Didier Debaise

Didier Debaise

Didier Debaise

Didier Debaise is a researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), and teaches contemporary philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research focuses on current forms of speculative philosophy, on theories of the event, and on the relationship between pragmatism and French philosophy. He is a collection editor at Presses de réel, and a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Inflexions et Multitudes. He has devoted several publications to Whitehead’s thought, including Un empirisme spéculatif (Vrin, 2006) [Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead, 2017], Le vocabulaire de Whitehead (Ellipses, 2007) and L’appât des possibles (Presses du réel, 2015). He has edited several collective volumes, in particular on pragmatism, (Vie et expérimentation, Vrin, 2007), on contemporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions, Presses du réel, 2011), and on the activations of speculative thought (with I. Stengers, Gestes spéculatifs, Presses du réel, 2015). He is the author of multiple articles on the philosophies of Bergson, Tarde, Simondon, Deleuze and Whitehead. He recently edited Au risque des effets, a collective volume on the revivals of W. James (with I. Stengers, Les liens qui libèrent, 2023).

The devastating powers of amalgams

In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour revisits the question of the Moderns in light of new imperatives and an unprecedented horizon. In the introduction, he writes: “If we have never been modern, then what happened to us? What are we inheriting? Who have we been? Who are we becoming? With whom are we related?” A therapeutic ambition of sorts runs through the book. It is, on the one hand, a matter of diagnosing the devastating powers that drive the Moderns’ mode of thinking, engaged as they are on the “modernization front.” Central to such diagnosis is the notion of “amalgam”—a confusion between distinct modes of existence producing “monstrous entities.” “The term’s etymology,” says Latour, “is as obscure as can be, possibly from the Arabic signifying ‘the labor of bringing together’, with originally an alchemical and later a chemical meaning.” But the project is also, on the other hand, therapeutic: it is a matter, collectively, of giving consistency to the plurality of modes of existence, and of exploring their “crossings” (croisements means both “encounters” and “cross-breeding” in French). The project of an anthropology of the Moderns arises from within the “new climatic regime”, between “amalgams” (a consistently pejorative term signifying for Latour the impoverishment of modes of existence) and “crossings” (acts that put these same modes of existence in relation with each other, with singular and unpredictable outcomes [charitable fiction]).

In this presentation I reflect on the gestures that constitute An Inquiry, on what we learn from them, and how we might extend them.


Speakers in Session 2: After a reading of An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence

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