With such an explicit title, the intention of L'appel des entités fragiles: Enquêter avec des modes d'existence de Bruno Latour is more than clear: referring to the conceptual toolbox developed in Latour's Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, the book aims to “listen to the call” of nonhuman entities to recognize them as important elements in the different “modes” in which modern human existence manifests itself. The term modes of existence, borrowed from Étienne Souriau (2015) and used by Latour as a framework for his own anthropology of modernity, upgrades the notion of “mediation” used in his previous works, which was too ambivalent and often mistaken for inferring that nonhuman entities are simple intermediaries that only convey a message without transforming, reshaping, and rebuilding the old situation into a new one. Latour's new terminology attempts to identify how seemingly universal “modes”—such as...
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