This panel concerns Bruno Latour and other figures associated with "new materialism" in ecological ethics, an ontology that strives to undo various dualisms in Western thought (for example, matter and mind; matter and meaning; nature and culture). In the wake of his passing and 10 years after the publication of his lectures on natural religion, we pay special attention to Latour's legacy for the study of religion, ecology, and/or science. We put Latour in conversation with other ecological thinkers, but also with phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Buddhist philosophy. Another key figure in new materialism is Karen Barad, and one paper explores the relation between Barad's work and phenomenology.
While work has been done on Buddhism and ecology, and a few studies have been devoted to bringing together Buddhist ideas and those of Bruno Latour, it is remarkable that there has been virtually no comparative work done on Latour’s thought and that of one of Buddhism’s most highly developed philosophical traditions, Middle Way (Madhyamaka). In this paper I compare Latour’s thought in Facing Gaia and Irreductions to that of the Tibetan Buddhist philosphers Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje. By putting their ideas into conversations, I offer new ways forward in the tradition of Latour’s philosophy.
This paper analyzes the potential for an eco-political theology that is inclusive of participants in both animal and plant communities. It examines the nature politics and network theory of Bruno Latour in dialogue with ontology of flesh developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These are then re-constructed through an examination of often neglected lectures series by Merleau-Ponty where a Marxist revolutionary framework is applied to the natural relations between the human and more-than-human worlds. The paper concludes with constructive proposals for the participation of religious communities within such an eco-political theology that examines the role of grief and green criminology within an ecocidal industrial-extractive politics.
In their study of modern scientific self-narration, the philosophers of science Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers offer a novel approach to the question of how to think philosophically about and with religion. The unifying factor between these thinkers is an engagement with Catholicism both as a historical institution and the signature of a philosophical idiom. Focusing on how their work emerges out of the fraught dual-identity of Catholicism, far from binding the act of critique to a given religious doctrine, instead opens a field of inquiry, discourse, and even contestation, out of which may spring new possibilities for speculative thought.
This paper, drawn from a larger book project, will consider the discrete depictions of phenomenology of touch in the work of two contemporary theorists: Luce Irigaray and Karen Barad. Specifically, I consider the importance of touch as elaborated in Irigaray’s self-proclaimed “phenomenology of desire” (Sharing the Fire, Palgrave, 2022) and in Barad’s agential realism. In their preservation of radical alterity and their anti-metaphysical approach to materiality, both thinkers might be read in relation to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology. I focus on both thinkers’ recent works in which they imagine the very constitution of being in terms of touching, and in this way, they establish a certain ontology of touching—a relationality in difference that could ground a phenomenology of perception that preserves radical alterity. Importantly, these thinkers reimagine touch itself in a way toward a post-metaphysical materiality and transcendence.