The issue and its publics: Latour, Durkheim and object-oriented politics

Drawing loosely upon observations made during the COVID-19 crisis, the paper discusses how democratic publics form and collide around political issues in Western democracies. Inspired by Bruno Latour's political philosophy, I demonstrate the advantages of an object-oriented perspective on democratic practice. Then, I endeavour to show the deficits of this perspective, with support from an unexpected source: Émile Durkheim’s late works. Reinterpreting Durkheim's ideas of ritual, I suggest that we might usefully complement the object-oriented perspective on the formation of publics with a more traditional notion of collectivity. In the first part of the paper, I examine Latour's popular work during the initial stages of the pandemic. I then dig into his object-oriented concept of the political, and I criticize the one-sidedness of his approach to the collective aspects of democratic life. In the second part of the paper, I show how Durkheim's concept of ritual may complement the Latourian conception.