Latour on Paris Attacks

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Latour

Latour on Paris Attacks: 

What is so discouraging about the terrorist acts is that our discussion of what motivated the operations is as insane as the acts themselves. With each attack of this nature, we restage the grand war drama, the nation in peril and the protector-state purporting to rise up against barbarity. This is what states do, we say: we should have a basic expectation of security, and the state should have the means to provide it. End of story.

But what makes the current situation so much more dismaying is that the crimes committed on 13 November have occurred within a few days of another event about to take place that involves tragedies of a different kind, ones that will require that we come up with very different answers to wholly different threats that have nothing to do with ISIS/Daech. I am referring, of course, to the World Climate Change Conference in Paris, the COP21, which we are now liable to deem less serious, less urgent than the police response to the bloody escapades of those machinegun-toting lunatics.

See the rest here and here.

12 thoughts on “Latour on Paris Attacks”

  1. Pingback: ANT Multiple!? | Installing (Social) Order

  3. Klein seems to have missed that hers is a minority politics and as such would need heavy-weight support from some elected officials to have any substantial impacts, what’s the highest ranking green party official in the eurozone?

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  7. all these nationalisms/nativisms European and Islamist are doomed efforts to maintain modern states in the face of the ongoing collapses of our times, we have no viable large-scale politics/economics/etc in the anthropocene.

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  8. Indeed. While I find the paralleling quite appealing, I am a bit struggling with the fact that the concrete link between both events and the upcoming (or already visible) interpretation of both European and IS identities as being directed towards an apocalyptic end is exactly what is missing in the piece (although there between the lines)

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  9. That’s part of why I HAD to post this. What the heck is going on? There is a similar set of concerns on the facebook page for installing order too.

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  10. Hmm, I am really struggling with that – not with the argument itself or with the seemingly unconnected parallel of Paris and Gaia, but with the suspicion that there is a connection missing in the piece: the common apocalyptic framework that the IS ideology, the newly reinvented Christian (Catholic) Europe and the collective suicide interpretation of climate issues share…not sure what to do with that….

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