SubStance

Introduction

The thought of Isabelle Stengers undeniably holds a very particular place in the field of contemporary philosophy. For anyone attempting to situate it, the difficulties are innumerable. These not only concern the multiplicity of objects that she has explored, or the novel articulation between practices that she has effected, but also the philosophical lines of filiation within which she has inscribed her work. It would be in vain to establish orders of priority or seek to establish a hierarchy of the set of objects that punctuate the development of her work with the aim of giving coherence to what nevertheless presents itself in a dispersed manner. Would one find in The Invention of Modern Science a book capable of giving all the impulses to a body of work that has not ceased to unfold its proposals and amplify them? What would then become of all the new figures that are subsequently deployed and that disrupt any presumed continuity, such as the figure of the diplomat, the ecology of practices, as well as the multiple speculative demands that Stengers constructs but which one will only encounter later, in Cosmopolitics and in Thinking with Whitehead? Should one, on the contrary, place the latter at the center of attention and, by taking on this perspective, approach the ensemble of her other works as a series of intimations of what there acquires its full expression? But what place would then be given to the more transversal demand, notably those originating in the minoritarian practices that Stengers relays and that give her more theoretical propositions a life animated by collective voices and insistences that go well beyond the writing itself?

It becomes clear that these questions, which result from purely theoretical concerns, from the habit of retracing the coherence of a body of work by identifying a hidden explanatory key, have no relevance here. What seems crucial to me is, rather, to find out what new function Stengers attributes to philosophy– a function that, I believe, has not changed and is at work both in the texts as well as in the shaping of a certain stance, an ethos or temper.¹ In some respects, Stengers borrows this new function [End Page 17] from Gilles Deleuze, but does so by considerably modifying its meaning and giving it an unprecedented field of application. This function is first expressed in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and philosophy: “When someone asks ‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. […] It [philosophy] is useful for harming stupidity [la bêtise], for turning stupidity into something shameful” (106). When Stengers evokes the two philosophies that have mattered most to her, that of Deleuze and Whitehead,² she resorts to this function of resisting stupidity, and by some strange alchemy, she opens a personal route that redefines the set of speculative problems as well as, inevitably, of political gestures. Thus, in an article entitled “Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test,” she does not hesitate in foregrounding the theme of stupidity:

Since the 19th century, there is a new problem again, as exemplified by Flaubert and Nietzsche: the problem ‘de la bêtise.’ Bêtise is usually translated in English by ‘stupidity,’ but the Deleuzian bêtise is not ‘stupor,’ as the term may be associated with some kind of sleepy quality. It is quite active, even entrepreneurial, as were Bouvard and Pécuchet. It refers to the rather horrifying experience you can get for instance when trying to speak with so-called neo-liberal economists, the stone-blind eye they turn against any argument implying that the market may well be incapable of repairing the destructions it causes.

(12)

I believe this passage illustrates the demand that extends across Stengers’s work and that endows the problems she develops with a singular character. Two dimensions of stupidity must be discerned. In one respect, it is absolutely situated and incarnated in actions, attitudes and manners; it always concerns this scientific, medical, therapeutic, economic or environmental apparatus. It is indeed about the “stone-blind eye” in...