CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1 CRISIS 1
1.1 The Proliferation of Hybrids 1
1.2 Retying the Gordian Knot 3
1.3 The Crisis of the Critical Stance 5
1.4 1989: The Year of Miracles 8
1.5 What Does It Mean To Be A Modern? 10
2 CONSTITUTION 13
2.1 The Modern Constitution 13
2.2 Boyle and His Objects 15
2.3 Hobbes and His Subjects 18
2.4 The Mediation of the Laboratory 20
2.5 The Testimony of Nonhumans 22
2.6 The Double Artifact of the Laboratory and the
Leviathan 24
2.7 Scientific Representation and Political Representation 27
2.8 The Constitutional Guarantees of the Modern 29
2.9 The Fourth Guarantee: The Crossed-out God 32
2.10 The Power of the Modern Critique 35
2.11 The Invincibility of the Moderns 37
2.12What the Constitution Clarifies and What It Obscure 39
2.13 The End of Denunciation 43
2.14 We Have Never Been Modern3 46
3 REVOLUTION 49
3.1 The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success 49
3.2 What Is a Quasi-Object? 51
3.3 Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap 55
3.4 The End of Ends 59
3.5 Semiotic Turns 62
3.6 Who Has Forgotten Being? 65
3.7 The Beginning of the Past 67
3.8 The Revolutionary Miracle 70
3.9 The End of the Passing Past 72
3.10Triage and Multiple Times 74
3.11 A Copernican Counter-revolution 76
3.12 From Intermediaries to Mediators 79
3.13 Accusation, Causation 82
3.14 Variable Ontologies 85
3.15 Connecting the Four Modern Repertoires 8 8
4 RELATIVISM 91
1 How to End the Asymmetry 91
2 The Principle of Symmetry Generalized 94
3 The Import—Export System of the Two Great Divides 97
4 Anthropology Comes Home from the Tropics 100
5 There Are No Cultures 103
6 Sizeable Differences 106
7 Archimedes' coup d'etat 109
8 Absolute Relativisim and Relativist Relativism 111
9 Small Mistakes Concerning the Disenchantment of the
World 114
10 Even a Longer Network Remains Local at All Points 117
11 The Leviathan is a Skein of Networks 120
12 A Perverse Taste for the Margins 122
13 Avoid Adding New Crimes to Old 125
14 Transcendences Abound 127
5 REDISTRIBUTION 130
1 The Impossible Modernization 130
2 Final Examinations 132
3 Humanism Redistributed 136
4 The Nonmodern Constitution 138
5 The Parliament of Things 142
Bibliography 146
Index 154