Bruno Latour in Pieces by Henning Schmidgen

Bruno Latour in Pieces by Henning Schmidgen

Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in the sociology and anthropology of science to his recent philosophy of multiple modes of existence.

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 intellectualSchmidgen 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

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780823263691
ISBN 10	082326369X
Title	Bruno Latour in Pieces
Author	Henning Schmidgen
Series	Forms Of Living
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Fordham University Press
Year published	2014-10-15
Number of pages	194
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.