9 - An Inconvenient Bodin: Latour and the Treasure Seekers

Summary

Abstract

The admirers of Jean Bodin's political philosophy might be surprised by his Demonomanie des sorciers and his forceful attempt to prove the reality of witchcraft. This opposition between the enlightened modern and the superstitious premodern makes his thought a prime example to confront to the theory of modernity proposed by Bruno Latour. This essay attempts such an exploration, and focuses on narratives of treasure seeking in Bodin's text, to understand the notion of nature that they bespeak, a nature entirely worked through by demons. Looking at Bodin as a premodern also allows us to complicate Latour's account by highlighting what the resurgence of thinking about witchcraft in late sixteenth-century Europe reveals about a larger argument about Nature, and the ways in which humans should deal with it.

Keywords: Jean Bodin, Bruno Latour, Nature, witchcraft, treasure hunting

In his treatise on witchcraft De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Jean Bodin (1530–1596) tells the story of a friend who, with a group of companions, went looking for buried enchanted treasures in Lyon. Their quest was unsuccessful as the spirits guarding the treasure scared them off with a horrific scream. Such a story might surprise those more used to thinking of Jean Bodin as a precursor of the rational Enlightenment. How can we make sense of this story and of the worldview it bespeaks? The present study will suggest that the work of Bruno Latour can help us answer such a question, and that, in return, Bodin's text can present a fresh perspective on Latour.

The Early Modern Bifurcation of Nature

For those who study the early modern period, the work of Bruno Latour—and that of the many scholars who are building on his insights—is of special interest, as Louisa Mackenzie and others have argued. Latour's works, including We Have Never Been Modern and Pandora's Hope, analyse early modern ‘revolutions’, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution, in order to question the validity of our collective construction of modernity. Conversely, the study of early modern culture can help shape our reading of Latour. According to Latour, the invention of Western modernity is rooted in a representation of nature which itself based on an originary bifurcation, a concept borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead, who explored how early modern philosophers and their followers created a clear and ever-widening separation between ‘what is in the mind, and what is in nature’.