Abstract

When I first held a copy of Isabelle Stengers’s passionate book, a big tome that tangles with a truly speculative philosopher, one we were both in love with, I misread the actual title, Penser avec Whitehead, as Pensez avec Whitehead! My French is better than that, but I fear my character is not. I saw an imperative rather than a situated practice of thinking-with. Horrified but laughing, in a characteristic act of friendship, with earth-rooted and precise abstractions, Stengers lured me to think with her beyond the catastrophes of my always-ready-to-hand self-certainties and ideologies. She has taught me—taught us—to recognize the killing trap of believing that we have nothing but infernal choices, each of which...