"Contaminación de los ríos; embriones congelados; coronavirus; sida; agujero de ozono; robots... ¿Cómo comprender estos objetos extraños que invaden nuestro mundo? ¿Proceden de la naturaleza o de la cultura? Hasta aquí; las cosas eran simples: para los científicos; la gestión de esta división tradicional del trabajo no puede explicar la proliferación de híbridos. De ahí el sentimiento de pavor que generan y que los filósofos contemporáneos no consiguen disipar. ¿Y si hubiéramos tomado el camino errado?...". (Descripción editorial).

Not the most readable of Latour's books, but exposure to it is no bad thing, and inevitably elements of his thinking can gradually infiltrate readers' perspectives. Worth the effort. ( )

Struggled for about 30 pages, then gave up. Either the book makes no sense, or I'm woefully uneducated, or some combination of the two. Exactly the same feeling I get whenever I look at anything vaguely close to postmodernism.

I have no problem conceding that this rather thin book went a bit over my head. The blurb promised a spectacular new insight into human reality and history. And the bold claim that we only seemingly joined modernism stimulated my curiosity. But Latour writes as if he's in his own universe, uses quite particular jargon (which he hardly explains) and terminology that differs from what the rest of the intellectual world ordinarily uses (eg he uses the word 'society' for something that almost everyone else would describe as 'culture') and many passages just remained too obscure for me.

And yet: what I did understand, did resonate somehow. I'll try to translate it into my own words: what we understand as modernity (the Enlightened, rational-scientific view of the world) is not a radical break with the foregoing, and it must certainly not be interpreted in terms of progress; on the contrary, it is even a downright wrong view. That is because modernity rests on a radical break between nature (matter) and culture (society), whilst - according to Latour - both belong to the same realm and can't be divided; the break even is clear nonsense. As a consequence, self-proclaimed modernism gives us the illusion that everything we create is new and different and above all better (an accumulation of knowledge and insights). And thus it throws us into an arrogance that dazzles and disguises that we are actually heading for a catastrophe. (Obviously Latour in his later works makes very strong ecological accents).

I think I do see what Latour means, and maybe he is partially right (but in a much more nuanced way): western modernism claims a universalism and a truthfulness that isn't realistic; in the past months my reading of a lot of books on systems thinking has made that clear to me, too. And Latour's critique on how we look at history and time from our modernist and progressive perspective really appealed to me; these passages in the book contain fundamentally valuable insights.

But I'm not convinced modernism in general makes such a clear break between nature and culture as Latour claims. And the author uses his point of departure to radically deal with everything and everyone (all -isms are done with, and most of all postmodernism, while his view in fact amounts to pure deconstruction and is therefore essentially postmodernist). Moreover, if we follow his claim that the starting point of modernism is a real illusion (that ‘nonsensical’ separation between nature and culture), how then is it possible that we are heading for an (ecological, nuclear ...) catastrophe? Then that distinction does make a difference! It seems to me that Latour got trapped in a thought paradox that he himself constructed.

No, I’d rather prefer the much more constructive approach of systems thinking that in its own way tackles the simplistic aspects of modernism, but at least makes an attempt to formulate meaningful alternatives. But then again, maybe I'm wronging Latour and I just misunderstood him. And it seems to me, that that is at least as much his fault as it is mine. ( )