Isabelle Stengers is a continental philosopher of science, strongly influenced by the work of Deleuze and Whitehead, whose early work emerged in conversation with scientists about their experimental practices. In this way, she shares affinities with Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway—and is often an interlocutor of both theorists. Stengers’s work reads like a kind of engaged ethnography because she is so committed to scrutinizing the concrete practices by which science, philosophy, and other research endeavors take place. Her texts are lively, dramatic, and comedic, inviting the reader—at times explicitly—to laugh at the missteps, follies, and wonders by which thinking occurs.

The “ontological turn” in anthropology is a movement associated with anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, and Tim Ingold, and earlier, Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, among others. 22 This ontological turn is an explicit response to the crisis of modernity that expresses itself largely in terms of ecological crisis, which is now closely associated with the Anthropocene. The ontological-turn movement is an effort to take seriously different ontologies in different cultures (we have to bear in mind that knowing there are different ontologies and taking them seriously are two different things). Descola has convincingly outlined four major ontologies, namely naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism. 23 The modern is characterized by what he calls “naturalism,” meaning an opposition between culture and nature, and the former’s mastery over the latter. Descola suggests that we must go beyond such an opposition and recognize that nature is no longer opposed or inferior to culture. Rather, in the different ontologies, we can see the different roles that nature plays; for example, in animism the role of nature is based on the continuity of spirituality, despite the discontinuity of physicality. Diagram used by Johannes Kepler to establish his laws of planetary motion. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. §1. Cosmopolitanism: Between Nature and Technology Stengers’s recent work puts us all on the hook because cosmopolitics is an enterprise to which we each are invited: an ecology of practice, made up of minoritarian projects that all seek in various ways to resist the harms of capitalist imperialism. Barry Malone, “Why Al Jazeera will not say Mediterranean ‘migrants’,” Al Jazeera, August 20, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/editors-blog/2015/08/al-jazeera-mediterranean-migrants-150820082226309.html

§3. Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics

Latour, Bruno. 1997. “Foreword: Stengers’s Shibboleth,” Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xx. Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. Here we only want to show that as Kant develops his thinking towards universalism, his conceptualization of the relation between cosmopolitics and the purposiveness of nature is situated within a peculiar moment in history: the simultaneous enchantment and disenchantment of nature. On the one hand, Kant recognizes the importance of the concept of the organic for philosophy; discoveries in the natural sciences allowed him to connect the cosmos to the moral, as indicated by his famous analogy near the end of Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and constantly reflection concerns itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” 14 Howard Caygill makes an even stronger claim, arguing that this analogy points to a “Kantian physiology of the soul and the cosmos” that unites the “within me” (freedom) and the “above me.” 15 On the other hand, as we saw in Kant’s citation of Kepler and Newton in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” the affirmation of “universal history” and advancements in science and technology led in the eighteenth century to what Rémi Brague calls the “death of the cosmos”: Robbin’s and Cheah’s Cosmopolitics departed from the premise that, since Goethe’s time, worldliness and ramified notions of cultural belonging and identification were predicated on a concept of the human as that which overcomes the limitations of immediate existence. The human derived from the universal feeling of sympathy (Kant), from the intrinsic value of communication (translatability), and from the belief in a common cultural compact. The editors critiqued this humanist tradition from the standpoint of “actually existing practices of cosmopolitanism,” characterized by “fragility of collectivity”; “long-distance nationalism” (Benedict Anderson); “Trojan nationalisms” (Arjun Appadurai); and conflictual identity politics in the place of a “gallery of virtuous, eligible identities.” 4 For Cheah, cosmopolitics was deputized to take on capitalist cosmopolitanism by pointing to “mass-based emancipatory forms of global consciousness, or actually existing imagined political world communities.” 5

If we approach human rights in terms of a biopolitical analysis, you can argue that what produces humanity and all its capacities such as needs, interests, the capacity to labour and so on, are biotechnologies that have now become globalized. Human rights or human rights instruments are the codification of these capacities in a juridical discourse, that is to say, in the language of right. Hence, we don’t begin with the human being who has rights, but with the production of fundamental human needs and capacities, which we subsequently understand in terms of rights that we can claim for ourselves or on behalf of others. But we can only claim these rights in the first place if the needs and capacities that these rights seek to protect were synthetically produced in us by biopolitical technologies. If you look at the new cosmopolitanism in this way, then things become more complicated. 7 I’tiqal is the common word for arrests, military or criminal, and it is the verbal noun of the Form VIII verb for the root ‘a-qa-la. Interestingly, this root has two main meanings, one being ‘to arrest’ and the other ‘to speak.’ The first meaning, then, is “to hobble,” from ‘iqal (a tie for hobbling camels’ feet), clearly a derivation for the modern meaning of “to detain,” “to arrest,” etc. According to Edward Lane (2166, C19 classical English-Arabic dictionary) the camel would be restrained with the ‘iqal in the yard of the abode of the heir/next of kin, hence the association of ‘a-qa-la also with paying blood-money. Lane connects the sense of aqala (as restraint, extended to restraint from what is incorrect or immoral), to its second usage as “to reason,” “to realize,” or “to comprehend.” (Hans Wehr 737). In Lisan al-Arab (C13 dictionary) it is noted that a man who is ‘aqil has constraint over himself and specifically over his tongue (Lisan 3046), which he can ‘i’taqala,’ arrest (the Form VIII verb is used here). 47 Note, though, that this is a pragmatic call. “But you never resist in general,” Stengers explains. “You may resist as a poet, as a teacher, as an activist for animal rights” (2005c, 45). To study Stengers is to face vocational urgings to find our own modes of resistance, whether as poet or activist or something else entirely. Such adventures in discovery are emergent, by definition, since “[w]hat is unknowable is unknown” (2011, 261). second, how to enjoy the labor of philosophy and science by undercutting such bifurcations, infusing these endeavors with passion and interest; New discoveries in the natural sciences thanks to the invention of the telescope and the microscope exposed human beings to magnitudes they could not previously comprehend, leading us to a new relation with the “entire span of nature” ( in dem ganzen Umfang der Natur). 17 The Kantian scholar Diane Morgan suggests that through the “worlds beyond worlds” revealed by technology, nature ceases to be anthropomorphic, for the relation between humans and nature is thus reversed, with humans now standing before the “unsurveyable magnitude” ( Unabsehlich-Groß) of the universe. 18 However, as we indicated above, there is a double moment that deserves our attention: both the enchantment and disenchantment of nature via the natural sciences, leading to a total secularization of the cosmos.

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. Peng Cheah, “Interview with Peng Cheah on Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Human Rights,” interview by Yuk Hui, Theory, Culture and Society (March 17, 2011) www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-with-pheng-cheah-on-cosmopolitanism-nationalism-and-human-rights/ Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; The debate concerns the current use of the word and reflects the clear split between left and right Zionists in relations to Jewish colonization in the Territories. Historically two terms were used by Zionists to designate Jewish settlements: ישוב, yeshuv, and התנחלות, hitnakhalut. The first comes from the root ישב, y.sh.v, to settle, but also, according to its conjugations, simply, and generally, to sit, or, specifically, to sit down. The second comes from the verb נחל, n.kh.l, which connotes taking possession, acquiring, or inheriting. Nakhala is a piece of inherited or possessed land. The second term is biblical and has a clear colonial connotation. The Pentateuch (Numbers), for example, describes in great details the distribution of the land of Israel among Israel’s tribes, each with its own Nakhala, a land designated as belonging to this tribe by virtue of a divine promise even before it has been possessed. Noting the heated debates among Wikipedia Hebrew editors about the proper word for Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, Adi Ophir parses its political usages exegetically and historically: