Lesser-Known Pieces by Latour on Religion and Spirituality: Part 1

Latour’s own site is obviously the first port-of-call to access any of his resources. In fact, I can’t emphasise enough how much is available there; it’s hard to think of another contemporary philosopher who curates his own content with such rigour and makes it as freely available.

That said, to an unusual degree his work is spread across different media, ranging from newspaper articles to museum catalogue entries, and from lecture notes to manuscripts of interviews, and this can make it hard to keep up to date with the full range of what he has written.

I try to keep a full bibliography on Latour’s work in all its guises (and always appreciate a heads-up if you find an obscure interview or opinion piece somewhere: do send me a note on timhowles@outlook.com or @AIMETim). And so with that in mind I thought it might be interesting to have an occasional series on this blog, introducing and offering some thoughts on items from his backlist that you may have missed.

One of the proudest moments of my life was my first meeting with Latour, which took place at my own university, the London School of Economics, on 24th October 2014. Latour had come over to engage in a debate with Rowan Williams on the topic of religion and the environment. My doctoral supervisor, Graham Ward, had organised a personal meeting for me. It was a cold, miserable morning, and I remember travelling down from Oxford to London on the train with some trepidation. I didn’t know what to expect. But Bruno couldn’t have been more accommodating. He gave two hours of his time, graciously talking me through his thoughts on The Inquiry, on Rejoicing and on Factish Gods, among many other things. It was absolutely fascinating; one of the great privileges of my life actually. Since then, it’s been wonderful to have continued in communication with him in various ways. Latour is the ultimate “collegial” thinker and (from what I’ve heard) he always has time to offer to anyone interested. It’s a great tribute to him.

One funny story, if I may. Latour was so generous with his time that he invited me to join him for a coffee after our interview, but before the debate itself. I scanned the road for the best-looking coffee shop and found a smart, indie place up the road. We queued. When I got to the counter, I ordered first: “latte, please”, I said. I quickly realised my mistake as this French connoisseur spied with disdain the milky drink that was passed over to me!

The debate itself is available on YouTube. I did make a full transcription from that video which I then used in my own research. But I was delighted to find the full dialogue published recently as a chapter in this book, Religion and the Public Sphere: New Conversations, edited by James Walters and Esther Kersley. To be honest I hadn’t been aware of this volume when it was first published in 2018; it’s amazing how important pieces by Latour can escape the radar of even the keenest reader! But it’s great to have it available in this form.

The dialogue between Williams and Latour is found in chapter 4, entitled “Religion and the Environment”. I remember the event vividly from my seat in the audience; an extraordinary back-and-forth between two of the great thinkers of our generation. Latour’s contribution focuses on some of his work on the Anthropocene as it had developed in 2014 (which feels like a long time ago now, of course). Among other things, it is particularly noteworthy for his discussion of the idea of “apocalypse”. For Latour (and Williams agrees with him on this point) the disjunction between the strong command posed to us by the climate science data (“you must change your lives, or else catastrophe!”) and the failure of individuals, societies and governments to heed this warning can be explained by the idea that the apocalypse is surely “behind us”. The narrative of progress modernitycelebrates is towards a future whose essential form has already been revealed. The apocalyptic injunctions emanating from the climate scientists, then, which are then relayed through the media and other channels, is hard to assimilate with this narrative. To the extent that modern people can conceive of a cataclysmic event at all, they are at best able to posit it as something that has already taken place and that has been assimilated, and not as something that may still lie ahead. Thus, to all extents and purposes they live “après l’Apocalypse” (Facing Gaia, p.252). This has an effect upon their understanding of time, their sense of being in the world, and their conception of history:

Les modernes se disent désormais absolument certains d’avoir atteint la fin des temps, d’être parvenu dans un autre monde, et d’être séparés des temps anciens par une rupture absolue.
[The moderns] tell themselves henceforth that they are absolutely certain they have reached the end of time,have arrived in another world, and are separated from the times of old by an absolute rupture.
Latour, Face à Gaïa, (2015), p.253

Modern people believe that the essential trajectory of their own future, the arrow of progress we are all moving along, has already been set (even if minor adjustments and set-backs are likely to occur along the way). They can no more envisage disruption to this trajectory than a religious believer can envisage the flow of history somehow slipping away from the control of a sovereign God. For Latour, this is the reason why the scale and likely impact of the contemporary environmental crisis has yet to gain its full traction. If we live “après l’Apocalypse”, our capacity for action will be substantially reduced. We will hear the apocalyptic injunction. But we will lack the requisite motivation to respond, no matter how well-informed and convinced we may be about the reliability of the science that undergirds it.

What is needed, then, is a reclaimed understanding of history as that which is fragile and composed, and a renewed sense of our own cautious and attentive agency in contributing to the survival of planetary existence into the future.

The appreciative words of Anna Tsing, a fellow academic and collaborator with Latour on other texts and articles, are worth noting. These come from a different article, but they reflect much of what I felt that day at the LSE:

Let me say first how much I loved it when you, Bruno, talked about the apocalyptic in these lectures. For me this was a revelation. Because I had until then always experienced the term ‘apocalypse’ as a punishment. It was used to tell people: ‘you cannot go there because you are being apocalyptic!’ And being apocalyptic was not amenable to being an academic in many ways. And then you came along in these lectures and said: ‘yes, OK, apocalyptic is a trope. But why not use that trope?’
Latour, with Stengers et al (2018), Anthropologists are Talking, p.18.

Watch this space for more posts like this on “forgotten” or “buried” pieces of Latour’s work on religion and spirituality.