onto Latour’s ‘Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence’, again, available to download on Latour’s own website. It really is just a biographical account of how he ended up where he his. He talks through his various encounters with scientists, ethnographers and philosophers, as well as his early life as a ‘militant Catholic student’, and the development of his projects. Here’s a nice quote Latour pulls out when talking about the effect Isabelle Stengers had on his work :

‘Even Pasteur’s microbes, even Aramis’s magnetic couplings, the automated subway system, even Michel Callon’s famous scallops, all of them undeniably present, actants and movers, glittering with reality, still didn’t offer, in Stengers’ eyes, a sufficient guarantee that we had pulled ourselves away from the text, the social, the symbolic. To manage that, we would have had to grasp the world without dragging through it human subjects and their obsession with knowledge conceived as the relation between words and things.’

Latour (2012: 15)