Annotation
In the 19th century, the plurality of incommensurable historical eras and cultures has been contrasted with the unity and homogeneity of nature. On the one hand, the cultural and social determination of the human behavior was conceived as similarly irresistible as the natural one. On the other hand, the diversity of cultures and political orders was associated with the freedom of man to transcend natural constraints and construct his own reality.
No matter if the human world was conceived as governed by its own implacable laws or as an expression of human freedom, it was treated – practically and theoretically – as separated from and independent of the world of nature. Accordingly, humanities represented a special kind of knowledge which had its own epistemological tools that were different from and independent of those used by the sciences.
The great divide of the modern era has been brought down by the global ecological crisis which has forced the problems of “nature” into the very center of “politics” and thereby undermined also the separation between the social and natural sciences. One of the boldest attempts to elaborate constitutive elements of a new political philosophy that would reflect the collapse of the great divide was Bruno Latour.
The course consists in the close reading of the two books which he devoted to that task: We Have Never Been Modern (1991, 1993) and Facing Gaia (2015, 2017).