Dominique Pestre

Dominique Pestre

Dominique Pestre

Three anecdotes to tell of the Bruno I knew

Bruno is a character of exceptional intellectual power, needless to say, and he has dominated the last few decades as a Foucault or a Derrida had done before him.

Like the greatest intellectuals, Bruno first follows his own logic, his own path. He dialogues and listens, but he repatriates what he hears into his own world, molding it into his own language — and this movement, which is heuristic, radically transforms things.

Which does not mean that he doesn’t also record, in a kind of inner cognitive periphery, the substance of certain criticisms, reticence or limits which are opposed to him.

Bruno wasn’t always where we’d expected him to be. For him, there was always something to learn on the side — which I will illustrate with three anecdotes.


Dominique Pestre is a historian of science and knowledge, and Directeur d’Etudes at EHESS. He is mainly interested in scientific and technical practices, and the political, cultural and social history of science. He is the author of numerous books and editor of Science in the Twentieth Century (with John Krige), of the Dictionnaire culturel des sciences (with Nicolas Wittkowski and Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond), and of Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, des grandes découvertes à nos jours, Le Seuil, 3 volumes.


Speakers in Session 1: Sciences and Technologies Studies with Bruno Latour

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