Speaker
Description
In the opening section of We Have Never Been Modern (1991), titled “Crisis” Bruno Latour contends that critical thought has reached an impasse because it remains trapped within three mutually exclusive methodological frameworks: naturalization (aligned with scientific realism), socialization (linked to social constructivism), and deconstruction (rooted in poststructuralist critique). For Latour, contemporary theory’s failure to apprehend phenomena as simultaneously real, discursive, and socially constructed signals the need for a new mode of inquiry grounded in the tracing of actor-networks. His antipathy toward poststructuralism is scarcely hidden, and Latour and poststructuralist theory are conventionally regarded as incompatible. Yet recent scholarship complicates this opposition. In a similar vein, I argue that Latour and poststructuralism – here with particular attention to Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler – converge on overlooked theoretical horizons despite methodological and rhetorical divergences. Both share a commitment to destabilizing the binaries that structure modern thought – nature/culture, science/politics, subject/object. Both interrogate the ontological and epistemological assumptions, as well as the institutional formations, that sustain these oppositions, albeit through distinct methods and vocabularies. Rather than positioning Latour as a corrective to an overly linguistic poststructuralism, or poststructuralism as the necessary counter to Latour’s supposed naivety about discursivity, this paper foregrounds the generative frictions between them and, crucially, reconsiders the very notion of crisis that Latour locates at the heart of modern thought.
| Keywords | Bruno Latour, poststructuralism, nature/culture divide, deconstruction |
|---|---|
| ataberkcetink@gmail.com |