Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the use of the concept of " event" in Latour's work, in relation to how the term has been used in philosophy, and anthropology. . Although not as explicitly central as other terms such as "network" "actant" "mediation", etc., my contention is that the notion of the event is very important to understand Latour's research programme.

Paper long abstract:

Bruno Latour's narrative of his own work is often framed as the overcoming of critical sociology (essentially Bourdieu) by a new approach to the "social", lead by the emergence of Science and Technology Studies ( STS). The theoretical model brought forward by STS would be defined as "Actor-Network" theory (ANT) a tag that Latour has both adopted and rejected in different instances. In spite of Latour's warnings on reducing ANT to a method or a "tool", ANT's success as "normal science" has inevitably become a model to be applied in many different settings: in the last decade we have see the proliferation of "agents", "actants", "mediations" and "networks" in the literature of the social sciences. My contention in this paper is that there are other elements to Latours' work which cannot be reduced to the ANT model; in particular I am thinking about the place of history and the notion of the event. This paper will discuss the use of the concept of " Event" in Latour's work, in relation to how the term has been used in anthropology and philosophy.