After lockdown: A Metamorphosis / Bruno Latour

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis - that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we - inhabitants of the earth - live, what kind of place 'earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible - a freedom differently situated and differently understood.

In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth , Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 One way of becoming a termite (p. 1)
• 2 Locked-down in a space that's still pretty vast (p. 8)
• 3 'Earth' is a proper noun (p. 17)
• 4 'Earth' is feminine - 'Universe' is masculine (p. 27)
• 5 A whole cascade of engendering troubles (p. 38)
• 6 'Here below' - except there is no up above (p. 48)
• 7 Letting the economy bob to the surface (p. 58)
• 8 Describing a territory - only, the right way round (p. 69)
• 9 The unfreezing of the landscape (p. 78)
• 10 Mortal bodies are piling up (p. 91)
• 11 The return of ethnogeneses (p. 99)
• 12 Some pretty strange battles (p. 109)
• 13 Scattering in all directions (p. 118)
• 14 A little further reading (p. 129)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

LaTour believes that through his interests in philosophy, theology, and anthropology, he is actually pursuing a single goal, to understand the different ways that truth is built. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, LaTour has written about the philosophy and sociology of science in an original, insightful, and sometimes quirky way. Works that have been translated to English include The Pasteurization of France; Laboratory Life; Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society; We Have Never Been Modern; and Aramis, or the Love of Technology.

LaTour is a professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, a division of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, in Paris.

(Bowker Author Biography)