Introduction

Classifying knowledge always inevitably implies the opportunity to exercise power. In an era where academia is increasingly anchored to a distinction between human and social sciences, to a rigid separation between disciplines presumed to safeguard their relevance, it is no small matter to recognize that there are still scholars whose work systematically eludes a fixed placement, sometimes ending up challenging a series of conventions that are anything but given or harmless. This is certainly the case for a great intellectual like Bruno Latour, forced to grapple with the reactions provoked by his body of research—so decidedly mutable and situated at the intersection of traditionally distinct disciplinary fields such as sociology, philosophy, anthropology, semiotics—to the point of resorting to the autobiographical form to describe the trajectory of an intellectual adventure made of encounters, deviations, recoveries, and circular paths.