Archives mensuelles : octobre 2013

Je suis membre actif du groupe de lecture AIME (http://aimegroup.wordpress.com/), mais contrairement à Adam Robbert j’ai rapidement trouvé trop contraignant le format de commentaire chapitre par chapitre du livre. J’aurais voulu participer à une discussion plus diversifiée sur le site … Lire la suite →

Sam Hind of THE SEMAPHORE LINE drew attention to this video and asked for a translation: Here is my translation: Laure Adler: First question for you Michel Serres, are you Tintin? Serres: Am I Tintin? Oh no I am much … Lire la suite →

The modesofexistence (http://modesofexistence.org/index.php/site/index) people have contacted the AIME reading group to solicit comments and greater participation. Here is the comment I left on their site: I am a member of the AIME reading group, but unlike Adam I quckly felt … Lire la suite →

One big thing that is missing on Facebook and on the blogosphere is plain old argument. People seem incapable of following even fairly simple arguments, and unwilling to provide any arguments themselves. Fairly basic emotions generate in-groups and their scornful … Lire la suite →

Very interesting post by Ross Wolfe calling for more argument and less posturing on Facebook, and in theoretical discussion ingeneral.

Latour’s diplomatic metalanguage is a form of pluralised dialectics, as is post-structuralist thought in general. Deleuze, for example, is willing to look favorably on Hegel’s dialectics on the condition that movement is given primacy over negativity. Zizek’s recent ontological treatise … Lire la suite →

I seem to be alone in thinking that Latour’s repeated references to William James are not to be taken as indicative of any major intellectual debt to Jamesian pragmatism. This is not to deny that Latour’s pluralist ontology can usefully … Lire la suite →

I do not find in Latour’s texts any sophistication about the critique of empiricism as it has been pursued since the middle of the 20th Century in both the Continental and the Anglo-american traditions. On this issue, his citations of … Lire la suite →

Philip of CIRCLING SQUARES has posted a good article unpacking what it could mean to say that AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE is plurimodal, or, as I have been arguing, polytheistic. This notion of a polylogic writing embodying a … Lire la suite →

It is important to understand in which interpretative key we must read Bruno Latour’s assertions in AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE. Despite Latour’s talk about « ethnographic investigation » and « empirical metaphysics » we do not see any sociology in this book, … Lire la suite →