Extending the Cosmopolitical Right to Non-Humans

This short essay is a review of Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Harvard University Press, 2013) and a commentary on the wider move that accompanies the book. ! !readers of Valuation Studies bother themselves with the latest intellectual fad emerging from the Left Bank in Paris? I will suggest there is at least one good reason to do so. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, the latest modernizing intervention to emerge from Paris' 6th and 7th arrondissements, a hotspot of modernizing activity in the past, has valuation in its sights. The very place that gave us the modern valuation regime of 'rational metrication' is at this very moment planning to set a few depth charges; planning how to blow things apart in a signi耀cant section of the world of valuation, in order to start again. This time the valuation regimes in question must be designed to avoid the epistemological mistake of believing and acting as if valuations associated with economization can be made referential in the way say cartographic valuations can (with great dif耀culty) be made and maintained as referential. Before I consider this foreshadowed intervention however, I attempt to introduce An Inquiry into Modes of Existence—a sprawling endeavour of an interactive website understood as a multimedia platform, an impressive social marketing campaign, and a book (a fat advertising pamphlet?). 1 As you might gather from my title, I set Latour's injunction that we should re-