François Jullien’s work ( Jullien 1995) on Chinese philosophers has the great
merit of showing us to what extent Westerners have dramatized the question of the ex-
ternal world and made effectiveness incomprehensible ( Jullien 1997).
I have come to understand this thanks to Gomart 1999 and Gomart 2002, along
with a whole series of recent works on what becomes of subjectivity once objectivity
has been transformed by science studies; see in particular Despret 1999 and Berg and
Mol 1998.
One of Isabelle Stengers’ contributions is that she has shown how the social sci-
ences would finally become scientific if they agreed “to treat humans as things,” that is,
paradoxically, with all the respect with which a researcher in the so-called “hard” sci-
ences manages to let himself be surprised by the resistances offered by his object of
study (Stengers 1997b). The indifference of nonhumans protects them against objec-
tivization, whereas humans, always concerned about doing well (especially when a lab
coat asks one of them to imitate an object), are not very good at defending themselves
against enrollment in objectivization, proving the anthropomorphic and polemical role
of objectivity, moreover, by their perfect imitation! The argument is developed still fur-
ther in Despret 1996, and especially Despret 2002, where it becomes a means for sort-
ing out the experimental arrangements of psychologists. On what I call the Stengers-
Despret shibboleth, see Latour forthcoming.
On the properly metaphysical meaning of the word “proposition,” see White-
head 1978 [1929].
This was the thrust of my effort in Latour 1999b, and it serves as a philosophy of
the sciences in the present book. I am grateful to Geneviève Teil for her fine example
(Teil 1998).
It is a great misfortune that empiricism was invented during an ongoing political
battle for the control of matters of fact: instead of amaximumof contact between
speech and charged phenomena in language, people had to be content with aminimum,
mere “sensory data,” in order to limit the scope of discussion as much as possible
(Whitehead 1920). For this sad political history of empiricism, see Shapin and Schaffer
1985 and Poovey 1999.
There is a magnificent discussion of this Deleuzian point in Zourabichvili 1994,
although Deleuze could have learned it from Gabriel Tarde: “For thousands of years,
people have been cataloguing the various manners of being, the various degrees of be-
ing, and they have never had the idea of classifying the various species, the various de-
grees, of possession. Yet possession is the universal phenomenon, and there is no
better term than ‘acquisition’ to express the formation and growth of any being what-
soever. The terms ‘correspondence’ and ‘adaptation’ made fashionable by Darwin and
Spencer, are vaguer, more equivocal, and they do not grasp the universal phenomenon
from the outside” (Tarde 1999 [repr.], 89). The argument owes nothing to an anti-
essentialist reflex: there are indeed essences and properties, but they come into play af-
ter the fact, once the work of institutions has been accomplished according to due pro-
cess.
The works of the epistemologist Alexandre Koyré present the canonical version
of this presumed break between the order of the natural world and the order of the so-
cial world, at the very moment when the whole of public life is falling under the con-
