Modes of existence explained to the moderns, or Bruno Latour’s plural world We have for many years tracked Bruno Latour’s important work, from Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991) to Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (1996). Changer de société, refaire de la sociologie (2005) already provided a retrospective and programmatic balance-sheet, immensely useful for lively, stimulat- ing discussions. But the publication of Enquête sur les modes d’existence (2012a) or An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (hereafter AIME) provokes us to ask: how far we can follow Latour? This comprehensive work, subtitled, An Anthropology of the Moderns, is at once a treatise, a waypoint and a ‘user’s manual’ for an ‘ongoing collective inquiry’. At the heart of this project lies the plan to continue and amplify previous thinking (1991). AIME seeks to complement the ‘negative’ argument of the earlier investigation (the moderns do not do what they say they are doing – there is a gap between ordinary experiences and the official accounts of them) with a ‘positive’ argument that describes both what the moderns actually do and what they really care about. This volume makes significant progress, in many respects, in relation to the subjects and precepts that Latour has defended tenaciously for the past two or three decades (tracking action as it is taking place, step-by-step; restoring mediations – or ‘repopulating the no-man’s land between words and things’– by giving the status of actor to nonhumans and human beings alike; showing how networks expand and are redistributed through associations and connections while maintaining the continuities that must co-exist with discontinuities or heterogeneities, which give rise to so many tests and translations, etc.). Constructivism, which is one of Latour’s hallmarks and has given rise to many misunderstandings, has been reformulated usefully and precisely, so that it is far from the simplistic claim that things are ‘in our minds’ and are less real because they are constructs. Latour takes seriously the occasionally irate reactions that his previous works elicited. This led him to wonder about the wounds that his statements may have caused the moderns, precisely because he did not attach enough importance to what they cherished, such as the value of scientific knowledge. ‘[To] speak well to someone about something that really matters to that person’ (2013: 58) is the ethical task he has set himself in this book. Showing what people consider important and taking the qualities of experience into account are matters of great seriousness for social scientists. Latour argues that it is precisely at this point that the moderns render themselves opaque, and suggests that this is what makes them deeply unhappy. They act as if they cared about nothing; they 564 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2013) 21, 4 564–575. © 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12048 Review Article JEAN-PIERRE DELCHAMBRE AND NICOLAS MARQUIS