Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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Chertok, Léon and Isabelle Stengers. 1992. A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Trans. Martha Noel Evans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. This co-written book offers a wealth of historical insights into the entanglement of medicine and modern epistemologies of science. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Stengers’s long-lasting interests in Mesmer, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis.

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9. This re-enchantment shows itself in several places. Most obviously perhaps, it is in Stengers’s own suggestions to readers about how to think, gather, and mobilize in ways that impassion ourselves and our world. Moreover, before we even consider our own passions, she asks us to notice how passion is at play in science itself, in the events and the controversies by which innovations become scientific.Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada.

Intellectually provocative and erudite, this interdisciplinary volume presents a diverse array of critical perspectives, assessing both the ideal enterprise and the current realities of the rapidly developing cosmopolitical movement. Despret is a collaborator of Stengers (they co-wrote Women Who Make a Fuss, for example), and her work is just as philosophically lively. Like Stengers, Despret works closely with scientists, especially primatologists, and her publications are replete with gripping stories about science in the field.

Etienne Balibar, Europe, Constitution, frontière op. cit. See Chapter II, “L’Europe en panne?,” pp. 25–47. We can find these analogues to religion all over the place, according to Stengers. Modern practices, ranging from science and medicine to pedagogy, deploy methods that work to disqualify their others. As some figures of authority like doctors or entrepreneurs (or professors, priests, or pastors) gain recognition as modern and lay claim to legitimacy, they rely upon the non-modern status of others, identified by Stengers as the “charlatan, populist, ideologue, astrologer, magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher” (2010, 30).