While much of the public dialogue about Covid-19 centers on reducing harm, on recovery and on the resumption of "normal life," Bruno Latour's After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, translated from French by Julie Rose, analyzes humanity's changed existence in the pandemic. He does this in parallel with close reading of Franz Kafka's legendary novella, The Metamorphosis, and argues that the pandemic's first 20 months are a preview of the world ahead. He foresees a world in which life on Earth will increasingly be determined by confrontations between humanity's way of life and the limitations of a deteriorating environment that is no longer as much a natural world as it is a world built by and for humans.
Though After Lockdown is a thought-provoking, philosophical text, one need not be a French theorist to appreciate its penetrating analysis of the stultifying lockdown experience and the networked essence of life, the eccentric humor of its allegorical fables, and Latour's intense commitment to understanding the world. Latour writes with intellectual gravitas, but in his style complexity feels almost like a compliment to the reader. He does not condescend by dumbing things down, and instead treats the reader as an equal mind.
So buckle in to learn new words--e.g., bioclastic, holobiont--and new facts about termites. While sobering in its vision of the future, Latour's After Lockdown is a constant reminder of the pleasures of a passionate theoretical and literary mind, the kind of mind that one can hope will persist through whatever comes. --Walker Minot, teacher, freelance writer and book reviewer