulars without a fundamental root. Along the way, we pass through the landscape of modern french philosophy-Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres to be sure, but alongside them a panoply of figures from across the disciplinary map-epistemologists, semioticians, sociologists, theologians. A remarkable introduction to the thought of a remarkable thinker." -- -Peter L. Galison Harvard University

• Contents List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works Introduction 1. Exegesis and Ethnology Studies in Dijon Peguy's Inscriptions The Problem of Repetition Exegeses, Re-readings, Revisions Ideology The Production of Lack 2. The Philosopher in the Laboratory At the Salk Institute Laboratory Reports Guillemin's History High-tech, the Beach, and the Post-structuralists Science as an Agonistic Field The Rhetoric of Science 3. Machines of Tradition Laboratory Life Desks versus Machines History and Construction Take from Science the Idea of Science? 4. Pandora and the History of Modernity Pandora Years The Pasteur Project "Give me a laboratory" Sociology and Bacteriology 5. Of Actants, Forces, and Things Actors and Actants The Politics of Knowledge Irreductionism Interlude with Comte A History of Things 6. Science and Action An Anthropology of Science In the Hinterland of the Texts Great Divides, Large Networks From "Immutable Mobiles" to "Centres of Calculation" Media Studies 7. Questions Concerning Technology The Exegesis of Modernity The Turn to Technology Have We Never Been Post-Modern? Technology - A Mode of Existence The Agonistic Field Strikes Back The Crisis of the Networks 8. The Coming Parliament Assembling Rejoicing Judging Walking Liquefying Summarizing Conclusion Notes Appendix Acknowledgements Bibliography Timeline