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On the Modern Cult of the Factish
Gods
Bruno Latour
“What immense spiritual and intellectual relaxation! With
what vivacity and cunning Bruno Latour gets us out of the cage holding us
hostage of the mumbo-jumbo of Subjects and Objects all these long years of
Western Civ. Out-fetishizing these fetishes, nudging us towards the mastery of
non-mastery, he invites us thereby to the sort of thinking needed to remake a
failing world.”—Michael Taussig, Columbia University
“Bruno Latour’s is a joyous and generous science, not a
warmongering, invidious one. His unique intellectual trajectory beautifully
replicates those strange objects he was the first to fully discern. For his
work is eminently suitable to an actor-network treatment; it thrives on
associations; it deals in mediations; it articulates heterogeneous modes of
existence; it modulates its own regime of enunciation as the truth it describes
changes its own conditions of production. What started as a ‘social description
of scientific practice’ morphed into a radical redescription of the social at
least as much as of science itself, and it bloomed as a daring project of a
general anthropology of truth, within which facts and fetishes, divine forces
and material forms, art and science, religion and law, all are made to inhabit
a virtual plane of coexistence, which we are challengingly invited to bring
into actuality as our common world.”—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Museu
Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the
project that the anthropologist, philosopher, and influential science studies
theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern.
There he proposed to re-describe the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific
truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In
this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naïve belief,” the
suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are
fabricated, and that “facts” are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology
of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting
the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both
are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes
are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns
sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique
of critique through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons
between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and of religious
icons.
Duke University Press
January 2011 168pp 9780822348252 PB £12.99 – Now only £9.00
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