Those six lectures in ‘natural religion’ explore what it could mean to live at the epoch of the Anthropocene when what was until now a mere décor for human history is becoming the principal actor. They confront head on the controversial figure of Gaia, that is, the Earth understood not as system but as what has a history, what mobilizes everything in the same geostory. Gaia is not Nature, nor is it a deity. In order to face a secular Gaia, we need to extract ourselves from the amalgam of Religion and Nature. It is a new form of political power that has to be explored through a renewed attempt at political theology composed of those three concepts: demos, theos and nomos. It is only once the multiplicity of people in conflicts for the new geopolitics of the Anthropocene is recognized, that the ‘planetary boundaries’ might be recognized as political delineations and the question of peace addressed. Neither Nature nor Gods bring unity and peace. ‘The people of Gaia’, the Earthbound might be the ‘artisans of peace’.
Lectures
Those lectures filmed and set up by the University of Edinburgh are available on their sites.
Lecture in the framework of the Understanding Society Series organized at CRASSH by Professor Simon Golding, November 6th 2013
Since the project on Modes of Existence has been long in coming and has connection with all the successive field works done by the author, the paper tries to retrace the main steps that have led to the project. It shows that this project precedes the work done in actor-network theory and explains the link between philosophy and anthropology through the peculiar notion of mode of existence.
A long collaboration with Armin Linke comes to fruition with a collaboration between Armin's and the AIME's project. The video shows work in progress with a presentation in English by Bruno Latour and in German by Dorothea Heinz to Armin's students in Karlsruhe. Warning, this is a work in progress. Don't expect definitive answers.
The AIME digital environment will benefit enormously from Armin's archives and from Armin's students field work through several sites which are immensely difficult to describe through textual means. The platform aims at giving through photographic essays embedded into the documentation of the AIME book, a second chance to direct attention to the experience of modes of existence difficult to trace. The joint project will end with several independent outputs (books by Armin and by his students).
A fifteen minute presentation of the ERC project called AIME which will be published in French in September 2012 and in English in March 2013.
For a philosophy that is empirical and not simply empiricist, investigation offers the only way to ferret out its concepts and then put them to the test before proposing a version that can be submitted to critique by its peers. And yet, even though investigation as a genre benefits from a distinguished and intimidating prestige in philosophy, it is fairly unusual for an author to propose to carry out an investigation with the participation of his readers. This is nevertheless what I propose to do in publishing a book titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, alongside a digital site that allows its visitors, who will have become co-investigators, to inspect its arguments and go on to suggest other fields to study, other proofs, other accounts. By means of this arrangement I invite my co-investigators to help me find the guiding thread of the experience by becoming attentive to several regimes of truth, which I call modes of existence, after the strange book by Étienne Souriau, recently republished, that features this phrase in its title.
June 23 - 30, 2007; staged by Frédérique Ait-Touatti, research done by Eduardo Vargas
Played again in CRASSH Cambridge with Simon Schaffer as the Dean the 14 March 2008 and finally shot in Paris with Dominique Reynié as the Dean, filmed by Martin Pavlov.
A momentous debate concerning the nature of sociology and its relation to other sciences took place between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903. Unfortunately the only available record of the event is a brief overview which English readers may find in Terry Clark’s 1969 edited volume On communication and social influence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
The present recension of the debate, therefore, is based on a script consisting of quotations from the published works of Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim, arranged to form a dialogue. It will be acted out, in French, by Bruno Latour (Gabriel Tarde), Bruno Karsenti (Emile Durkheim), and Simon Schaffer (The Dean), under the direction of Frédérique Aït-Touati. An English translation of the script, with references to the works from which extracts are drawn, is provided here to help the audience follow the debate.
A lecture on the cognitive equipment of the State at the occasion of the anniversary of the Scientific Council for Government Policiy, in 2007 in presence of the Queen of Holland.
Published in « How to Think like a State » The Thinking State edited by Wim van de Donk, Scientific Council for Government Policy, The Hague, 2007, pp. 19-32.
The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture
2010
53:27
The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010, given by Professor Bruno Latour: "May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics".
Location: Nobel Museum, Svenska Akademiens Börssal, May 11 2010. The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture is given every spring at the Nobel Museum by an international scholar of excellence.
University of Montreal
2008
Lecture in 6 parts on YouTube
Bruno Latour, in a presentation entitled "What's organizing? A meditation on the bust of Emilio Bootme in praise of Jim Taylor", gave a vibrant hommage to James R. Taylor, founder of the Université de Montréal Departement of communication and an important figure in organizational communication. Latour is professor at Sciences Po Paris and co-founded Actor-Network-Theory, which had an important impact on all aspects of sociology.
University of Southern California, the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
Feb. 19, 2010
48:23
Keynote Speech, Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network theorist. The digital network adding to the already existing networks of water, rails, sewage, telegrammes and telephone networks.
