Icons, Frames, and Language Games: Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

The three essays in this volume are each built around a different icon, genre, framing, or language game: a drasha (about iconoclashes), a language game (religious speech, religious paintings), and ethnopsychiatry. While Latour distances himself from social constructivism (as a “poor man’s creationism”), he fails to recognize the challenges of religious pluralism, asserting that religious speech is not communicable or translatable, a hermetic language game of feeling and gesture. For today’s world, this is insufficient.