Latour gives flesh to his work

The back cover announces a "key step in the project continues Bruno Latour make a positive anthropology of Western societies." And the reader is not misled. The book is divided into two complementary parts: the section on "factishes" which gives its title to the book, and those called "Iconoclash".

If Latour is well known as a sociologist is to have undertaken the colossal task of producing an anthropology of modernity. To do this, we had to start with a very painstaking restoration of the functioning of the scientific institution Laboratory Life: The production of scientific facts, extended by the progressive development of an anthropology "a-modern" (We have never been modern: symmetrical anthropology Test).

As Latour announced himself in his work, if he has hitherto essentially defined what modernity is not where it claims to be, but does not respect its practices (the great division Nature / Culture, objective reality / representation, science / opinions, etc.), it now wants to find new ways to give substance to this a-modernity, and it does so through the concept of "factish", which he is "operator" of the "symmetrical anthropology" (p. 66).

At the big dipper, the factishes, these are objects that abound in our daily lives that populate a tangible reality and are smugglers; smugglers of a dimension that exceeds that of the product, which allows to move from their construction to their autonomy - without believing neither one nor the other (p. 65). Without further deflower Latour's theory of factishes, at most should we see that this is a book that gives hope, a living book, rhythmic, alert. This is a very effective cure at ambient gloom, and opens important perspectives on how to repopulate our completely dried modernity, without going through a critical yet more austere ...