(107) « It’s the Development, Stupid ! » or How Can we Modernize Modernization ? » for a book of essays edited by Jim Proctor Postenvironmentalism to be published by xx, commenting upon T. Nordhaus, and M. Shellenberger, Break Through. From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007
Prépublication dans la version web de la revue Espace Temps.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book has somewhat infuriated their fellow conservationists, but it tackles just the right set of philosophical questions about the psycho social limis to be put on the notions of limits to growth and to development. The paper follows the authors in their exploration of the right set of political passions necessary to extract political ecology from its obsession with nature. It argues that it is not at the moment when humans and non humans finally clearly come into the same arenas that the notion of environment should be revived to distinguish again between a natural realm to be protected and a human realm to be shamed for its past deeds. In effect, the question is to resume modernization by accepting to take up the burden that the first modernizations had simultaneously created and denied.

(106) « Morale ou moralisme? Un exercice de sensibilisation" in Raisons Politiques, n° 34 mai 2009, pp. 143-166 (avec Emilie Hache).

The ANT argument has often been suspected of dubious moral grounds ; the accusation is made by those who use a roughly Kantian definition of what it is to occupy a moral upper ground. By following the contrasts between four different texts (Comte-Sponville, Kant, Serres and Lovelock), the paper explores what an ‘objective morality’ would look like and how to compare the Kantian axiology with the ANT’s possible definition of an object-oriented-morality. Especially important is the semiotic definition of the moral intensity of a text, this intensity bein defined by the ability for someone to feel responsible by responding to the calling of more beings than the ones expected from the moralist tradition.

[traduction anglaise English translation "Morality or Moralism: an Exercice in Sentization" in Common Knowledge 200-]

(105) « Pour un dialogue entre science politique et 'science studies'"», Revue française de science politique, Vol . 58, n°4, pp. 657-678, 2008.

The two disciplines of political science and science studies both use the words politics and science, and yet their meaning are so different that they seem incommensurable : an effort is made, from the science studies side, to explain to political scientists the various uses of those words and how they could relate to political science properly speaking. Building up on (103), the paper shows that only one meaning of the four of the word ‘science’ does actually distinguish it in a radical way from ‘politics’. Once this meaning is circumscribed, a more fruitful collaboration between science studies and political science could be developped.

(104) « The Netz-Works of Greek Deductions – A Review of Reviel Netz’s The Shaping of Deductions in Greek Mathematics », Social Studies of Science, Vol 38, n°3, pp. 441-459, 2008.
[Traduction française French translation par Dominique Vinck et Rigas Arvanitis in Revue d'Anthropologie des Connaissances, 2009]

Netz’s book is, without question, the most important work in science studies since Shapin & Schaffer Leviathan and the air pump. By resorting to a very original semiotic and constructivist method, it manages to redescribe entirely the practice of deduction in the beginning of Greek geometry. It shows how this practice bears almost no connection with the various theories of abstraction and conviction that have been offered by philosophers from Plato onwards. It offers the first systematic non-formalist description of formalism at its early historical stage. In doing so it offers the best occasion to elaborate a metalangage to speak concretely of abstraction.

(103) « Turning Around Politics – A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper », Social Studies of Science, 2007, Vol.37 Issue.5, pp. 811-820.

The criticism levelled by Gerard de Vries against the political theory implicit in science studies offers a good occasion to render more precise the different meanings the word « politics » may have in the literature on the « politics of science ». It is certainly time to use the same methods that have modified the theory of science so much, on the practice of politics. The commentary on de Vries’s paper offers just such a clarification by distinguishing five successive meanings of the adjective « political ».

(102) « A Plea for Earthly Sciences », Keynote adress at the British Sociological Association, East London, april 2007, to be published in Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas (editors) New Social Connections: Sociology's Subjects and Objects, Palgrave Macmillan, London

The extension of ecological crisis have also extended the need for a politics of science. To the point where the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences has become moot : it might be more rewarding to direct our attention to ‘earthly sciences’ (not to be confused wiht ‘Earth science’).

[republication republication in Media Geography edited by Jörg Döring & Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld: Transcript 2008]

(101) « On Sloterdijk » lecture given at the special symposium, Bruxelles, Académie flamande des sciences, Février 2007(in preparation).