1/ The tenth chapter of @BrunoLatourAIME’s Où suis-je? pivots from how the pandemic has challenged the ideological structures of modernity (the Economy, the object, Nature), to the way it has caused us to rethink the intimate & apparently subjective site of the human body itself. 
2/ Latour rejects simple dichotomies of objective materiality to which is added “mon corps vécu de l’intérieur, celui de ma subjectivité” (p.120).
3/ Crucially, & poignantly, Latour explains that he has been reminded of this by his own, very sad experience of cancer over the last two years, that I know he has faced with dignity and good faith.
4/ He recounts visits to specialists. Each addresses one of his organs or bodily systems, consulting a digitised medical database. The impression is that his body forms “une carte qui repose assez superficiellement sur le territoire d’un corps accessible par d’autres procédures”.
5/ Well-meaning though they are, it's as if these therapists are viewing his body from above, a satellite-image, segmenting & cartographising the body into understandable pieces, “une prise de terre, une saise violente, une occupation, par d’autres, de la terre dévastée” (p.121).
6/ Serres “Détachement” & “Les Cinq Sens” are in the background here. “il en serait de meme d’un champ et d’un corps: pas plus l’agrobusiness n’exprime le comportement d’un sol, pas plus les différentes saisies par des biologistes n’expriment les puissance d’agir de mon corps”.
7/ To this, Latour contrasts “le corps vécu”. Here, the body is understood as composed and animated by a variety of actors that constitute its movement, those that come from the inside & those that come from the outside.
8/ Human subjectivity, such as it is, is found only insofar as one surfs the wave of this plural dance, this “chora”: it is our joyful lot “de surfer quelque temps sur cette vague immense que je désigne comme mon ‘corps’” (p.126).
9/ Latour here is articulating an affect theory approach to the body, as I myself have previously argued here: logisticsofreligionblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/03/lat…
Thus, he writes: “avoir un corps, c’est apprendre "à être affecté” (126).
Thus, he writes: “avoir un corps, c’est apprendre "à être affecté” (126).
10/ To think this way about the body is a task that has been aided by feminisms of various sorts, he says (128). But, as always in late-Latour, the key analogy is with occupation of the land. How can we render “mon corps compatible avec ce que j’ai appris de Terre”? (123).
11/ Gaia provides a model for our understanding of the body. Gaia is not a “living entity” in the reductionist or simplistic sense, and neither is the body (p.123). We cannot say that either is either a whole without its parts, or a part without the whole.
12/ Both Gaia & our bodies are open to the world outside and are animated by a host of agents, both material & immaterial: “cela vaut pour l’entité ‘coeur’ ou ‘rein’ comme pour l’entité ‘corps astral’, ‘zone énergetique’, ‘aura’ ou ‘points d’acupuncture’” (p.124).
13/ So we end with this extraordinary statement: the opposite to “body” is not spirit, soul, etc, but “c’est Mars, la planete inerte” (p.126).
14/ All this has been made clear in the extraordinary interview here (which I thoroughly recommend; DM me): philomag.com/articles/bruno…
15/ The questioner asks: in this book, you evoke in a modest and touching way the illness that strikes you today. You refer to. chemotherapy. And then you have this surprising statement: “I wonder if I shouldn't also start freeing my body” What does that mean?
16/ Latour replies: “Being ill means being in a situation that forces you to think. I realised that I had succeeded, through my philosophical work, my reflection on Gaia, on the Anthropocene, in freeing myself from the traditional idea of nature …” (my translation)
17/ ... “Like the pragmata, the body is a mysterious object. It is possible to make multiple investigations of it, and medicine, but also acupuncture or qi gong, are "holds" that give access to different dimensions, not exclusive of each other." (my translation)
18/ A great chapter then, & one that can be read in conjunction with recent studies in affect theory.
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