The Minoritarian Powers of Thought: Thinking beyond

Stupidity with Isabelle Stengers

Didier Debaise

SubStance, Volume 47, Number 1, 2018 (Issue 145), pp. 17-28 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689011

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought:
Thinking beyond Stupidity with
Isabelle Stengers
Didier Debaise

Introduction
The thought of Isabelle Stengers undeniably holds a very particular
place in the field of contemporary philosophy. For anyone attempting to
situate it, the difficulties are innumerable. These not only concern the mul-
tiplicity of objects that she has explored, or the novel articulation between
practices that she has effected, but also the philosophical lines of filiation
within which she has inscribed her work. It would be in vain to establish
orders of priority or seek to establish a hierarchy of the set of objects that
punctuate the development of her work with the aim of giving coherence
to what nevertheless presents itself in a dispersed manner. Would one
find in The Invention of Modern Science a book capable of giving all the
impulses to a body of work that has not ceased to unfold its proposals
and amplify them? What would then become of all the new figures that
are subsequently deployed and that disrupt any presumed continuity,
such as the figure of the diplomat, the ecology of practices, as well as the
multiple speculative demands that Stengers constructs but which one
will only encounter later, in Cosmopolitics and in Thinking with Whitehead?
Should one, on the contrary, place the latter at the center of attention and,
by taking on this perspective, approach the ensemble of her other works
as a series of intimations of what there acquires its full expression? But
what place would then be given to the more transversal demand, notably
those originating in the minoritarian practices that Stengers relays and
that give her more theoretical propositions a life animated by collective
voices and insistences that go well beyond the writing itself?
It becomes clear that these questions, which result from purely
theoretical concerns, from the habit of retracing the coherence of a body
of work by identifying a hidden explanatory key, have no relevance here.
What seems crucial to me is, rather, to find out what new function Stengers
attributes to philosophy– a function that, I believe, has not changed and
is at work both in the texts as well as in the shaping of a certain stance, an
ethos or temper.1 In some respects, Stengers borrows this new function

© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc.

SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018 17
18 Didier Debaise

from Gilles Deleuze, but does so by considerably modifying its meaning

and giving it an unprecedented field of application. This function is first
expressed in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and philosophy: “When someone asks
‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive, since the
question tries to be ironic and caustic. […] It [philosophy] is useful for
harming stupidity [la bêtise], for turning stupidity into something shame-
ful” (106). When Stengers evokes the two philosophies that have mattered
most to her, that of Deleuze and Whitehead,2 she resorts to this function
of resisting stupidity, and by some strange alchemy, she opens a personal
route that redefines the set of speculative problems as well as, inevitably,
of political gestures. Thus, in an article entitled “Thinking with Deleuze
and Whitehead: A Double Test,” she does not hesitate in foregrounding
the theme of stupidity:
Since the 19th century, there is a new problem again, as exemplified
by Flaubert and Nietzsche: the problem ‘de la bêtise.’ Bêtise is usually
translated in English by ‘stupidity,’ but the Deleuzian bêtise is not ‘stu-
por,’ as the term may be associated with some kind of sleepy quality. It
is quite active, even entrepreneurial, as were Bouvard and Pécuchet. It
refers to the rather horrifying experience you can get for instance when
trying to speak with so-called neo-liberal economists, the stone-blind
eye they turn against any argument implying that the market may well
be incapable of repairing the destructions it causes. (12)

I believe this passage illustrates the demand that extends across

Stengers’s work and that endows the problems she develops with a sin-
gular character. Two dimensions of stupidity must be discerned. In one
respect, it is absolutely situated and incarnated in actions, attitudes and
manners; it always concerns this scientific, medical, therapeutic, economic
or environmental apparatus. It is indeed about the “stone-blind eye” in the
face of the destructions caused by the market. One could surely multiply
the cases, the examples of such attitudes and forms of neutral expression
in the face of economic, political and environmental catastrophes, but
what matters is that stupidity is always incarnated, situated, in the here
and now. But here we must be careful, for it is not a matter of reducing
stupidity to some psychological trait, to the character of those with whom
it is concerned. While always situated, stupidity for Stengers refers to a
kind of operation that I would qualify as one of capture or possession. It
constitutes a capture of the soul. She argues as much in her In Catastrophic
Times:
What I will name stupidity cannot be reduced to a type of psychologi-
cal weakness. It will not be said that “people are stupid” as if it was a
matter of some personal defect. Stupidity is something about which it
will be said instead that it seizes hold of certain people. And in particular it
seizes hold of those who feel themselves in a position of responsibility
and who then become what I call our guardians.” (117)

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 19

As Stengers indicates in the above passage, stupidity is at the same

time part of an epoch that celebrates it as a responsible attitude whenever
we are confronted with the crumbling of situations that would otherwise
require collective modes of reflection upon what appears as inevitable.
Thus, stupidity is at once thoroughly situated and profoundly linked to
an epoch. This is because, as Stengers notes, it is neither a temporary state
of consciousness nor a psychological form, and it must never be reduced
to stupefaction, a state of passiveness or somnolence of consciousness.
Stupidity is profoundly active, “entrepreneurial,” in the sense that it
actively addresses events in order to subtract from them their problem-
atic bearing. In a situation where one would be prompted to interrogate
the specific modes of existence at stake in an experimental practice, to
collectively invent alternative relations to a disease, to “cultivate the in-
terstices” implicated in every living relationship, to bring into existence
other worlds that resist the “infernal alternatives” intended to provoke
responsible sacrifices— in those situations stupidity instead incites an
attitude of resignation. It is this modus operandi of stupidity that we must
bring to light so as to become capable of resisting it.
For this reason, one should not be surprised that Stengers insists
on the historical and epochal dimension of stupidity. She reinforces this
by producing a strange hybridization of Deleuze and Whitehead that
permits greater emphasis on the historical dimension of stupidity: “[w]
hat Deleuze names bêtise, Whitehead related to what he calls nineteenth
century discovery, the discovery of the method of training professionals,
or what he calls ‘minds in a groove’ (SMW 197) and to the epochal fact that
‘professionalism has now been mated with progress’ (SMW 205)” (Stengers,
“Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead” 12). Inseparable from our epoch,
stupidity crosses all its aspects. Thus, what is at stake in thinking through
stupidity is a veritable diagnosis of the present.

The Celebration of False Problems

Stupidity is characterized, first of all, by a certain fascination with
false problems, with “infernal alternatives,” a kind of laziness or tired-
ness of thought, that “naturally” presents itself in every situation: truth or
belief, experience or representation, facts or values, subjective or objective,
and so on. For a time, philosophy had lost itself in these false problems3
by placing them at the center of absurd questions intended to define the
basis of all possible experience: how can knowledge be in accordance with
all the forms of existence, this “adaequatio rei et intellectus, at best good
enough to serve as a crutch for an elementary philosophy exam?” (Latour
71). How could purely constructed, heteronomous and artifactual beings
acquire a life of their own, a real autonomy, and become self-contained

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20 Didier Debaise

beings? Are facts constructed? What might the conditions for free action
be in a universe of deterministic laws? It may come as a surprise that,
up to this day, certain approaches which call themselves “speculative”
display the same sacralization of false problems under the guise of new
questions: how to know a world outside of human experience? What
might an experience before or after humanity be? How to render contin-
gency an absolute necessity? These are enormous false problems that are
only possible through various confusions between terms that had been
previously separated and constructed, but whose modes of construction
are no longer put into question. Certainly, every age has had its share of
false problems, and it would be absurd to limit these general questions
to modernity, but seldom have they acquired such a degree of efficacy
in the constitution of ontological, epistemological, or political modes of
experience.
Why has modern thought been so fascinated by false problems?
What has made this epoch so interested in them? Why is it that, today,
we are witness to the almost symptomatic resurgence of false problems
in philosophy and in “new” debates that animate it? These questions
seem to me to be fundamental, given that, behind these false problems,
so innocently epistemological, there is an entire political organization of
thought at stake. To take an interest in the fabrication of false problems,
in their dispersion and in their manner of mobilizing evidence to present
themselves, is to interrogate the construction of a certain image of thought,
at once political and speculative, which has stupidity as its final expression.
As Stengers argues: “What presents itself as a logical consequence (…)
has been fabricated by multiple processes of so-called rational reorgani-
zation that in the first place aimed at sapping or capturing the capacities
for thinking and resisting of those who were apt to do so” (Stengers, In
Catastrophic Times 55).
In order to understand false problems it in all their breadth, we must
return to the gestures, and operations from which they are derived. In her
Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers situates the originary operation within
what Whitehead called “the bifurcation of nature.” Most of Whitehead’s
readers had not, until Stengers focused on it, appreciated the profound
originality of the concept of the “bifurcation of nature,” and instead re-
garded it as nothing more than another expression of the characteristic
“dualism” of modern thought. In the initial chapters of Thinking with
Whitehead, Stengers radically breaks with such an interpretation of the
bifurcation of nature. Far from being a derivative, a secondary applica-
tion of dualism, it becomes the central term from which the invention
of modern experience emanates, and through which this new mode of
experience acquired its particular tonality. It required an interest in the

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 21

invention of experimental science, removed from a purely epistemological

or ontological interpretation, to truly understand its significance, because
it is there that its origins lie. Consequently, I will qualify the bifurcation,
as Stengers conceptualizes it, as an operation or a gesture through which
nature is bifurcated in the setting of an experiment on bodies (physical,
biological, psychological, or social).
Far from associating them with dualism, one should say of the mod-
erns that they are the ones who have reified the terms of an experimental
operation. Because it is always possible to distinguish, by a process of
abstraction, between primary and secondary qualities, they deduce that
nature is comprised of two realms of existence. In short, they turn their
abstractions into reality itself. In this way, resisting the bifurcation of na-
ture is above all resisting to the reifications of abstractions upon which
the modern experience of nature rests:
In other words, Whitehead does not in the slightest propose to “prove”
that we should abandon the great modern divide between primary
qualities, attributed to the entities that constitute nature, and secondary
qualities, relative to our perception. He does not even bother to name
those who prolong and repeat this division even today: he knows that
it is you and I, the philosopher or the scientist, all those who have ac-
cepted this division as important or as an unquestioned matter of fact.
He defines this division as the absurdity that his concept will have to
escape. (Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead 38)

What is the link between the false problems explored above and
the bifurcation of nature? I would say, following Stengers’s reading of
Whitehead, that the bifurcation of nature is the constitutive act of mod-
ern experience, and that false problems are its expression at the level of
representation. Having led to an opposition between two fictitious realms
of existence nevertheless presented as “real,” the bifurcation drives one’s
thinking towards a purely abstract realm where all practical requirements
have been lost. It is then that thought, lost in its own constructions, oscil-
lates between a “real” that is only the reified image of its own abstraction,
and a “subjective experience” void of all efficacy.
False problems emerge from these multiple confusions where one
has lost both the situated origin and its requirements. With Stengers’s
diagnosis, the seriousness that accompanies the grand epistemological
questions becomes laughable: questions about knowledge of a “real”
world beyond the human, about the distinctions between fact and inter-
pretation, as well as questions concerning the difference between what is
given and what has been constructed. Behind these questions, repeated
ad infinitum in always singular forms, there is something truly grotesque,
for everything seems to be inverted: if the practical divisions are always
susceptible of making experience bifurcate, why look at them as anything

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22 Didier Debaise

other than simply practical acts? Why the desire to absolutely reify, to
ontologize, that which amounts to a practice of differentiation?
However, the eminently more serious question is how these false
problems have, against all odds, been so effortlessly able to impose
themselves? How has the bifurcation, despite forcing its advocates into
ever-stranger arrangements and encasing them in insurmountable con-
tradictions, managed to maintain itself and even, sometimes, to intensify?
It would be a mistake to believe that false problems, as secondary expres-
sions of the bifurcation, amount to purely epistemological questions, or
that they would, after some clarification, disappear just as easily. Because
behind these so “innocently” theoretical issues, we in fact discover veri-
table war machines, turning without end and producing a desertifica-
tion of all modes of existence: the reduction of mental beings to simple
representations, of fictions to imaginary realities, of values to subjective
projections onto nature.
If Whitehead had left the question at an epistemological or meta-
physical level, Stengers prolongs and deepens the stakes by injecting the
political dimensions from which it should never have been disconnected.
Speculative thought, as an inquiry on the abstractions that govern ex-
perience, becomes then profoundly political, engaged in questions that
Whitehead could not have envisaged: what motivates the iterations of the
bifurcation? What are its effects? What is in the process of being disquali-
fied this time? With false problems, with the bifurcation of nature, what
one finds are incredible instruments of domestication of heterogeneous
and minoritarian knowledges that have for some time accompanied the
constitution of modern experience. It is thus a matter of making perceptible
the fact that “we live in a veritable cemetery for destroyed practices and
collective knowledges” (Stengers, In Catastrophic Times 98).
If the reading of Whitehead and the constitution of the bifurcation
of nature matter, if they take a special importance in Stengers’s thought,
it is because they enable her to interrogate the operations and multiple
disqualifications that are put into play in seemingly innocent questions.
What is at stake in the exploration of the bifurcation is the project of inter-
rogating the régime that institutes the great divide between knowledge
and belief— a divide which is at the heart of the political relations of a
new governing of the climate focused on defining the relationships and
distinctions among “users,” “experts,” and those who are “responsible.”
Through Stengers’s proposed path, Whitehead’s thought becomes a novel
speculative thought with eminently political dimensions, a speculative
thought concerned with the operations of disqualification that lie at the
heart of the modern concept of nature. Stengers provides the clearest
representation of this in Cosmopolitics, when she argues that:

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 23

The contemporary scene is literally saturated with the “modern” heirs

of Plato. Each of these heirs denounces his “other,” just as the philoso-
pher denounced the sophists, accused them of exploiting that which he
himself had triumphed over. They include not only the heirs of Plato,
but those philosophers who, following the sophists, were used as an
argument to demonstrate the need for a foundation. What, in Plato’s
test, can be read as a network of analogies isolating the terrible instabil-
ity of the sophist-pharmakon has today split into a number of “modern
practices” (scientific, medical, political, technological, psychoanalytic,
pedagogical) that have been introduced, just as Platonic philosophy in
its time, as disqualifying their other – charlatan, populist, ideologue,
astrologer, magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher. (29-30)

This is not to say, of course, that the processes of contemporary dis-

qualification, articulated through psychosocial types such as the charlatan,
the populist, the ideologue, etc., identically repeat a scene already invented
within Platonism. To the contrary, if ‘modern practices’ turn themselves
into heirs of Platonism through their own operations of disqualification
of minoritarian knowledges, they do so on an entirely new plane, in a
new epistemological and political space, on a new scene that implies
other tools, other operative modes, other strategies of disqualification.
This other scene, where all is played out once again, where the trials and
selections are reinvented even when the act of disqualification is reiterated,
is precisely what the term “bifurcation of nature” is intended to express.
A new episteme, Foucault might have said; certainly a new distribution
of power/knowledge. It is indicative of the importance of the notion of
the “bifurcation of nature” that it allows for the articulation of scientific
experimentation, the power of disqualification, and the political relations
that derive from their entanglements.

Intensifying the Possible

Stupidity is furthermore characterized by a certain economy of the
remarkable and the ordinary. As Deleuze stated in his Difference and Repeti-
tion: “stupidity is defined above all by its perpetual confusion with regard
to the important and the unimportant, the ordinary and the singular” (190).
The idea of a confusion that has amplified throughout the modern age,
reaching its peak in the 19th century and becoming the implicit principle
of the organization of knowledge in the present age, is one of the themes
that permeates Deleuzian thought and occupies a central position in Dif-
ference and Repetition: “The problem of thought is not tied to essences but
to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution
of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points” (189). Stupidity
marks the confusion, the incapacity to evaluate what is of importance; it
is a form of active anesthesia of thought. It is for this reason that it is so
intimately tied to the celebration of false problems. Insofar as it renders

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24 Didier Debaise

any evaluation between the important and the anecdotal impossible,

stupidity justifies the idea that any question has the right to be asked, and
that the only criteria of relevance for any ontological or epistemological
position would be those that are intrinsic to it: coherence, argumentative
cohesion, formal strength, and so on. Stupidity is thus only possible by
detaching thought from the necessities that truly require it, necessities
which are always situated in an outside within which thought originates
and is put to the test. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition on the
subject of voluntarist images of thought: 
They lack the claws of absolute necessity–in other words, of an origi-
nal violence inflicted upon thought; the claws of a strangeness or an
enmity which alone would awaken thought from its original stupor
or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but
constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for
being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness of the world. Thought is
primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes
philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. (139)

Flaubert’s novel, Bouvat et Pécuchet, wonderfully expresses this idea

through the adventures of the two protagonists, autodidacts in search of
an encyclopedic foundation of knowledge, which in turn epitomizes the
state of an age: the celebration of facts—notably, through encyclopedism—
detached from all necessity, from all pragmatic relation to situations. And
what is known ends up getting lost in innumerable confusions, all of which
are an effect of the abstract conception of knowledge. To repeat the point:
one would be heavily mistaken to reduce the problem of stupidity—of this
confusion bearing such profound epistemological and ontological implica-
tions—to psychological dimensions, to a temporary state of knowledge,
to a kind of provisory diminution of thought.
If Deleuze gives rise to a very particular attention concerning the
emergence of stupidity, as well as to its consolidation and circulation, it is
Stengers who again must be credited with having intensified its political
dimensions, and established the conditions for always local and collective
forms of resisting to its disqualificatory effects. Let us pose the pragmatist
question: What are the effects of the confusion between the important
and the ordinary? What does it truly endanger? How can knowledge,
once it has condemned accounting for what matters, become a machine
of disqualification? It is once again in the unique hybridization between
Deleuze and Whitehead that we find elements for a response.
Thus, in Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers grants crucial importance
to Whitehead’s final publication, Modes of Thought, that had up until then
enjoyed little or merely allusive attention by his readers. She shows that in
that book a new question takes center stage, a question certainly present
in Whitehead’s previous works, notably in the first sentences of Process

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 25

and Reality, but which here finds unprecedented thickness: what is it that
gives the sense of importance? How can one not read this question as the
acme of an opposition to the bifurcation of nature? Indeed, the bifurcation
entailed a reduction of the important to a secondary category of nature,
to an effect of the projection of purely human values on a nature that is
otherwise devoid of them. All the operations that characterize the gesture
of bifurcating exclude this “sense of importance” from nature and locate it
in the only domain permeated by intentions and finalities: anthropologi-
cal experience. Once this reduction is effected, it starts to get lost in the
multiple confusions highlighted above, subtracting thought from all the
vital attachments that endowed it with consistency.
From this perspective, Whitehead’s gesture is, as Stengers remarks,
radical: asserting importance as a primary category of the experience of
nature. No longer reserved only for humans, the notion of importance
becomes a term for the expression of every center of experience. Whitehead
announces this in a formulation pregnant with consequences: “the sense of
importance is embedded in the very being of animal experience” (Modes
12) Before being an epistemological or axiological category, reserved to
consciousness, importance finds its foundations in the vital dimension
of experience. And it is this vital dimension, the need to distinguish, in
each situation, the remarkable from the ordinary, the important from the
anecdotal, that alone justifies thought and gives it its true consistency.
It is thus the status of philosophy itself that is at stake here. Stengers
extensively analyses this challenge in a chapter of Thinking with Whitehead
devoted to speculative thought. Returning to the function of the “specula-
tive schema” developed by Whitehead, she insists on the fact that impor-
tance is the only criterion of its justification:
Yet coherence itself, which obliges the thinker and which the scheme
makes prevail, would, if it were an end in itself, be bereft of importance,
for what it cannot render explicit is precisely that in which it matters.
If the principles must be stated in generic terms, no leap is generic. In
order for imagination to leap, it needs to trust the something will come
to meet it. The knowledge produced by the coherent scheme must be
actually “important.” (171)
The “speculative schema,” this construction of a system of thought
the purpose of which, Whitehead said, was to allow for an “interpretation
of all the aspects of experience,” would have no consistency if it weren’t
linked with absolute necessity to what matters in a particular moment of
experience. It is therefore not experience itself that must be evaluated in
the first place, but the capacity of a theory, a way of thinking, a philosophi-
cal schema, to account for what insists, to account for the often hidden
insistences which at any moment risk sinking into indifference. In this
sense, the “speculative” function he attributes to philosophy is also, and

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26 Didier Debaise

above all, a moral and political attitude. Thus, in Modes of Thought, this
conviction takes on the form of a new maxim: “our action is moral if we
have thereby safe-guarded the importance of experience so far as it de-
pends on that concrete instance in the world’s history” (15). As Stengers
demonstrates, this is without doubt the leitmotif that extends across
Whitehead’s speculative thought and that renders inoperable any attempt
at tracing the differences between the epistemological, axiological, political
and ontological dimensions implicated in all experience.
Indeed, if the task of speculative thought is to “safeguard the impor-
tance of an experience,” how could we then separate these dimensions,
extracting one or the other? As soon as importance enters the scene as a
primary category, one deals with new questions: how do multiple attach-
ments articulate and take on a collective consistency without (re)invoking
all those operations of disqualification that accompany the bifurcation of
nature? Whitehead expresses this requirement of articulation at numerous
instances and notably in Process and Reality, where he writes: “Philosophy
may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and
Christ is nailed to the cross” (338). The challenge is thus not to judge—that
is, to silence—those for whom physicalism, in this case, does not have the
final word, but to bring into existence a “diplomatic” scene allowing for
the transformation of oppositions into contrasts. This is what Stengers calls
the “ecology of practices,”4 which is at the heart of her book Cosmopolitics:
Naturally, scientific field ecology can rely on the stability of the situa-
tions it studies when producing representations and an evaluation of
those situations. But once human practices come into play, the ecological
perspective cannot rely on such stability but, on the contrary, communi-
cates directly with the question of the pharmacological instability associ-
ated with pharmaka in general, and with the factishes that create and
are created by our practices in particular. The question of the identity
of a practice would then have to be answered not by a static diagnosis
but by a question of “value” and “value creation”, that is, the ecologi-
cal question of what “counts” and “could count” for that practice. (43)
The bifurcation of nature induced an ordering of knowledges through
hierarchies and disqualifications based on the invention of a univocal
nature. One may no doubt be astonished by the strange invention of the
modern concept of nature, by these dividing operations along which
natural bodies have been attributed to the realms of distinct qualities, and
by the transformation of initially practical abstractions into ontological
statements, pretending nothing less than being reality itself. However,
all of this would be even more surprising if it were not also the occasion
for the homogenizing and domesticating of a multiplicity of knowledges
that have become minoritarian, of situated knowledges, attentive to the
variations of the environment, to the inherent instabilities of all experi-

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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 27

ence, knowledges that are ultimately indissociably entangled with the

attachments and values that matter to their practitioners and the issues
that assemble them.
Let us recall once more this passage in Cosmopolitics that marks the
effects of the bifurcation whose heirs are all those “‘modern practices’
(scientific, medical, political, technological, psychoanalytic, pedagogi-
cal) that have been introduced, just as Platonic philosophy in its time,
as disqualifying their other – charlatan, populist, ideologue, astrologer,
magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher” (29-30). The bifurcation of nature
could not, however, have acquired this “all-terrain” power of disquali-
fication had it not been accompanied by an activity of the devaluation
of thought—that I have referred to as stupidity—in its capacity to define
what is important at any given moment. Against this backdrop, we can
at present clearly grasp the lack of innocence inherent in false questions,
to those fallacious problems so regularly celebrated: they conceal in the
background a silent power of disqualification.
Université Libre de Bruxelles

Acknowledgements
The English version of this paper benefited from the help of Adrien de Sutter, Martin
Savransky, and Katrin Soldhju.

Notes
1. I borrow this notion of temper or ethos from W. James, who, in his Some Problems of
Philosophy, writes: “philosophy expresses a certain attitude, purpose, and temper of
conjoined intellect and will rather than a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly
marked off” (12).
2. Of course, the constellation of philosophies with which Stengers has developed her own
work is not solely limited to these two individuals. Indeed, one would have to adjoin
the countless influences of Leibniz, Etienne Souriau, William James, Donna Haraway.
However, Deleuze and Whitehead occupy a very privileged position as initiators of a
certain philosophical stance.
3. I borrow this notion of false problems from H. Bergson who had inscribed it within
a genealogy linked to the activity of the intellect. (See Bergson, The Creative Mind: An
Introduction to Metaphysics, and in particular the chapter on the position of problems. I
would also bring to the attention of the reader the reprise of the notion of false problems
that I have developed to interpret Bruno Latour’s Inquiry on the Modes of Existence in an
article entitled, “The Celebration of False Problems”).
4. For an in-depth analysis of the ecology of practices by Stengers and current uses, see the
article by Katrin Solhdju and Karin Harrasser, “Wirksamkeit Verpflichtet.”

Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Dover, 2007.
Debaise, Didier. “The Celebration of False Problems.” Reset Modernity, edited by Bruno
Latour, MIT Press, 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University
Press, 1994.

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28 Didier Debaise

---. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia University Press, 2006.
James, William. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy.
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