Latour’s not so hard to grok, certainly much easier than the Deleuzes and Derridas of the world. Approach his work as more or less philosophical anthropology rather than, like, pure philosophy. Indeed, humans a situated in overlapping spaces and how we make meaning in those spaces is at the heart of his work, from Lab Life through Actor Network Theory. What makes him easier to grok, and set him a little bit apart, is that he steadfastly refused to deny that there was a reality other than the socially constructed ones we make/negotiate. So you have to really pay attention to particular contexts and study it very carefully in order to understand what’s happening in that space. It’s not just social constructivism all the way down.
(He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)
I read two thirds of "Changer de société, refaire de la sociologie" and it was a hard read, most of what he wrote didn't make sense or wasn't well illustrated. It didn't seem like he wanted me to understand his points, nor take me on a laborious journey where my way of seeing things would be transformed
I feel like that’s a fairly dense, technical point of entry for his work, since he’s explicitly trying to set up an alternative theoretical framework for his brand of sociological/anthropological philosophy. Did you read Lab Life?
I have to admit, I have no idea how I came across this book from Latour, I guess I just liked the title. But the one you quoted looks interesting beyond just the title
Or Latour and the others really are just pseudo thinkers, maybe they have some things to say but it is muddied and bloated by all the wrong (Not Even Wrong) things they are saying, and history might judge the French postmodernists for taking the wrong path.
I say this as someone who used to be partial toward postmodernist texts, and defended them using arguments similar to yours (they should be understood in this other way!), but I eventually, finally moved on, and I (in my opinion) deem them to be at their worst harmful to critical thinking.
Regarding Latour specifically there is hate-paper on his work, a professor published a paper describing exactly why Latour is problematic bullshit.
Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.
Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's actually really funny (the man loved puns).
There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
Yes, Derrida is fine if you’re just in it for wordplay. But it has always struck me that that’s about all there is to it. I don’t take him/deconstructionism seriously though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally escaped.
I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
By the way, I’d make a similar criticism of, for example, later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea. Sein and Zeit and his lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards—-but early Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in ways later Heidegger absolutely isn’t).
Maybe it's precisely wordplay that is at stake here. Heidegger is no less stranger to it than Derrida. In fact a lot of his philosophical complexes are grounded explicitly into etymology and new ways to hear old words.
Concerning Heidegger I stand in the opposite corner of the room: I liked his later writings more and despite having read him profusely, I'm not able to articulate his thoughts like you did by contrasting present-at-hand with ready-at-hand which however pinpoints very well the divide between analytical and continental thought.
You're right to say that he "collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea", and it is pertinent to what we are discussing since in heideggerian terms this should be expressed as "language bringing language to language through language".
An example: the linguistic proximity between explicate vs implicate that is another instance of the ready-to-hand vs present-at-hand dichotomy.
I agree with pretty much everything you written here. I think Wittgenstein (PI era) is the only convincing philosopher working in a similar "method" and for similar aims.
(He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)