Thread by @AimeTim

1. This is a very important new interview with Bruno Latour, detailing his understanding of his own writing practices, the relevance of genre & form, and the importance of the idea of non-identical repetition.

academia.edu/56388837/An_In…

2. It reminds us of the importance of the work of early French poet Charles Péguy to his though, (“I don’t put anyone above Péguy”), esp. his retrieval & description of non-modern temporalities & the technique of non-identical repetition. This is consistent through Latour's work.

3. Quote from the interview: “this repetition is precisely a part of what has always interested me, that is, how does a formal repetition allow us to capture beings that are otherwise inaccessible?”

4. Latour reminds us that non-identical repetition is a fundamentally Christian exegetical manoeuvre. For reading of Scripture "does not entail the endless exercise of rereading a text that remains the same over the centuries”. Latour learned this from Malet/ Bultmann.

5. From the time of his Dijon thesis onwards, "exegesis" has been the key word for Latour's method. It is a method of "reading" off the empirical detail of the world, without presupposing its meaning (what Latour calls "premature unification of the world").

6. Now, we see what I have been claiming in my own writing all along: "this is clearly a notion tied to the politics of a deeply Christian exegesis”, writes Latour. “It is what theology in general does”.

7. Another word Latour uses for "exegesis" is "semiotics", and here we see as well the importance of Greimas to his early thought. Semiotics is useful insofar as it "re-attributes to so-called inert characters the power to act". Latour meshed Greimas with Garfinkel to create ANT.

8. So we see why writing - the material practice of producing words - is a tool for Latour. Writing forces you to pay attention to detail - to describe. It is essential training for an ANT theorist or one who seeks to apply the insights of The Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

9. Latour describes his own infancy, “I used to spend days describing a bouquet of flowers, gladioli, whatever. Writing is what people, kids, have to be taught. That’s where they begin to have the capacity to pay attention, to look for the right words ... continued in next tweet.

10. quote continued ... "You realise that you don’t have the words, that the thing you are describing is inert, then you animate it. In short, description is the basic vocation for writing”.

11. Writing is a way of forcing attention to beings in such a way as to provide them with a space in an actor-network. Exegesis and ontology are intimately linked in Latour's work. If you understand the connection between these, you can read any Latour text!

12. Final quote from the interview: "That is why, when I came to read my first thesis again after fifty years, I said to myself (laughs), now isn’t that strange, it is called Exégèse et ontologie! In the end, I have done nothing but that!” [end of thread]