Review of Henning Schmidgen, Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Gloria Custance. New York

Shannon O’Rourke

Bruno Latour in Pieces (BLP) offers a brief but extensive introduction to Latour’s education, career, collaborations, and collaborators. BLP is Latourean in its insistence on pointing to the “ego, hic, nunc”. By following Latour’s method of indexing, of pointing to people, places, and times, Schmidgen aptly follows Latour. Like any biography worth its salt, Schmidgen’s research follows the influences that played a role in transforming Latour into the thinker he is, but also plays it close to the ear by not only articulating the bibliographical information, but in attempting a genealogy of Latourian philosophy. Schmidgen reveals the sources of a rearticulation of many key Science and Technology Studies themes in relationships developed in biblical hermeneutics through his ethnography of the Guillemin’s Laboratory. BLP is after all an “intellectual biography,” so it is hardly surprising that Schmidgen attempts what his project plainly sets out to do. But, what is pleasantly surprising is the interconnected mosaic generated in graphing historical bibliographical details onto Latour’s intellectual development. The imagine of Latourian studies is circulated, and in turn transformed (there is no circulation, no translation, without transformation), but what is up for debate is whether these transformations are felicitous in maintaining the relationships that make them possible.