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Bruno latour and i have been traveling companions for a long time, starting with his long period at the CSI (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) at the École des Mines in Paris, through to the SPEAP program (Experimental Programme in Political Arts) that he is currently instituting at Sciences Po. In the latter, students start by inquiring into emerging problems, such as environmental ones, then begin rebuilding the links between political, scientific, and artistic representations that the traditional disciplines have so systematically disconnected. Rather than discuss in an abstract fashion the possible relations between the humanities and Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, I am going to retrace these kinds of relations by looking at actually occurring exchanges, in particular at the CSI. These links and trajectories have been numerous, as much among domains (sciences and technology, law, culture, economy, health) as among concepts (translation, mediation, regimes of enunciation, agency, attachment, etc.). The Inquiry is the culmination of a long-running project,1 from the first work of Latour and Steve Woolgar on laboratories, then to STS and the beginnings of actor-network-theory (ANT) worked out together with Michel Callon and John Law (and quickly subjected to their own critique, as in Law and John Hassard's 1999 Actor Network Theory and After), through to the interrogation of the Moderns launched in a spectacular fashion by We Have Never Been Modern in 1991, and the less diplomatic proposition to sociologists that they rebuild sociology without Émile Durkheim (Reassembling the Social, 2005). The Inquiry is both a recapitulation of the results of ANT and an explicitly pluralist and pragmatist reformulation of ANT methodology, as well as a response to the questions that the latter had leftopen-the price to pay for a radicalism that did its job well. One should also mention that the Inquiry has installed Latour and his current colleagues, especially Isabelle Stengers, on the pathway of those she calls the philosophers of difference: Gabriel Tarde, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Étienne Souriau, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Serres, Donna Haraway, etc.
I am going to put this overall path under the heading of a "return to the object," enabling me to draw out the threads supporting thought, like Latour's, that is always in the process of making. I will...