Home > Positioning > Persons > Stengers

Isabelle Stengers (b. 1949)

Stengers asks how practices — scientific, political, artistic — coexist without a transcendent arbiter. The question runs through everything she has written, from the Prigogine collaboration on irreversibility through the seven volumes of Cosmopolitics to the late work on catastrophe and collapse. Her answer is not tolerance (which presupposes a privileged position from which alternatives are permitted) but an ecology: each practice has its own obligations, its own constraints, its own mode of verification, and the philosopher’s task is to study how they present themselves to one another rather than judge them from above.

Isabelle Stengers (b. 1949, Brussels). Daughter of Jean Stengers (1922–2002), historian at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Trained as a chemist at the same university before turning to philosophy. Worked for a period on Ilya Prigogine’s Brussels research team, a collaboration that produced three co-authored books and shaped her philosophical trajectory. Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Grand Prize for Philosophy from the Académie française (1993); Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (2013, for Cosmopolitics).

The Prigogine collaboration

Three books with Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), Russian-Belgian physical chemist and 1977 Nobel laureate: La Nouvelle Alliance (1979), its substantially reworked English version Order Out of Chaos (1984), and The End of Certainty (1997). The argument: classical science’s denial of irreversibility had been overturned by non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Dissipative structures — far-from-equilibrium systems that maintain themselves through energy exchange with their environment — are not anomalies but central to how order emerges in nature, including biological order. The arrow of time is a universal phenomenon rather than an artefact of observer limitations. The books are usually classified as popular science, but the philosophical and historical frame is Stengers’ and is substantial. Prigogine brought the science; Stengers brought the question of what irreversibility means for how we think about science itself.

Cosmopolitics and the ecology of practices

Originally published in French as Cosmopolitiques in seven volumes (1996–1997), reissued in two French volumes (2003) and translated as Cosmopolitics I (2010) and Cosmopolitics II (2011).

Cosmopolitics. Deliberately distinguished from cosmopolitanism. Where cosmopolitanism imagines a universal political order based on shared humanity, cosmopolitics names the slow, situated work of holding together multiple practices that produce different and conflicting realities, with no transcendent vantage from which to arbitrate. The “cosmos” is not given in advance; it is what would have to be constructed if the practices were to coexist. Where conflicting practices develop a mutually constructive relationship, Stengers calls this reciprocal capture — not compromise but a relation in which both sides are changed while remaining distinct.

Ecology of practices. The methodological move underlying cosmopolitics. Each practice — physics, chemistry, ecology, politics, healing — has its own obligations, constraints, and modes of validation. The philosopher does not evaluate practices against a universal standard but studies how they present themselves to one another. The ecology metaphor is literal: practices occupy niches, compete, cooperate, and transform one another’s environments.

The idiot. After Deleuze: the figure who slows down the consensus by insisting that “there is something more important.” Not stupidity but a principled interruption of the rush to agreement — the refusal to subscribe to the urgent question that everyone else treats as self-evident.

Thinking with Whitehead

Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts (2002), translated as Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011, trans. Michael Chase). The product of thirty years’ engagement with Whitehead’s corpus.

The book is widely credited with returning Whitehead to serious philosophical reading in continental philosophy after decades of relative neglect outside process theology. Bruno Latour’s foreword positioned it as a major event. Stengers reads Whitehead in chronological order, tracking what she calls the “seismic shifts” in his thinking from the early works on philosophy of nature through Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. Her reading emphasises Whitehead’s constructivism — speculative philosophy as a careful construction of concepts that “civilises” the abstractions inherited from modern thought, rather than a system claiming completeness. She takes Whitehead’s God seriously rather than excising it as embarrassing theology, while reading it through the systematic constraint it serves rather than through traditional theism.

A later return: Réactiver le sens commun (2020; English: Making Sense in Common, 2024) turns Whitehead’s philosophy toward the social and political implications that Thinking with Whitehead had largely held in reserve.

The political-ecological works

Capitalist Sorcery (with Philippe Pignarre, 2005 / English 2011). Diagnosis of capitalism as a system that produces “infernal alternatives” — false dilemmas that capture thought and rule out collective recovery of the capacity to think otherwise. Unusual for its drawing on neo-pagan and feminist witch traditions as resources for resistance.

In Catastrophic Times (2009 / English 2015). Confronting climate catastrophe and the end of the developmentalist narrative. The question is not whether the catastrophe is coming but how to resist becoming barbaric in its face.

Another Science is Possible (2013 / English 2018). A manifesto for slow science — sciences slowed down enough to take their entanglements with the world seriously, against the competitive metrics of fast science.

Network and collaborators

Stengers’ work is heavily collaborative and her position is best understood through her sustained working relationships. Prigogine (the science co-author, on whose Brussels team she worked). Latour (long correspondence and mutual influence; he wrote forewords to Thinking with Whitehead and Power and Invention, and adopted cosmopolitics as a central term in his own later work). Donna Haraway (Stengers has translated Haraway’s work into French; Haraway describes the web of Stengers, Latour, Vinciane Despret and herself as “string figures”). Vinciane Despret (long collaboration on ethology and the question of animal subjectivity). She has written substantively on Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, and centrally on Whitehead.

Wikipedia classifies Stengers under speculative realism, but the placement is overstated. The original Goldsmiths four (Brassier, Harman, Meillassoux, Grant, 2007) did not include her. She contributed to The Speculative Turn (2011), but her sustained interlocutors are Latour, Haraway, and Despret, and her project predates the speculative-realism debates. Process-relational, constructivist, science-studies-adjacent — overlapping with speculative realism, not subsumed by it.

Key works

With Prigogine:

Sole-authored or with other collaborators:

See also: Whitehead · Cosmopolitics · Philosophy of organism · Process philosophy