Chapter Viii BrUno latoUr anD the MiraCUloUS preSent oF enUnCiation erik bordeleau So, there exists a form of original utterance that speaks of the present, of deinitive presence, of completion, of the fulilment of time, and which, because it speaks of it in the present, must always be brought forward to compensate for the inevitable backsliding of the instant towards the past Bruno latour, Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech “Science” only gives the impression of existing by turning its existence into permanent miracle. Bruno latour, The Pasteurization of France A drama of presence1 ‘In their light toward the future, the Moderns are absent to themselves’. Bruno latour uttered this sentence during the “Speculative gestures” colloquium organized by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise at Cerisy-laSalle in July 2013. He had irst given an inspiring talk on how not to deanimate scientiic descriptions, as part of a larger relection on storytelling and “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, which was later published in New literary History2, alongside an article by the archaeologist ian hodder on the entanglement of humans and things, and a reply to both of them by the philosopher graham harman. the presence of harman as a commentator in this context comes as no surprise. His object-oriented philosophy has been deeply inluenced by latour’s metaphysical treaty Irreductions. harman’s crusade against po1 2 i would like to thank François lemieux and heather Davis for their invaluable presence by my side during the Cerisy conference. this text owes a lot to them both. B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, in New literary History, Vol. 45, n° 1 156 Breaking the spell tentiality and for the afirmation of the primacy of actuality has found a decisive impulse in the idea that we need to go ‘from the vertigo of power to the simple and banal positivity of forces’.3 reciprocally, latour’s Jamesian attempt at cultivating a ‘stubbornly realist attitude’4 in order to stay close to the pragmata (the greek word for thing) found in harman’s work a source of inspiration. in 2004, latour dedicated an important article to exposing his views on matters of concern to Harman (“Why has Critique run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”) and since then, on until 2008 or so, he repeatedly insisted on the importance of adopting an object-oriented attitude with regards to inquiry and politics, promoting the ideas of a parliament of things and of an ‘object-oriented democracy’.5 nonetheless, during the 2008 debate at the london School of economics, published three years later under the title The Prince and the Wolf,6 latour unexpectedly criticized the actualism depicted in Irreductions that harman is so fond of. if Irreductions was a necessary book in order to solve the problem of the humans/non-humans opposition, latour said, it now appeared to be ‘a lawed, a completely lawed philosophy’ that was mainly useful for polemical reasons, precisely because it obliterates the question of virtuality or potentiality.7 For latour, the deployment of networks depicted in Irreductions leads to a lat ontology that doesn’t pay enough attention to the notion of trajectory, thus painting everything in grey; it doesn’t allow one to properly capture the different modes of existence of things and beings – ‘the key in which things are sent, so to speak.’8 latour then explained that only three years after the publication of Irreductions, he embarked on a multifaceted exploration of regimes of enunciation that, more than 15 years later, culminated in a book that appears as latour’s opus magnum: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.9 latour’s interest in the inner narrativity of things that i will explore further in this article exempliies the ultimate consequences of this radical turn-over. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 B. latour, “préface de la nouvelle édition”, in Irreductions (paris : la découverte, 2001), p. 8 (my translation) B. latour, “Why critique has run out of steam”, in Critical Inquiry, Special issue on the Future of Critique, Vol 30 n° 2, p. 231 B. latour, “From realpolitik to Dingpolitik or how to Make things public”, Bruno latour and peter weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmosphere of Democracy (Cambridge: Mit press, 2005), p. 16 B. latour and g. harMan, The prince and the Wolf (washington: Zero Books, 2011) Ibid., p. 46 Ibid., p.48 B. latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge Ma: harvard University press 2013) e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 157 let’s come back to latour’s presentation at Cerisy. there he showed how, in scientiic texts, performances precede competencies and are therefore inherently ‘animated’. ‘there is no other way, latour maintains, to deine the characters of the agents they [the scientiic accounts] mobilize but via the actions through which they have to be slowly captured’.10 it is in this sense that, insofar as it is composed of meaningful and active agents – ‘as long as they act, agents have meaning’11 – the world for latour is inherently dramatic. it is this ontological proposition that i would like to explore more at length in the following pages. after his talk, latour found himself in a heated debate with the discussant and friend Donna haraway. the discussion was moderated by isabelle Stengers and concerned the modes of iguration of Gaia. Haraway opened the discussion with an eco-feminist critique of the epic and its totalizing and universalizing account of coming catastrophes. against the generalizing and paralysing effect attributed to apocalyptic narratives, she argued for localized, speculative fabulations that multiply human and non-human viewpoints so as to transform our relation with mobilization and question our ways of responding to the ecological crisis. it is along this line of thought that haraway somehow provocatively came to suggest that our modes of existence should enter into a process of ‘detumescence’. was that term at least partly referring to latour’s rather pastoral rhetoric, magnanimous demeanours and predilection for all-encompassing ‘charitable iction’ (as he describes his AIME project)? Was her abrasive depiction including latour, a thinker so skilful at occupying the stage and unabashedly at ease at staging modernity ‘at large’? the tone of haraway’s intervention was passionate and polemical, yet friendly. It was unquestionably an amazing moment of thought. She was certainly pushing latour to his very limits, but she was doing it as someone who enjoyed latour’s trust. in fact, although the theme was never fully disclosed, there was little doubt that underpinning the discussion between them was the issue of what to do with the Christian tradition and its world-making modes of narration. it is no secret that latour is a practicing Catholic and that his rather idiosyncratic conception of religion plays an overarching role in his system of thought, especially in relation to the possibility of being absent – and, most importantly, present – to oneself and the world. haraway’s response to latour seemed to garner spontaneous approval among the audience. 10 11 B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, in New literary History Vol.45 n. 1 (2014), p. 11 Ibid., p. 12 158 Breaking the spell Her ierce anti-monotheistic stance and praise for multi-species muddling seemed to be in tune with the general orientation of the week-long encounter. Although the organizers put forth no exclusive deinition, they had presented the speculative gestures as ‘situated virtualities’ and ways to engage with ‘a possible’. the conference’s focus on the situatedness of knowledge production practices is, no surprise here, heavily inluenced by Haraway’s work. it echoed most directly with her presentation at Cerisy, in which she spoke of the mediality of worlding processes and how we cannot think but through apparatuses of thinking. She illustrated her point with these sharp and thought-provoking formulas inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s seminal book Reproducing the Future: ‘it matters what thoughts think thoughts; what knowledges know knowledge; what relations relate relations; what worlds world worlds; what stories tell stories.’ Celebrating the ‘partial takes’ and ‘continuous weaving’ involved in the arts of storytelling, she promoted an ethics of ‘staying with the trouble’, stressing the fact that ‘response-ability is almost never a matter of choice, but of dealing with the hand that was imparted to us.’ Latour’s approach to the question of the modes of iguration of Gaia or to the kind of arts of narration to be fostered in the age of the anthropocene is closely related to that of haraway. they both tend to put emphasis on the eventfulness of the act of storytelling. in fact, as latour puts it, they think of narrativity not as ‘a feature of the language about the world’ but as ‘a property of the world itself’.12 in his criticism of how, in the ‘scientiic worldview’, ‘the agency of all the entities making up the world has been made to vanish’,13 latour does indeed side with haraway: ‘the great paradox of the “scientiic worldview” is to have succeeded in withdrawing historicity from the world. and with it, of course, the inner narrativity that is part and parcel of being in the world – or, as Donna haraway prefers to say, “with the world”’.14 why then was latour so manifestly put on the defensive by haraway during their challenging dialogue? what could be so passionately at stake in their discussion, considering that they share a common understanding of how inner narrativity or ‘storytelling is not just a property of language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active’?15if latour agrees with haraway 12 13 14 15 Ibid. Ibid., p. 13 Ibid., p. 13 Ibid., p. 14 e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 159 on the need ‘to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible’,16 he nonetheless holds a very different position on the sense and role of apocalypse, a structuring idea of the Christian art of storytelling and activating presence if there is one. latour’s act of enunciation in response to haraway’s sustained critical ire is worth describing in detail, as it constitutes a sort of embodied and performative hint at how science and religion intersect in his thought. Around the end of the discussion, Latour responded to a question coming from the audience about Foucault and his treatment of conversion or metanoia in antiquity. It was at that moment that he said, in a careful and somehow prospective way: ‘In their light toward the future, the Moderns are absent to themselves’. This was but the irst trait of a lively gesture of thought, the inauguration of a remise en présence17 that couldn’t but emanate, i daresay, from his soul, as it is of ‘the near, the origin, the present my [his] soul longs for.’18 the heavily charged and rather enigmatic sentence – what does latour allude to exactly when he suggest that Moderns are absent to themselves? – hovered up in the air, suspended, as no interlocutor seemed to take account of it. So then, a few minutes later, latour reasserted his point. he gazed upwards, threw his arms up and then energetically brought them back towards him, as if invoking some greater force or gathering his strength in order to establish a new point of departure in the exchange. and then, against all odds, he defended the idea of apocalypse. he made it resonate with clarity and technical distinction, bringing it back in the discussion in spite of the fashionable disregard it was subjected to up until then. latour basically said that we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of the resources of apocalypse, for they allow us to pose the problem of our presence in the world, of how to be present to the challenges we are now facing. and just then, the bell announcing lunchtime rang. the debate stopped suddenly. while the participants slowly dispersed, i stayed there, immobile, with a friend who was just as struck as myself by what had just happened, and we started to collect our thoughts about this unexpected turn of events, trying to wrap our minds around it. More than a year later, i guess i’m still at it. The questions of presence and of the activating relation to the future are crucial to latour’s work. For latour, apocalypse ties in closely with how 16 17 18 Ibid., p. 15 This key formulation is quite hard to translate in English. Literally, we could say “put back in presence”; but the translator of Rejoicing has preferred another solution that privileges the relation to spatial proximity: “made close again”. B. latour, Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech, p. 98 160 Breaking the spell post-human gaians or, to use latour’s preferred formulation, the ‘earthbound’, envisage the future and inhabit the present. it is an essential historical ingredient that, he suggests, should not be left aside in our attempt to weave ‘the various threads of geostory’ in new ways.19 latour’s realist drama of presence20 includes the notion of apocalypse within a complex and, at least at irst sight, paradoxical understanding of how ‘in the real world time lows from the future to the present.’21 in this passage, latour refers polemically to the reductionist version of an objective ‘natural world’ that is conceived of as inherently drama-free and should remain so, insofar as scientiic rigour precisely consists in resisting the temptation of anthropomorphizing it. the speculative image of thought latour elaborates against the idea of inert and deanimated matter can only be fully understood, i would argue, if we bring to the picture how he conceives of the fabrication of present persons within the realm or mode of existence of religion. in both cases, to put it more succinctly, what is at stake is the afirmation of a regime of enunciation that resists the ‘inevitable backsliding of the instant towards the past’ and coincides with a form of temporality that, radiating from a ‘miraculous’ present, challenges common deinitions of causality. Therein lies, i would argue, the crux of latour’s renewed political theology. “Apocalypse is our chance” a few weeks after the Cerisy debate, latour gave an interview to the French newspaper Le monde in which he extrapolated his conception of apocalypse and how it could affect positively our perception of the current situation. Questioned about the discrepancy between the gravity of the ecological crisis and our ability to react appropriately to it, latour suggested that we are witnessing a movement of ‘understandable withdrawal in 19 20 21 B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, p. 15 i’m referring here to ernesto de Martino’s concept. in his study on the magical world, the italian anthropologist described how presence in the world is constantly at risk of dissolution and needs to be collectively reinstituted through different existential techniques. ‘[The sorcerer] transforms the critical moments of beingin-the-world in a courageous and dramatic decision, that of situating oneself in the world.’ e. de Martino, Le monde magique (paris : institut d’édition Sanofi-Synthélabo, 2003), p. 126. this approach to the consolidation of a being-there bears close parallels with what latour calls in Rejoicing ‘the making of individuals made close again’ [la fabrication des personnes remises en présence], p. 155 B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, p. 13 e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 161 front of the coming apocalypse.’22 with his typical enthusiasm and acting out as some sort of great motivator and decipherer of the French people, latour expressed his admiration for the ‘marvellous association between the trust in science, republican spirit and modernization’23 that permeated the formation of French institutions. the tone and tenor of latour’s public address bears great importance with regard to the type of political intervention he concretely envisages and performs in his speeches and writings. For latour, the solution to the global ecological crisis inevitably passes through an in-depth reform and revitalization of our institutions, primarily that of the State – which makes him rather unpopular among a great part of the left intelligentsia. in this regard (and the same applies to his long-term friend peter Sloterdijk, to whom he dedicated his gifford lectures entitled Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature) latour can be thought of as some sort of creative and megalopathic adviser of the anthropocenic prince. latour’s reference to the notion of apocalypse is enmeshed in a description of our current state of affairs that involves the State as an unavoidable collective actor. in fact, although he states that ‘we are assuredly in a situation of revolution’,24 it is one of such a novel kind that the revolutionary and anti-capitalist traditions appear to be, in his opinion, largely irrelevant. Indeed, facing the great challenges of our times requires equipping the State with more accurate and perceptive tools so that it can better ‘palpate’, ‘experiment and produce the general will’.25 i won’t comment further on latour’s pragmatist and optimistic views about the State as an instrument of collective representation and as a ‘great machine to distillate general will’26. what i’m interested in here is to show how latour’s characterization of apocalypse as an opportunity is a key element in his system of thought, elucidating both his conception of semio-ontological dramaticity and the eulogical and evangelical tenor of his political mode of address. the latter must be understood in a generous and expanded nietzschean way, as suggested by Sloterdijk in his The Competition of Good news: Nietzsche Evangelist in which he presents his own account of modern disenchantment and path to overcome it: ‘and if the contemporary is 22 23 24 25 26 B. latour, “l’apocalypse est notre chance”, Le monde, September 20th, 2013, available online here: http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2013/09/20/bruno-latour-l-apocalypse-est-notre-chance_3481862_3232.html (my translation). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 162 Breaking the spell not capable of praise anymore, isn’t it precisely because it was forced to allow primacy to the irremediable?’27 Latour proposes a practical deinition of apocalypse that rejects its common assimilation with the idea of catastrophe, bringing forth its original meaning as ‘revelation’ without mentioning it explicitly: apocalypse signifies the certitude that the future has changed shape, and that we can do something. it’s as if the form of time had changed and that, therefore, we could now at last do something. it is a thought for action against stupor and panic. (…) apocalypse is the understanding that something is happening and that we must make ourselves worthy of what is coming to us. it is, in fact, a revolutionary situation. 28 this passage could allow for an extended theological exegesis. i will try to stay as brief as possible, focusing on how latour envisages the idea of apocalypse in relation to a transformed – activating – relation to the future. Latour’s deinition of apocalypse is technical and generic enough to be extended to any moment whatsoever. in this example it works in relation to the massive advent of the anthropocene, but nothing prevents it from applying, with most interesting results, to our way of characterizing agency in scientiic narratives. In this sense, while he insists on the importance of being object-oriented, latour’s reference to apocalypse is essentially concerned with getting our subjectivity right, that is, with favouring a politically informed and active stance in time. in the interview he mobilized the dramatic and historical resources of apocalypse in a rather conventional way, so as to reveal the present-informed-by-the-future as an opportunity to be seized. But in fact for latour, following whitehead’s conception of the atomicity of becoming, it is the fabric of the world itself that is made of a myriad of actual occasions to be acknowledged and ‘revealed’ as such. the certitude of which latour talks with regard to the change affecting present time bears surprising similarity with how Christianity conceives of faith as what makes the future present in the subject who believes. For example, in his encyclical letter about hope, Cardinal ratzinger explains how ‘eternal life’ is but a vibrant relation to a future that is already there: Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. the fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched 27 28 p. sloterdiJk, La compétition des Bonnes Nouvelles: Nietzsche évangéliste, trans. By olivier Mannoni (paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002), p. 55 (my translation) B. latour, “l’apocalypse est notre chance” e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 163 by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.29 even though he talks about certainty in his own account of apocalypse, Latour would most certainly contest a deinition of faith that involves a dimension of belief. ‘Faith and belief have nothing to say to one another’30 latour vehemently sustains. as is well known, an essential component of his work aims at debunking the notion of belief. his book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods is fully dedicated to show that ‘a Modern is someone who believes that others believe.’31 he posits that we should do without a category producing an undesirable distinction between interiority and exteriority, passivity and activity, theory and practice. and indeed, belief is just too reductive and subjective a category when it comes to giving a proper – that is, fantastic, ambitious and, in the end, realist enough – account of how the world as we experience and discover it is composed of indivisible events irreducible to a strict subject/object division. latour doesn’t mobilize the resources of apocalypse in the name of religion understood as some sort of supplement d’âme for a desolated ‘material’ world. he doesn’t want to spiritualize or re-enchant the world – presenting things in this way would mean that one has already lost the (ever-enchanted) world in the irst place. On the contrary, as he nicely puts it, ‘the symbolic is the magic of those who have lost the world. it is the only way they have found to maintain “in addition” to “objective things” the “spiritual atmosphere” without which things would “only” be natural.’32 if anything, latour wants to bring our attention to the dimension of (real) 29 30 31 32 benedictus xVi, Spe Salvi (Vatican, libreria editrice Vaticana, 2007), available online here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html B. latour, “‘thou Shalt not take the lord’s name in Vain’: Being a Sort of Sermon on the hesitations in religious Speech” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, n.39 (Spring 2001), pp. 215-234 (p. 231). B. latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, trans. by Catherine porter and heather Maclean (Durham and london: Duke University press, 2010), p. 2 B. latour “irreductions”, in The Pasteurization of France, trans. by alan Sheridan and John law (Cambridge: harvard University press ,1993), p. 187. one can also think of this famous passage from We have never been Modern: ‘they [the antimoderns] take on the courageous task of saving what can be saved: souls, minds, emotions, interpersonal relations, the symbolic dimension, human warmth, local specificities, hermeneutics, that margins and the peripheries. an a dmirable mission, but one that would be more admirable still if all those sacred vessels were actually threatened.’ B. latour, We have never been Modern, trans. by Catherine porter (Cambridge: harvard University press, 1993), p. 123 164 Breaking the spell futurity inherent in every present. in this sense, faith is about nourishing a noble and speculative disposition towards the future, one that participates decisively in the plural arts of immanent attention.33 adam S. Miller’s remarkable Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology underlines how, for latour, religion is an ethical exercise in immanent attention aimed at staying with the historical trouble – a training to live by and speak from things. ‘Religion, he says, is what breaks our will to go away.’34against the grain of the usual association of religion with the other-wordly, Latour afirms that ‘it is religion that attempts to access the this-worldly in its most radical presence (…)’.35 inversely, he can’t seem to have harsh enough words for any form of escapism: ‘the dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin.’36 the heart of latour’s realism thus stands, paradoxically as it would appear at irst glance, in his conception of religion. Or, to be more precise: La33 34 35 36 in The Present Feeling: Contemporary Art and the Question of Time, a collective text that will be published in the catalogue of the 2014 Montreal Biennale, the SenseLab explores the question of futurity in a way that is different from, but not incompatible with, the narrative art of immanent attention suggested by latour. For the Senselab, ‘to respond ably with the world in the making is to align oneself eventfully with the futurity in the present.’ in contrast with latour’s insistence on the way in which the future is made present, the Senselab thinks of the responsibility towards what is coming in terms of an aesthetic of potential responsiveness, promoting an enhanced sensibility to the enmeshed temporalities forming the contemporary. ‘think of the contemporary as the commingling of all these temporalities: the con-temporary as the textured “withness” of times. Feel the textures inherent to this conjecture of experience. Feel how immanent a future is in this moment, feel how far, how close, how else it is to yourself, how topologically intimate it is to itself. Now, imagine the future as anything that could come out of the mix, as the potential of all that vibrates and comes together in withness. what could come is always still in the mix. this potential – futurity – can only be felt. in the present.’ the Senselab’s focus on futurity as potential diverges significantly from the agents’ inner historicity as highlighted in latour’s approach. it is more prone to celebrate the burstability of a life and the creative involution inherent to becoming-animal. adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (new York: Fordham University press, 2013) p.145. B. latour, “will non-humans Be Saved? an argument in ecotheology”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol 15 (2009) pp. 459-475 (p. 464), cited in adam S. Miller Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and ObjectOriented Theology, p. 157 B. latour, “will non-humans Be Saved? an argument in ecotheology”, p. 473, cited in Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology, p. 156 e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 165 tour draws the ultimate consequences of the most singular feature of JudeoChristianity, namely its thoroughly historical perspective. in a move similar to those readers of leibniz who cancel god from his system and keep the thus liberated and anarchic monads, he subtracts the idea of an unearthly providence in order to emphasize the Christian sense of historical contingency.37 in the wake of Martin rudwick’s work on geohistory, from whom he retains that ‘when geohistory began to “burst the limits of time” it was not to escape from the narrow prison of the Church’s teachings,’38 latour takes the Bible as a model of historically grounded narrative. he thus obtains a rather counter-intuitive yet convincing way of resisting the Modernist or rationalist divide between science and religion. in his gifford lecture, this operation culminates in his presentation of gaia as a fully secularized, realist and contingent historical igure. The keyword here is history, as it brings together narrativity and contingent factuality. as suggested earlier, latour’s realism is anchored in a strong conception of narration: i use the word ‘narrative’ to designate the specific ontology of events that might have unfolded otherwise, events that had no plan, that are not lead by any providence, journeys that succeed or fail depending on constant retelling and continual re-evaluation that modifies, once again, their contingent meaning.39 gaia is the name of a radically secularized and immanent geohistory. if latour sides with lovelock and his contested choice of term, it is not because the concept of gaia might suggest a touchy-feely ‘sentient being’, but because it ‘captures the distributed intentionality of all the agents that are modifying their surroundings to suit themselves better.’40as latour 37 38 39 40 i would suggest that latour’s realist stance takes its full significance when conceived in relation to the idea that Christianity favours a sense of active personality. latour’s dramatic realism is indeed thoroughly personalist. or to put it in other words: the last and fully differentiated word of latour’s radical narrativism is that of (a) person. I cannot argue this point more in details here. It would require discussing in details how his philosophy draws from and resonates with william James’ conception of the relation between theism and action, and with whitehead’s remarks on actuality and the question of evil. For a preliminary attempt at elucidating this question, see Erik Bordeleau, “La méthode de dramatisation et la question ‘Qui?’”, Inflexions n°8, 2015 (to be published). B. latour “the puzzling face of a secular gaia”, Facing Gaia: Six lectures on the political theology of nature, gifford lectures on natural religion, edinburgh, 18th28th of February 2013, p. 73. the lectures are available online here: http://www. bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/giFForD-SiX-leCtUreS_1.pdf B. latour, “the puzzling face of a secular gaia”, p. 72 Ibid., p. 67 166 Breaking the spell explains against the idea of natural actors ‘playing on the planks of an inanimate stage’41: every organism that is taken as the point of departure of a biochemical reaction should be seen not as thriving ‘in’ an environment, but as curbing the environment to accommodate its need to thrive better into it. in that sense, every organism intentionally manipulates its surroundings to its own benefit.42 gaia thus gives a name to the all-encompassing and rather cruel game of inter-capture between a myriad of agents pursuing ‘their interest all the way to the bitter end.’43 when conceived as such, the Blue planet suddenly stands out as what is made of a long concatenation of historical, local, hazardous, specific and contingent events as if it were the temporary outcome of a ‘geohistory’ as attached to specific places and dates as the Biblical narrative, that is, exactly what was not to be taken into account when considered simply as a falling body among all the others.44 We now have all the elements required to give a concluding, if not entirely satisfactory, account of how latour conceives of the headlong rush of the Moderns. Moderns are damned insofar as they believe that the truly rationalist way to be in the world is to latten futurity. In this perspective, materialism is the ultimate idealism. Matter is the illusory substance that supposedly lows purely ‘from past to present’,45 the other-worldly thing in which ‘the consequences are already there in the cause’, and for which therefore there is ‘no suspense to expect, no sudden transformation, no metamorphosis, no ambiguity.’46 alongside their fetish matter, Moderns too would like to simply low from past to present. Their conception of deanimated matter conlates with the most insane ascesis, that of becoming a pure and unreal low of information without transformation. Inversely, and against all odds, Latour maintains that ‘in the real world time lows from the future to the present’. life is but a zone of contingent, metamorphic and always somehow miraculous encounters. acting as some sort of secular prophet of the puzzling gaia, latour exposes us to a civilizational choice. he calls us to stand up to the challenge posed by an animated and 41 42 43 44 45 46 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 69 Ibid., p. 55 B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, p. 10 Ibid. e. Bordeleau - Bruno Latour and the Miraculous Present of Enunciation 167 inherently dramatic materiality, one that is produced by a constant and active re-addressing of time that commands ‘a realist deinition of the many occasions through which agencies are being discovered.’47 and there opens a realist drama of presence, in which things are thrown into the risky business of existing and organisms-that-person proliferate joyfully. * Contrary to what they often say of themselves, Modernists are not forward-looking, but almost exclusively backward-looking creatures. this is why the irruption of gaia surprises them so much. Since they have no eyes in the back of their head, they deny it is coming at them at all, as if they were too busy fleeing the horrors of the times of old. it seems that their vision of the future had blinded them to where they were going; or rather, as if what they meant by the future was entirely made of their rejected past without any realistic content about ‘things to come.’ (French usefully distinguishes between ‘le futur’ and ‘l’avenir.’)48 47 48 B. latour, “agency at the time of the anthropocene”, p. 14 B. latour, “war of the worlds: humans against earthbound”, Facing Gaia: Six lectures on the political theology of nature, p. 106