«Editions La Découverte learned with sadness of the death of Bruno Latour last night in Paris. All our thoughts go out to his family and loved ones», writes the publishing house in a press release sent to AFP.
Recipient of the Holberg Prize (2013) and the Kyoto Prize (2021) for all of his work, Bruno Latour was an unclassifiable intellectual, concerned with field research. He was one of the figures of ecological thought.
He is the author (alone or in collaboration) of works such as «The Law Factory. An ethnography of the Council of State», «Laboratory Life», «We have never been modern», «The Microbes. War and Peace» (on Louis Pasteur) and the last «Where am I?» written in the midst of the Covid crisis.
Born June 22, 1947 in Beaune (Côte d’Or) into a family of Burgundy wine merchants, Bruno Latour passed an aggregation in philosophy and then trained in anthropology in Côte d’Ivoire.
He then taught in engineering schools, the École des Mines (where he was responsible for the «Description of scientific controversies» course) or the Center for the sociology of innovation.
Author of several essays published in English before being published in France, Bruno Latour has long been interested in questions of management and organization of research and, more generally, in the way in which society produces values and truths. , before turning to the environmental crisis.
He was one of the first to perceive the importance of ecological thought.
In 2021, he told AFP that the crises of climate change and the pandemic have brutally revealed a struggle between «geo-social classes». «Capitalism has dug its own grave. Now it’s time to make amends»