6 - Bruno Latour: Translating the Human

Summary

By stopping being modern, we have become ordinary humans again.

FMOF 8

On revient à l’évidence qu'un humain est attaché et que s'il se détache, il meurt.

MP 58

In the universal humanism of Michel Serres we saw both a development and a change of direction from the accounts of the human elaborated by Badiou, Meillassoux and Malabou. Whereas the figure to emerge in the thought of Badiou and Meillassoux relies on the host capacity of thought, Malabou moves away from determinate capacities but, in her early work at least, seems to favour a host cerebral substance of human personhood. Serres's account of the human, by contrast, is multi-modal: he combines de-differentiation with a recognition of determinate capacities, and also develops a narrative account of humanity as part of the Great Story of the universe. Whereas Badiou, Meillassoux and Malabou each have a predominantly ‘internalist’ account of the human, locating the host property of humanness within the body or the suite of capacities possessed by the individual, Serres's humanity is neither exclusively internalist nor externalist, understood both as (singular) identity and (group) belonging, and defined in terms of its place in a greater whole. If we were to persist in using these terms we would have to say that it is exo-internalist: humanity is what it is because of what is outside it, not exclusively (or even predominantly) because of its innate capabilities. In Serres's account of humanity the literary and scientific weave together, but there is still a substrate of univocity: the Great Story risks becoming Serres's ‘host narrative’.

Bruno Latour develops and proliferates Serres's incipient multi-modal approach, while also taking forward his move away from internalism. This chapter argues that Latour is very careful to offer an account of the human that repeats neither the structure nor the story of what he calls the ‘modern parenthesis’. In so doing, he gives us a multi-modal humanity which is not to be understood in terms of any host property or host substance, and which does much to mitigate the partiality of Serres's host narrative. The overall thesis of this final chapter is that we can best understand Latour's successive reworkings of the human in his Modes of Existence project and in his recent lectures on Gaia and the Anthropocene as ‘translations’, a movement first sketched in his early doctoral work on the theologian Rudolf Bultmann.