In _Around the Day in Eighty Worlds_ Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving (...) key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise. (shrink)

The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, you begin with a question that I think resonates with this. You write: “How can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought (...) to be, but to provoke thought?” So what I wanted to ask you is, how would you characterize the importance of this challenge of creating concepts that provoke thought, rather than instruct others on how to think?Well, probably you never know why you do what you do as you do it.... (shrink)

In his lectures on pragmatism, William James famously proposed that the question of ‘the one and the many’ constitutes the most central of all philosophic problems, and that it is ‘central because so pregnant’. Prompted by James’ proposition, this article explores the intimately political connection in James’ thought between his pluralistic metaphysics and the nature of the problematic as a generative force that impregnates worlds and thoughts with differences: what I here call ‘the pluralistic problematic’. Exploring the generative significance of (...) the problematic in James’ philosophy, I propose that, where James is concerned, the pluriverse has a thoroughly problematic mode of existence. And pluralism, rather than a celebration of the many, rather than a philosophical exposition on multiple worlds and ontologies, or a theory of the organisation of a diverse polis, is first and foremost a pragmatics of the pluriverse – a political, experimental and pragmatic response to the ongoing insistence of the pluralistic problematic. (shrink)

In the chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque where Whitehead makes a surprising and crucial appearance, Deleuze chooses to introduce the English mathematician and philosopher as the successor, or “diadoche,” of what he describes as a somewhat secret school. The reason for the secrecy of this school is itself something of a mystery. Even when Deleuze alludes to the question “What is an Event?” as a thread weaving its members together, it cannot be a coincidence that (...) the term he uses to characterize these connections is that of an “echo.” For its secrecy speaks not of a desire from its members to remain unknown, isolated, hermetically closed upon themselves, but rather of the fact that the... (shrink)

In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion of pure thought in abstraction from all expression is a figment of the learned world. A thought is a tremendous form of excitement”. It is the patterned signature of its expression that not only gives thought its own distinct character, but also propels it out into the world, exciting its environment (...) with a new variation of interests. Without this ability to repattern, even if just slightly, the atmosphere of feeling in which they are immersed, to make a difference by shifting the way in which a situation may... (shrink)

Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory article lays the groundwork for a generative conceptualisation of problems. Reweaving intercontinental connections between traditions of French philosophy and American (...) pragmatism, it proffers a conception of the problematic as a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Problems go all the way down and up, requiring nothing less than an art of metamorphosis capable of engendering processes of creation, invention, and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade. (shrink)

At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what 'relevance' is, and to cultivate a new ethos of knowledge-making for an eventful world. Engaging a diverse a range of thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, Martin Savransky challenges longstanding assumptions in the social (...) sciences and argues that relevance is an event that is part and parcel of the immanent and situated processes by which things come to matter. He develops new conceptual tools for cultivating an empiricist ethos of inquiry that is attuned to the question of how things come to matter- an ethics that turns social inquiry into a veritable adventure. The result is an original and rigorous book that infuses knowledge-practices in the social sciences with new sensibilities, creative possibilities, and novel habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling. (shrink)

The patterns of ecological devastation that mark the present unexpectedly enable an ancient and many-storied question to resurface with renewed force: the question of the arts of living — that is, of learning how to live and die well with others on a precarious Earth. Modernity has all but forgotten this question, which has long been buried under the dreams of progress and infinite growth, colonial projects, and the enthroning of technoscience. But what might it mean to reclaim the question (...) of the arts of living today? In this article Martin Savransky reclaims the connection between pragmatism, education, and the arts of living by proposing both that (1) William James's pragmatist philosophy can be read as an ongoing and unfinished experiment in weaving a certain art of living, and (2) James's pragmatism might provide us with uniquely generative elements to begin to experiment with the profoundly educational and ecological challenge of learning to inhabit the Earth otherwise. (shrink)