Bruno Latour

This slender, quirky, and intriguing book collects three pièces d'occasion that collectively extend the argument against the fetishism of facts so memorably advanced in Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993 [1991]). The first piece is a translation of a 1996 pamphlet that Latour wrote about an internship with an ethnopsychiatric practice at the Centre Devereux in Paris. The second republishes the introduction (coauthored by Peter Weibel) to the catalogue of the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash, which Latour co-curated, at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. The third selection was published in 2005 in the volume Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (Oxford), edited by James D. Proctor

The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality

In her interview published in the Cairol based journal ALIF, Lydia H. Liu reflects on the centrality of translation to the circulation of all knowledge. She emphasizes, in particular, new ways of understanding translation beyond semantics: What role does the supersign play in the making of concepts in translation? How do we analyze the logic of equivalency that simultaneously determines the "translables" and "untranslables"? Why is nonsense inseparable from sense? How do we analyze the conditions of the universal in translation? etc

Apocalypse Now!: From Freud, Through Lacan, to Stiegler’s Psychoanalytic ‘Survival Project

The objective of this article is to explore the value of psychoanalysis in the early twenty-first century through reference to Freud, Lacan, and Stiegler’s work on computational madness. In the first section of the article I consider the original objectives of psychoanalysis through reference to what I call Freud’s ‘normalisation project’, before exploring the critique of this discourse concerned with the defence of oedipal law through a discussion of the post-modern ‘individualisation project’ set out by Deleuze and Guattari and others. Tracking the development of ‘the individualisation project’ in history, I consider its connections with the cybernetic theories of Wiener and Shannon in the psycho-cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, before moving on to consider the other side of the psychoanalytic-cybernetic interaction through a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second section of the article. In reading Lacan’s seminar on Freudian drive in terms of the cybernetic repression of death, I set up the conclusion to the article which involves a discussion of Bernard Stiegler’s ‘survival project’ that relies on a recognition of the limit of death in order to produce human significance and oppose the madness of our contemporary computational reality

Fundamental Education: UNESCO and American Post-War Modernism

This article examines how the impact of modernism’s reception dominated post-war poetic discourse, and in turn, how the intersection of literary and political interests in the late 1940s resulted in an education platform with a global reach and implications, mainly in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and most notably in the shaping of UNESCO. The rise of literary and cultural NGOs, then, is best viewed in light of an intersection of political and academic interests that institutionalized literary production in the form of humanitarian outreach. The claims for modernism’s liberatory aesthetics were folded into a discourse of cultural freedom that was packaged as an educational imperative for global literacy. I.A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish’s different involvements in UNESCO will be used as case studies to illustrate how one aspect of modernism’s transmutation into a populist progressive political discourse occurred and how they reflected a global structural shift for literary production.Cet article montre comment l’impact de la réception du modernisme, plutôt que son influence, a dominé le discours critique de l’après-guerre, avant d’analyser comment le recoupement des enjeux politiques et littéraires à la fin des années 1940 s’est traduit, dans le domaine éducatif, par la mise en place d’un dispositif international de premier plan, notamment porté par les organisations non gouvernementales (ONG), et plus particulièrement par l’UNESCO. Ainsi, on s’attachera à comprendre l’essor d’ONG culturelles en examinant la façon dont la convergence des intérêts académiques et politiques a engendré une production littéraire institutionnalisée par le biais d’organisations à visée humanitaire. L’esthétique libératoire prônée par le modernisme fut aisément intégrée à un discours sur la liberté culturelle, lui-même présenté comme un impératif éducatif lié à la lutte contre l’illettrisme. L’engagement auprès de l’UNESCO de figures majeures comme I.A. Richards et Archibald MacLeish fera donc l’objet d’études de cas visant à révéler comment s’est produite une partie de la transmutation du modernisme en un discours politique progressiste et populiste, et en quoi ces derniers incarnent un changement culturel mondial plus profond dans le champ de la production littéraire