The World Is Articulated. Bruno Latour’s Long Road Towards a Process Empirical Metaphysics

Abstract

Starting from the common intuition that Bruno Latour’s work holds many affinities with process philosophy, the paper tries to provide answers for the erratic reception in such direction. Through a historiographic account of the ensemble of works produced by Latour, the hypothesis is advanced that all previous work to An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) while claiming to be process-oriented, was largely not received as such because of the problems inherent to the irreductionist principle at the heart of it. The empirical metaphysics proposed in AIME finally solved such problems, thus liberating the processual dimension. The final sections will argue that «the world is articulated» is the central proposition of Latour’s process of empirical metaphysics, and that his most important contribution to philosophy may be summed up by the idea that «everything that lasts, lasts through what does not last». Incidentally this is an accurate way to describe A. N. Whitehead’s notion of societies, which will thus require – given the major event that this author’s work constituted for Latour – to first look into this often neglected aspect of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. The article concludes with a note on the relation between Latour’s late metaphysics and his engagement in ecological matters.