Interview with Bruno Latour

A philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist, Bruno Latour, born in 1947, had never before given a long-term interview. At the end of October 2021, he asked Nicolas Truong, a senior reporter at «Le Monde» and a specialist in the life of ideas, to revisit his fifty years of research. With finesse and not without a sense of humor, he exposes and pursues, in front of the camera, the most important elements of his thought and reflections, underpinned by decades of work.

A documentary (2×52 min)

Part 1 - Change of world

In the first part, Bruno Latour explains how the world has changed, and why ecological disasters are closing the parenthesis of the three centuries born of the Enlightenment, even decreeing «the end of modernity». Over the last fifty years, the work of natural scientists has revolutionized our knowledge. After having sought to unravel the mysteries of the Universe, we are now invited to realize that our planet is only covered by a thin skin a few kilometers thick, called the «critical zone» by some scientists and «Gaia» by Bruno Latour, following in the footsteps of British thinker James Lovelock. The habitability of our «new Earth» is so threatened that we need to stop living off the ground and «land».

Part 2 - Modes of existence

In the second part, he sets out his philosophy and takes stock of our modes of existence, in order to understand how we can find our way in a damaged world. Coming to ecology through the philosophy of science, he goes back to the source of his research into the human mechanisms that claim the emergence of the «true», and to his work on the “sociology of laboratories”, during which he observed that science is not given, but socially constructed and nourished by innumerable controversies.

A series of 12 episodes