Sociologist Bruno Latour, author of key texts on the environmental crisis, died

Sociologist Bruno Latour, author of key texts on the environmental crisis, died

“Ecology is the new class struggle”, he had told the French newspaper Le Monde last year, on the occasion of the publication, already in 2022, of his latest book, “Memo sur la nouvelle classe écologique”.

In Argentina, the Siglo XXI Editores label published some of its most emblematic titles. One of them is “We were never modern”, a work translated into 20 languages ​​that questions the division between nature in the singular and cultures in the plural, and where he maintains that modern society never functioned according to the great division that sustains its system of representation. of the world: the one that radically opposes nature to culture.

Another of the texts published by the label is “Face to face with the planet”, which offers

a new look at climate change away from apocalyptic positions, where he argues that we are still prisoners of a vision of nature that does not serve to think about the link with it: neither the catastrophic views that announce the apocalypse nor the idealization that simplifies the world natural in conceiving him almost as a peaceful divinity. The sociologist argues there that everything that represented ancient nature – the air, the oceans, the glaciers, the climate, the soil – has ceased to be a reassuring or frightening static scenery to become one more actor on the stage.

Latour, who was also a philosopher and anthropologist, was an eminent professor at the famous Sciences Po university and an influential theorist on how man relates to his environment and how scientific thought is formulated. Thus he became a reference for new generations of environmental activists, politicians, researchers and even artists who try to redirect the environmental crisis that the planet is experiencing.

Despite these contributions, he was defined by the New York Times in 2018 as the “most famous and most misunderstood of French philosophers.” This was admitted today by President Emmanuel Macron, who in a tweet described him as “a humanist and plural spirit, recognized throughout the world before being recognized in France.”

Throughout his intellectual journey, Latour was a visiting professor at Harvard University and the author or co-author of 36 books and received two major international prizes for scientific or social science contributions, the Norwegian Holberg (2013), for his work on the concept of modernity, and the Japanese Kyoto (2021).

In 2021, he told AFP that the climate change and pandemic crises revealed a struggle between “geo-social classes”.

“Capitalism has dug its own grave. Now it’s about repairing it,” he said.

Source: Ambito

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Posts