With and after the Inquiry: How Do We Pragmatically Move from the Moderns to the Contemporaries?

In Down to Earth, Bruno Latour addresses all inhabitants of the Earth as contemporary, all sharing a same present which he names ‘the new climatic regime’. It does not mean that Latour endorses a new type of coloniality, erasing differences in the name of the emergency. ‘Becoming Terrestrials’ is not a call for unity in order to ‘save the Earth’. It does however put into question the ‘charitable fiction’ Latour proposed in what he considered his opus magnus, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence. This paper will address the concern Latour expressed at the end of his life: has his Inquiry a future in the new climatic regime? Will the values Moderns both instaured and mistreated still matter for the ex-Moderns? This induces a reading of the Inquiry attentive to both its strategy and its partis pris, that confronts them with the radical orientation changes that mark Down to Earth. This results in a speculation about some of the rewritings Bruno Latour might have considered, had life granted him the time.