Stengers’ Shibboletth
Foreword to Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
-Would you say that Isabelle Stengers is the greatest French philosopher of science?
-Yes, except she is from Belgium a country that exists only in part and where, contrary to France, the link between science and the state is nil.
-Would you say that she is the philosophical right-hand of the Nobel Prize winner of chemistry Ilya Prigogine?
-Yes, since she wrote several books with him, and yet she has spent the rest of her life trying to escape from the mass of lunatics attracted to this “New Alliance” between science and culture they both wrote together.
German translation in Isabelle Stengers Spekulativer Konstruktivismus, Merve Verlag, Berlin, pp. 7-32, 2008.
