The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE
Graham Harman, Peter Erdélyi
Language: English
Pages: 153
ISBN: 1846944228
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman.
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas
Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters
Plato's Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues
back with us. Whitehead picks up on a few of them, Latour picks up on a few of them. Kant thinks it’s impossible to know whether or not there’s an infinite regress of wholes and parts; Latour tells us there’s an infinite regress. You might read him as merely saying that “for all practical purposes” we never know where the last black box is. But I think that if you follow his logic, you have to say the black boxes never stop opening. And so in a way he is asserting a metaphysical claim that there
would also give the same advice to the student. Lucas Introna Sure. [LAUGHTER] Graham Harman I think pragmatism works as a method, even if it fails as a metaphysics. And with writing it is extremely important to say: okay, this book will be finished. I did that with this book, actually. I said: “this book will be finished when it’s August 25 and I have to fly to Amsterdam ten hours later.” And that’s the point I reached rather than the last chapter, everything was structured according to that
organizational theorist immediately has to draw a diagram… I mean, every generation changes, but it shows informal connection, interaction … Every management consultant has to invent one of these just because it’s like buckets taken out of a plasma, so to speak, to fill in and make the machine work; if not the machine would just stop. And then if you take formalism… I have just published an article in Social Studies of Science40 on a fabulous book by Reviel Netz41 on Greek geometry. But plasma is
warm regards to the people he still knew there, and generally seemed very amused about the existence of a Heidegger-Latour reading group. When it was time to say our goodbyes, he said (I’m quoting freely): “Wait a second. I’ll be coming to the LSE to give a lecture sometime next year,” at which point he reached into his pocket and took out his Palm handheld, to check the exact date. Being a proud owner of a Palm TX, I also took out mine. And this was the moment when not only the two Palm Pilots
problem with the social sciences is that the repertoire that they accept in the world, of action, of theory of space, of a theory of time, of the definition of what an individual is, of the whole basic furniture of the world, is set in advance. If you read even critical theorists, the list of what is supposed to exist is already fixed. So for example I am very interested in religion. I can say that the anthropology of religion is no use to me because it begins by saying, “of course all of these
