Isabelle Stengers

Works

• 1979Order out of Chaos

  Written with the chemist Ilya Prigogine: the physics of irreversible processes and of self-organisation far from equilibrium overturns the classical image of a timeless, deterministic nature and calls for a new alliance between the sciences and culture.

• 1997Cosmopolitics

  Seven volumes on an “ecology of practices”: each science has its own demands and obligations; a politics of knowledge should let all those concerned by a question make themselves heard instead of letting one authority speak for “nature”.

Position

Stengers is on the map as a philosopher of science who asks what makes scientific practices succeed and how they should live alongside other practices. With Prigogine she argued in “La Nouvelle Alliance” that the physics of irreversible processes and self-organisation undoes the classical image of a timeless, deterministic nature, so that science can rejoin a world of history and becoming. In “The Invention of Modern Science” (1993) and the seven volumes of “Cosmopolitiques” (1997) she described the sciences as inventive practices: an experiment succeeds when it makes a phenomenon able to answer the question put to it, and each practice has its own requirements and obligations. Her “ecology of practices” rejects any single authority that speaks in the name of nature or reason; “cosmopolitics” names a politics in which those affected by a question – experts, activists, practitioners, and beings that cannot speak for themselves – must be able to make a difference, slowing down decisions taken in their name. She has written at length on Whitehead (“Thinking with Whitehead”, 2002) and draws on Deleuze. In “In Catastrophic Times” (2009) she called for resistance to what she calls “the coming barbarism”, a climate crisis that in her view is driven by capitalism. Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway both describe her work as a major influence on their own.

Life & context

Isabelle Stengers was born in 1949 in Brussels. She studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) and then worked with the physical chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine on the history and philosophy of science; their joint book “La Nouvelle Alliance” appeared in 1979. She taught philosophy of science at the ULB, where she became professor. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has taken part in public debates on drug policy, psychotherapy, genetically modified organisms and climate change.

Further main works

• L’invention des sciences modernes (1993)
• Cosmopolitiques (7 vols., 1997)
• Penser avec Whitehead (2002)
• La sorcellerie capitaliste (with P. Pignarre, 2005)
• Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient (2009)