Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers is Professor Emeritus at the University of Brussels. Her work first focused on the problem of physics confronted with the problem of irreversibility (with Ilya Prigogine La nouvelle alliance, 1979 [Order Out of Chaos, 1984], and Entre le temps et l’éternité, 1988), then on the issue of modern science (L’invention des sciences modernes, 1993 [The Invention of Modern Science, 2000], and Histoire de la chimie, 1993 [A History of Chemistry, 1996], written with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent). Her research, conducted together with Alfred N. Whitehead, William James, and Bruno Latour, has been extended, with the notion of practice and ecology of practices, to all collective activities of knowledge production (Cosmopolitiques, 1997 [Cosmopolitics I and II, 2010-11], La Vierge et le neutrino, 2006 [Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, 2023]). She also explores the possibilities of speculative pragmatics, both in the political sphere (La sorcellerie capitaliste, with Philippe Pignarre, 2005 [Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, 2007]; Au temps des catastrophes, 2009 [In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, 2015]) and in the philosophical sphere (Penser avec Whitehead, 2002 [Thinking with Whitehead, 2014]). In the same vein, she published Les faiseuses d’histoires with Vinciane Despret in 2011 [Women Who Make a Fuss, 2021], Une autre science est possible! Manifeste pour un ralentissement des sciences in 2013 [Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, 2017] and Réactiver le sens commun : Lecture de Whitehead en temps de débâcle in 2020 [Making Sense in Common. A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, 2023].

Contribution

Many readers of chapter 3 of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, devoted to reference (REF), consider this chapter to be dedicated to achieving scientific objectivity, in line with Bruno Latour’s early work. Too quickly overlooked is the fact that the only example dealt with is that of yeast specialists, and that this introduces the crossing of REP/REF (REP for reproduction). Yeasts had to be pinned down in their path of existence to become frozen in a refrigerator and engaged in the back-and-forth path towards objectification. Latour has chosen an example implying that yeasts could be capable of entirely different things than those attributed to them by their experimental definition. This links An Inquiry to Latour’s latest books, in particular Où atterrir [Where to land], where he invites a different libido sciendi, one that would no longer emphasize what has been fixed in order to satisfy the demands of reference but would learn to describe powers of action which we depend on.

Photo: Laurent Thurin-Nal, CopyLeft.


Speakers in Session 2: After a reading of An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence

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