New Book from Harman on Latour

Graham Harman’s new book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political is out now. After his work on Latour as a metaphysician, Harman now extents his promotion of Latour as a philosopher by introducing him as political philosopher. I’ve not read the book yet, but I know Harman as a writer who does a great job in untangling Latours (sometimes misleading) ironic prose, making the content graspable by putting it in clear philosophical analysis. I heard people say they find Harmans introduction of Latours Actor Network Theory more understandable than Latours own introduction. On the Pluto Press blog you can find an extensive summery of the book that is quite insightful on the content of the book.

The fact that It’s been already four years since Harman’s Prince of Networks came out, makes me wonder whether the book has reached anything of its initial goal. Is Latour nowadays more accepted as  philosopher then before? The article of Patrice Maniglier to which I linked earlier, certainly gives that impression (although this can also have something to do with Latour presenting him nowadays as a philosopher rather than ethnographer). But it also seems this is somewhat limited to the francophone world.

One stingy issue that remains even after Harmans great work of introducing Latour to the philosophical world is that Latour still refrains from being a philosopher is the classic sense. Even when Latour claims to do ontology in his recent work on the modes of existence, he simultaneously claims that he is interested in greater moral issues rather than an abstract theory of being. This sets him apart from other philosophers concerned with ontology. Harman did not address this issue in Prince of Networks so I’m curious whether it will feature in Reassembling the Political.

Latour’s metaphysical turn

Apart from keeping you updated on future events; I also want to make use of this blog to highlight some recent articles, which might be of interest to the readers. The first one is a very lucid written article on Bruno Latour’s turn to metaphysics by Patrice Maniglier. In my opinion Maniglier rightly concludes with the statement that Latour’s presentation of metaphysics as diplomacy  still has its problems, but provides at least (if not more) a provocative alternative to the more traditional metaphysics and deconstruction driven philosophies. Also, Maniglier manages to formulate the matter more clearly, than Latour himself was able to in his Inquiry into the Modes of Existence.

P.S. The rest of the articles in the new issue of Radical Philosophy are also worth reading.