Latour on Politics: Political turn in Epistemology or Ontological turn in Politics?

Abstract

[eng] According to some authors, the Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Alternatively, or his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn” –which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT)-; or, otherwise, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes no possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, neither a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of the Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT.