Entrevista com Vinciane Despret

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https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241275484
Theory, Culture & Society
2024, Vol. 41(5) 135 –141
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/02632764241275484
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An Interview with Vinciane 
Despret: A Question Rarely 
Lives Up to Its Situation
Stephen Muecke
University of New South Wales
University of Notre Dame, Australia
Iwona Janicka
Czech Academy of Sciences
Abstract
In this interview, Vinciane Despret discusses the importance of Bruno Latour to her 
work. In particular, she addresses the questions of methodology. She examines why it 
is necessary to invent a new method for each new object we study and how we can 
become more attentive as scientists, especially those specialising in ethology, to the 
ways in which humans and non-humans are interested in each other. Finally, Despret 
considers how we can inherit from Bruno Latour’s work for our future thinking.
Keywords
ethology, Bruno Latour, methodology, modes of existence, storytelling
Like Bruno Latour, the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret interrogates fundamental 
concepts like ‘society’, ‘self’ and ‘other’. Her innovative ethological methodologies in 
animal studies and the environmental humanities elaborate the practical ways in which 
humans can engage with nonhumans, thereby transforming each other. In this process, 
other worlds emerge and take shape, demanding that humanities, as much as the sci-
ences, take notice. In this interview, she critically discusses scientific ways of addressing 
nonhuman others, specifically in ethology, in order to provide a much fuller account of 
nonhuman intelligences and sensitivities. Bruno Latour is particularly significant in this 
context because, throughout his work, he proposed ways to honour the ontological make-
up and modes of operation of the various entities he engaged with (whether in sciences, 
technology, law, religion or fiction). Like Despret, he gave weight to the attachments we 
form with nonhumans and provided a detailed account of these crucial relations. In this 
Corresponding author: Stephen Muecke. Email: s.muecke@unsw.edu.au
TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/
1275484 TCS0010.1177/02632764241275484Theory, Culture & SocietyMuecke and Janicka
research-article2024
Special Issue: Thinking with Latour
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136 Theory, Culture & Society 41(5)
interview, Despret discusses the importance of Latourian pragmatics to her own thinking 
and to future environmental philosophies. She shares with Latour, and other colleagues 
like Isabelle Stengers, a neo-pragmatic philosophical orientation which makes creative 
departures from the American tradition, aligning it with urgent matters that concern us 
today. In her work, she concentrates on the human-animal relationships – an area of 
research that was left unexplored by Latour – and this focus obliges her to extend and 
adapt Latourian methods so they can bring to light the specificities of human-animal 
encounters. The interview traces the transformation of Despret’s pragmatic methodol-
ogy, touching various subject matters over the years. The conversation that served as the 
basis for this interview took place online on 2 May 2024.
Stephen Muecke: A few colleagues and friends have been influential in your work, 
most notably Isabelle Stengers, but here I would like to ask specifically about Bruno 
Latour, whom we lost, sadly, in October 2022.
Vinciane Despret: One of my books, Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau [When the 
wolf dwells with the lamb] (Despret, 2020), really was dedicated to Bruno Latour and 
Donna Haraway. With this book I was thinking of them both and they are extremely 
present, in one way or another, in this text. The chapter on crows was actually dedicated 
to Bruno Latour, and it was almost like a postcard to him. He was very ill at the time. It 
was at the end of the ’90s that he had his first bout of cancer, and I knew he was very ill 
and very fragile. I wanted so much to tell him of all the love I had for him, all the love he 
had given me.
But that wasn’t the only reason for dedicating this chapter to him. And it’s no coinci-
dence that a later book, Living as a Bird (Despret, 2021b), is also explicitly dedicated to 
him (as well as to Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers). For these two writings, the 
chapter on crows and the book on bird territory came from the same impulse, that of 
celebrating the work of scientists who make their birds fascinating. And to celebrate this 
work by striving to describe it as meticulously as possible, paying attention to all the 
details involved in their practices. It was this gesture that I had already begun to learn 
from Latour in the very first book on birds, the one on the Arabian babblers in Israel. This 
book, The Dance of the Arabian Babbler (Despret, 2021a) is well worth a look. I had 
gone out into the field in the early 1990s to observe ornithologists observing birds whose 
descriptions seemed to me a little astonishing: babblers didn’t behave like the other birds 
I had found described in the scientific literature. They had very sophisticated social 
behaviors, and Zahavi, the ornithologist who was observing them, claimed that they were 
motivated by questions of prestige, that they had to resolve complex social dilemmas, 
that the gifts they gave each other and the fact that they danced together were in response 
to these motives, etc.
I should point out that I’d started out with some very bad questions, to do with ‘rep-
resentations’, typical questions of the time for the ‘philosopher in practice’: how do sci-
entists’ representations influence what they observe? How do scientists project onto 
birds? Because, I thought, if this bird is extraordinary, whereas the others in the literature 
were not, it was obvious, in the traditional conceptions that were still guiding animal 
research at the end of the ’80s, beginning of the ’90s, that it was because the scientists 
had projected their own anthropomorphisms, their own complicated motivations.
Muecke and Janicka 137
Obviously, everything I discovered in the field wildly resisted these questions and 
interpretations, and I could see that. But I was there, I had to investigate: so I forgot my 
inadequate questions, I took lots of notes, I observed the birds, I asked lots of questions 
of the ornithologists. At the end of the field trip, I found myself with notebooks full of 
things I didn’t know what to do with, because they didn’t answer any questions. On my 
return, I was lucky enough to come across Stengers’ Invention of the Modern Sciences 
(2000). In this book, I discovered two things: firstly, the possibility of beginning to 
articulate what I had experienced; and secondly, the existence of Latour’s work.
On the one hand, I began to find, in Isabelle Stengers’ writings, answers to the crucial 
questions that I was bringing back from the field, namely the fact that I was dealing with 
practices that ‘produce existence’, both that of the objects being questioned and that of 
the scientists observing them. It was on the basis of this insight that I could ask these 
ornithologists, and their birds, to testify: they had become, with each other and through 
each other, interesting. Secondly, in the very first lines of her book, Isabelle Stengers 
mentioned the work of Bruno Latour – her book was in fact a response to We Have Never 
Been Modern, published in French two years earlier. Once again, in reading Latour, I 
found the questions that what I was discovering in the field responded to, and would 
enable me to articulate everything I had learned and observed. And not only that.
First of all, let’s put ourselves back in the context of those times:interest in animals 
was low, and confined either to the books of anti-speciesist activists (with whom my 
work had no connection), or, with very rare exceptions, to work on the ‘study of mentali-
ties’ type or on human representations of animals – work which could not be said to be 
really interested in animals. In short, the field was still divided between the natural sci-
ences (those who study animals) and the humanities (those who study the way in which 
humans perceive animals, and who can therefore denounce the way in which scientists’ 
‘representations’ contaminate their knowledge).
But what Bruno Latour was proposing was radically new in this respect. Not only did 
this division not hold (and was of no interest to him), but Latour gave unprecedented 
legitimacy to the idea of considering non-humans not as ‘representations’, but as actants. 
It was no longer a question of seeing them in symbolic schemas, in systems of represen-
tation, but of studying, seriously and rigorously, how, for example, those speaking for 
them make them exist, make them matter – how, to use Latour’s (2001) expression about 
Thelma Rowell’s sheep, these scientists ‘give animals a chance’, by allowing them to 
break out of already pre-written scripts. With all the work this requires, all the imagina-
tion, all the wisdom and, above all, how these non-humans themselves manage to actively 
compel this consideration. In reading Latour, I could then understand, and recount, how 
all these exciting things we’re learning about babblers could have been discovered, and 
I could understand and relate it, by carefully describing the work of the scientists who 
had succeeded in getting these birds to bear witness to what interests them and to what 
mobilizes them in their social life. Let’s note in passing that Latour not only offered 
legitimacy to our interest in non-humans; he simultaneously gave us the legitimacy to 
practise a philosophy of science in the field: ‘Don’t just listen to what scientists say, go 
and see what they do. That’s where they’re interesting’.
Back to the chapter on crows in Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. This chap-
ter is really something that I wrote thinking: ‘I’m giving Bruno a gift, I’m showing 
138 Theory, Culture & Society 41(5)
him everything he taught me, everything he’s teaching us. I can put it into practice, I 
can put it to the test in the field and it gives us something very joyful, that teaches us 
lots of things.’ In this chapter, what I think I’ve tried to do is take up the gesture 
Latour taught me and do it with all the meticulousness he strove for in his work. Pay 
attention to the details of practices, to the stages of translation, don’t skip any steps, 
‘give an account’.
In a way, and this was the reason for my choice, the work of crow specialist Bernd 
Heinrich seemed to me to have been ready-made for a Latourian description. Heinrich’s 
investigation into why crows call their fellow crows when they’ve found food (rather 
than keeping it for themselves) is a real adventure. With each question solved, others 
open up, complicating the problem. We go from enigma to enigma, working out differ-
ent devices [dispositifs] for each problem, with a whole chain of translations, and, won-
derfully, a progression of interest as we go along: the crows get more and more 
complicated, more and more ‘recalcitrant’. They demolish one theory after another, and 
their investigator himself becomes more and more captured by the problems they pose, 
and more and more interesting himself. The crows had – and here it’s a Latourian ges-
ture that I could attempt by following this adventure in this mode – ‘enlisted’ their 
investigator in their array of increasingly remarkable skills.
And I followed this adventure by paying close attention to the way in which the crows 
are authorized, by the scientist, to take a position in relation to the questions and hypoth-
eses put to them: each of Heinrich’s devices was constituted as a suggestion for an activ-
ity to the recipient of the questions. Through these stratagems and devices, the researcher 
commits himself to more activities in order to elicit more activity from the birds he is 
observing (Latour, 1999). In other words, Heinrich is looking for every possible way to 
activate the crows around his problem in the same way that he allows himself to be acti-
vated by those he studies. To know is to explore a regime of authorizations and ‘ena-
bling’. This is where Latour brings me back to Deleuze’s definition of ethology: it’s a 
practical science of powers, a practical science of what beings are capable of. And Latour 
has me twist this definition slightly: it’s also the practical science of what beings make 
each other capable of.
Iwona Janicka: May I ask more about methodology? With you, it’s a bit special. Not 
only do you ‘go and see for yourself’, avoiding the beaten track of science and philoso-
phy, but you also ask those you study to guide you through the process. For example, in 
Our Grateful Dead (Despret, 2021c), you talked about a storytelling method: forming 
narrative matrices, a phrase that struck me was assuming that each story engages the 
next, and so on. It’s a method that involves following rather than explaining.
Vinciane Despret: What Bruno taught us, and which is very important, I remember a 
lecture Bruno gave at a university in Belgium, when I had just met him, and he told us: 
‘First, you have to learn to be stupid’ – he was talking about supermarket trolleys. How do 
you return them? How do you make people take them back? We all had explanations. I 
can’t remember exactly what question he was asking, but at one point he said: ‘No, no, you 
have to learn to be stupid again’ – in other words, go back to the basics. I think it’s really 
interesting, the way he asked us to go back to the most concrete and descriptive things.
Muecke and Janicka 139
Stephen Muecke: Like ‘The Berlin Key’ (Latour, 1991).
Vinciane Despret: Yes, like ‘The Berlin Key’. If there’s something in common, it’s not 
really with networks, it’s more with Bruno’s pragmatics, which is to describe, describe 
and describe, i.e. to go back to the work of the most meticulous description, to pay atten-
tion to all the details and stick to the concrete. Philosophers always tend to want to go 
straight to concepts. No, no, let’s stick with reality, let’s go there and see how far we can 
go with these descriptions. That was an important point. Each time I did research, I had to 
invent a new method, because the problem that arose didn’t fit into the established 
methodologies.
But I think you raise an important point about my work with those left behind. It was 
Antoine Hennion, the sociologist, one of Bruno Latour’s colleagues, who once said to 
me: ‘In the end, what you succeeded in doing with Our Grateful Dead is to make the 
subject very banal.’ This is astonishing. There’s nothing worse for an author than being 
told that what you’re doing is banal, yet this becomes a compliment! You’ve managed to 
do something banal with something that wasn’t banal.
Antoine Hennion’s remark touches on a crucial aspect of this research, which is its 
methodology. I think the banality comes from the fact that I didn’t ask any questions, and 
that it was simply the fact that I was announcing my intention to start this investigation 
that got people talking to me and telling me stories. This is the methodology I finally 
chose: staying at the pre-investigation stage. When I think about it, I realize that this 
method itself may have had a trivializing effect. I’m probably going to say it a bit hastily, 
too summarily, but the fact of asking questions often expresses an anomaly, or an aston-
ishment (you don’t ask questions about things that are taken for granted, in most cases). 
So if you ask people (and I’m not the only one to realize this [see Bennett, 1999]) whether 
they have relationships with their deceased, in an environment where such experiences 
arenot very legitimate, you’re going to arouse their mistrust, on the one hand, but above 
all, in a way, you’re highlighting the anomaly of these experiences, you’re making them 
unusual experiences. In short, the question can have a stigmatizing effect. I believe that 
the pre-investigation method, which makes people your collaborators rather than your 
respondents or informants, may have had a trivializing effect, if only in the sense of 
destigmatization.
In fact, it was a matter of following people in the way they themselves ask questions, 
without imposing my own – and in the way they themselves divide up what is real and 
what might not be, or might be in another sense, in another regime of truth – yet another 
way of being pragmatic, of paying attention to the way people are sensitive to various 
modes of existence and, no doubt, of being less asymmetrical. And this implies telling, 
relaying, not pretending to explain, after the fact, what people have proposed to you. 
Hence narrative matrices, stories that shed light on each other, defusing any attempt at 
explanation.
Iwona Janicka: What do you think is important to inherit from Bruno Latour’s work, 
or to pass on for future thinking?
Vinciane Despret: I think I can answer by extending that last question and returning to 
the question of research tools in a more general way. I’m thinking here of Bruno Latour’s 
140 Theory, Culture & Society 41(5)
diplomatic gesture, the idea of always questioning how we address those who hold some-
thing dear (and even questioning them on what they are prepared to modify to continue 
that relationship). What I’d like to see extended is Bruno’s very special approach: paying 
very close attention, and attributing importance very rigorously, to what we value. And 
to go through the process. For me, this isn’t a moral problem, it’s an epistemological and 
political one, which is why I have coined the term ‘the politeness of getting to know’ to 
describe the practices of the scientists I admire, and on which I try to align my own prac-
tice. Not just not destroying what people hold dear, but, on the contrary, building on that 
to explore questions with them. In all his inquiries, Bruno has, each time, invented a new 
methodology, a new tool, because an inquiry only makes sense if it finds its strength, or 
strengths, in what moves people, in what makes them think, in what interests them and 
makes them interesting. If I had to sum it up, it’s taking a position that I try to honour, 
and which is my way of inheriting it: the position of the apprentice. I didn’t know it at 
the time, but I think that’s the position I found myself in right from the start of my 
research. For my first fieldwork on the Arabian babbler, it was a case of being an appren-
tice. I’m with a zoologist who knows these birds very well, but I don’t understand them, 
I don’t know them, I don’t understand what I’m seeing, and I don’t know what to do. In 
a way, the only thing you can do in that case is just be there, listen and try to learn at the 
same time as the others, knowing that there are lots of things you don’t understand.
I think Bruno Latour taught me that – I hope I’m not mistaken, and I don’t want to 
offend his memory – because that’s what he seemed to be putting into practice. Trust, not 
in a general way, but through addressing others on the basis of what they value, what’s 
important to them, what’s vital to them, addressing ‘amateurs’, in the sense he cultivated 
the term. This is how he succeeded, with Isabelle Stengers, in making us love the work 
of scientists when they do what they do well, just as he did with jurists, with technolo-
gies, and those with whom he did a co-inquiry in the After Lockdown project (Latour 
2021: 78–83).
One last thing, more personal, but related to this: Bruno would sometimes say to me, 
in connection with my investigations, ‘Look, this is what you are doing’ [Tiens, voilà ce 
que tu fais]. And often, I didn’t know it, or not quite (like being an apprentice to my own 
research). What started out as a generous observation then became an induction. Since 
that’s what I do, I’m going to try to do it better. I tell myself that our inquiries should have 
the same effect. The same way of ‘making things matter’, including for those who are 
being questioned about what matters to them.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This publication is an outcome of the project ‘Establishing the Center 
for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P)’, which has received funding from 
the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No. 
101086898 / HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-TALENTS-01.
ORCID iDs
Stephen Muecke https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1634-8637
Iwona Janicka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8433-9014
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1634-8637
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8433-9014
Muecke and Janicka 141
References
Bennett, Gillian (1999) Alas, Poor Ghosts: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Logan: 
Utah State University Press.
Despret, Vinciane (2020) Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. Paris: La Découverte.
Despret, Vinciane (2021a) The Dance of the Arabian Babbler: Birth of an Ethological Theory. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Despret, Vinciane (2021b) Living as a Bird. Cambridge: Polity.
Despret, Vinciane (2021c) Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind. Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press.
Latour, Bruno (1991) The Berlin key or how to do words with things. In: P.M. Graves-Brow (ed.) 
Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 10–21.
Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: 
Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2001) A well-articulated primatology: Reflections of a fellow traveler. In: Strum, 
Shirley C. and Fedigan, Linda Marie (eds) Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender 
and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 358–382.
Latour, Bruno (2021) After Lockdown. Cambridge: Polity.
Stengers, Isabelle (2000) Invention of the Modern Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 
Press.
Stephen Muecke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute Notre Dame 
University, Broome, Emeritus Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, 
and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2020 he and Paddy Roe published 
a Latourian ethnography: The Children’s Country: The Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in 
North-West Australia (Rowman and Littlefield).
Iwona Janicka is Research Team Leader at the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics 
– Prague (CETE-P) and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of 
Sciences. She works in 20th- and 21st-century continental philosophy: environmental philosophy, 
political philosophy and feminist philosophy, with a particular focus on the questions of social 
transformation. Her current book project examines how to rethink politics with nonhumans in the 
context of climate change. She is the author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, 
Mimesis and Radical Social Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science. She is Associate Professor at the University 
of Liège and a foundational thinker for the consolidating field of animal studies. Despret’s trans-
disciplinary approach is located across philosophy of science, epistemology and behavioural sci-
ence. Her research focuses on the relationship between observers and the observed in scientific 
research, following scientists doing fieldwork and observing how they actively relate to their 
objects of study. She investigates the political consequences of our theoretical choices. Some of 
her books have been translated into English, including The Dance of the Arabian Babbler (2021), 
What Would Animals SayIf We Asked the Right Questions? (2016), Living as a Bird (2021) and 
Our Grateful Dead (2021).
This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Thinking with Latour: 
Essays and Reflections’, edited by Antoine Hennion.
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