Neither Order nor Peace: A Response to Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour did me the honor of an astute and detailed critique in the fall 2004 issue of Common Knowledge, and I am glad to have the opportunity to respond. In "Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck"—which Latour wrote in response to my essay "The Truth of the Other"—he finds me guilty of a truly remarkable piece of superficiality:

A historical anecdote, retold in a major paper by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, may illustrate why Beck's suggested approach to peacemaking is not completely up to the task. The main example that Beck gives is the "Valladolid controversy," the famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools. Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls—that much seemed obvious—but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization, which is basically that of humans. A licuri palm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw: each has a soul, a language, and a family life modeled on the pattern of a human (Amerindian) village. Entities all have souls and their souls are all the same. What makes them differ is that their bodies differ, and it is bodies that give souls their contradictory perspectives: the perspective of the licuri palm, the peccary, the piranha, the macaw. Entities all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature. For the controversialists at Valladolid, the opposite was the case but they remained blissfully unaware that there was an opposite side. Indians obviously had bodies like those of Europeans, but did they have the same spirit? Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. . . .

The relevance of this anecdote should be apparent: at no point in the Valladolid controversy did the protagonists consider, even in passing, that the confrontation of European Christians and Amerindian animists might be framed differently from the way in which Christian clerics understood it in the sixteenth century. At no point were the Amerindians asked what issue they took to be in dispute, nor is Beck asking now. . . . As Viveiros de Castro has persuasively shown, the question of "the other," so central to recent theory and scholarship, has been framed with inadequate sophistication. There are more ways to be other, and vastly more others, than the most tolerant soul alive can conceive.

This argument is apt; that last sentence is especially true. And the more rigorous we are in grasping the symptomatic significance, the more realistic will be the "cosmopolitan realism" that I have suggested. Older varieties of cosmopolitanism have presupposed a cosmos that is either naturally or metaphysically common to all, but today we must adopt a much more fundamental, realistic approach. We must ask, first, whether and, second, how—amid the radical oppositions of our currently disintegrating world—it is possible to think that commonality is developing or even, as Latour hopes, that it might be constructed. In this light, I would say that Latour overstates the intention of my essay. The misunderstanding is already present in the opening sentence of his critique: I am not, as he suggests, a "peacemaker." We Europeans are still under the spell of the postwar miracle that made neighbors out of enemies, and we see the revival of wars or world wars as the gravest threat to our new arrangements. Competition to find the ultimate formula for peace was...