Fotograf Zone – Bruno Latour – Où suis-je? Leçons du confinement à l'usage des terrestres

Sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour summarizes at the end of this short (and his last) book that it was written in “the style of a philosophical narrative”. It is a dense narrative on the one hand, but very down to earth – in the most inspiring sense of the word – on the other. Covid-19 and human behavior during lockdown was, to Latour, despite the difficulties of the time, a key to how we may inhabit the planet differently to the current pursuit of development and the plundering of the environment. We are now back, Down on Earth, looking around in the New Climatic Regime. We can no longer move forward, so we emancipate ourselves through detailed descriptions of our surroundings, continuities, permeabilities and dependencies on others (since autotrophs do not exist on Earth). Just as it could have happened to Gregor Samsa had his family not forsaken him. Transformed into one swarm, we may just have a chance to survive.

Bruno Latour. Où suis-je? — Leçons du confinement à l'usage des terrestres. Paris, Empecheurs, 2021. ISBN: ‎2359252003.

Tereza Špinková

is a theorist and curator. Currently she is studying for a doctorate at the Department of Environmental Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University in Brno, where she deals primarily with the relationship between human and non-human entities.

#44 Empathy

The ability to empathise with others is a construct that has only been around for a few centuries. This does not mean that such a skill did not exist until then. However, the concept of empathy creates a field in which this ability oscillates from understanding the other party to understanding the self. And because such a playground can be quite expansive, and the playing balls of empathy can be ping-ponged from one side to the other, we decided to dedicate an issue of the magazine to this field.