Along these lines, Stengers often uses terms like “fiction” to describe how science works (1997, 83); such locutions make it easier to notice that scientists (like all thinkers) are driven, first and foremost, by interest and imagination. (There is blasphemy to this vocabulary, contravening the science/fiction binary as it does, that is as delightful as it is philosophically salient. I note below that Stengers grants a place in her thinking for heresy; it can be helpful to notice the many places in which she offers up blasphemies instead of established ideas. My own portrait of Freud, accompanying this essay, gestures to heresy along Stengers’s lines. Freud himself sought to banish placebos, and yet our affections for theorists like Freud surely express longings for placebo effects).

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 new astronomy, following Copernicus and his successors, had consequences for the modern view of the world … Ancient and medieval thinkers presented a synchronic schema of the structure of the physical world, which erased the traces of its own genesis; the Moderns, on the other hand, remembered the past and in addition provided a diachronic view of astronomy—as if the evolution of ideas about the cosmos was even more important than the truth about it … Can we still speak of cosmology? It seems that the West ceased to have a cosmology with the end of the world of Aristotle and Ptolemy, an end due to Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. The “world” then no longer formed a whole. 16

Abstract

The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics 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. Freud himself, Stengers explains in the book she co-wrote with Cherkov, sought to achieve scientific legitimacy by appealing to this bifurcation. Freud’s methods laid claim to objectivity by refuting “ancient, primitive medical methods” like placebos (1992, 51). Just like Freud’s psychoanalysis, today’s medicines supply curative treatments in the name of modern epistemology—offering up “the strong drug of Truth” (2005b, 188), despite all protestations to disinterestedness.

A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal Metaphysics. Amerindian Perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013), p. 21. By highlighting the relational dynamics of science, Stengers’s work can bridge political theology with “new materialists” like Karen Barad or Jane Bennett. When matters of fact turn into reliable witnesses for scientists (2005a, 165), they model the feeling and remembering that Barad describes so vividly. When scientists risk their own common, settled ground (2005a, 166), they enact a kind of sympathy, as conceptualized by Bennett. My own sense, though, is that Stengers’s account of recalcitrance, inflected as it is by a call for “spoilsport” scientists and other heretics, is even more directly relevant for affirming the often-untapped sources, rituals, and modes of belonging that tend to be classified as religious or theological. 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.Cheah underscored how countries in the global south, as part of the effort to attract capital investment, essentially subcontracted their citizens to countries abroad. In the name of developing their capacities as human resources through education and professional training, they ended up outsourcing their bodies for cheap labor. Cheah’s insight — that the language of cosmopolitan right produces forms of labor injustice — may hardly be a revelation, but it reinforced the need, already well articulated by Balibar, to revive cosmopolitics as a term accountable to the fallout of economized existence, and to the necessity for a language of rights to have rights capable of doubling down on the politics of the global south within Europe. Cosmopolitics in this ascription would curtail the baggy “cosmopolitanism” set loose in the 1980s (identified by Robbins and Paolo Lemos Horta in their introduction to Cosmopolitanisms), with “a plural descriptive understanding” comprising “any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others,” 8 by aligning itself with “a cosmopolitanism of the poor” (Silviano Santiago), 9 associated with “nonelite collectivities that had cosmopolitanism thrust upon them by traumatic histories of dislocation and dispossession.” 10 Placebos exemplify this two-punch impact: excluded as unscientific because placebos appeal to the hopeful belief of patients, but then incorporated into clinical research trials because placebo-controls filter such beliefs out of scientifically valid treatments (1997; 2003; 2011). Informed by feminist/queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, and critical posthumanism, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics engages with longstanding questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism, but does so by urging for a more inclusive (and less violent) cosmopolitical framework. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial approach allows for visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice. See Bruce Robbins, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 10–12. This overview, useful as a way to categorize Stengers’s many publications, risks hiding from view themes that run throughout her work. Three intersecting concerns hold particular relevance to political theology:

Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica, trans. Catherine Diehl and Jason Groves (New York: Fordham, 2015), p. 120n.

Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation

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. conventional poleis do not, strictly speaking, deserve the name, and human beings who are not wise and virtuous do not count as citizens of the cosmos. But Flikschuh, Katrin, 2017, What is Orientation in Global Thinking? A Kantian Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Settlement in Turkish is ‘yerleşim’ (pronounced ‘yérléshimme’) usually followed by ‘yeri.’ Yer-leş-im is literally “getting a location.” The Jewish settlements in Israel are referred to as “Israil’de Yahudi yerleşimi,” which registers as “location-getting.” By contrast, camp is “kamp” in Turkish, a loan word from French (with the same dual meaning of camp and “camp de détention”). Kamp signifies a temporary arrangement, as opposed to yerleşim which denotes a settlement of greater permanence. Detention camp is “tutuklu kampı”; and refugee camp is “mülteci kampı,” as in “Suriyeli mülteci kampı” = Syrian refugee camp. The principle semantic difference between yerlesim and kamp rests on differences of temporality. 46 Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada. Latour, Bruno. 1997. “Foreword: Stengers’s Shibboleth,” Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xx. Mintaqa’ means district, quarter, area—it’s most often used for area or quarter of a city, but in recent years it has taken on the legal and military connotations of ‘zone’: Mintaqat al-Ihtilal expresses ‘occupied territory’ or ‘occupied zone’. Unlike ‘zone,’ however, it is still also used colloquially to mean ‘area,’ without the threatening connotation. The word mintaqa derives from the triple consonantal root na-ta-qa, to utter or articulate, of which the second form na-tt-a-qa also means to girdle, or mark out (Hans Wehr 114). Related words are nataqiyy, (phonetic), mantaqiyy (logical/dialectical), and nitaq, (girdle, limit, belt, or boundary). Mintaqa is a noun of place (like mustawtana, settlement—the ‘m’ at the beginning denotes place) so it can be taken to signify a space that has been marked out, delineated, encircled. Despret, Vinciane. 2015. “Thinking Like a Rat,” Trans. Jeffrey Bussolini. Angelaki. 20(2): 121-134.Martina Tazzioli and Nicholas De Genova, “Europe/Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of ‘The Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe,’” in “Europe at the Crossroads,” Zone Books: Near Futures, http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/#europe-crisis. In a talk, “A New Querelle of Universals,” (a condensed, English version of a chapter of Des universels: Essais et conférences [Paris: Editions Galilée, 2016], Balibar explains how any attempt to think the concept of the universal gives way to a translational problematic involving the contradictions that arise from any “saying” of universalism in a specific language or idiom: “My latent idea is that the universal is not really a concept or an idea, but it is always the correlative effect of an enunciation that, in given conditions, either asserts the differences or denies them (or even prohibits them), therefore leading to a conflictual modality of internal contestation of itself. But enunciations are always made in a specific language — an idiom — and idioms exist only in the form of a multiplicity of languages that are never isolated from one another, but continuously interacting, therefore inducing transformations within one another. “Translation” is the general name for this interaction, which as we know takes a number of different forms, involving cultural determinations and institutional power relations.” If, as Derrida argued and Bennington reconfirms, it is “the indecision of the frontier between the philosophical and the poetical that most provokes philosophy to think,” we might imagine Balibar’s frontières-mondes as cosmopolitical aporias that inaugurate a translingual rethinking of what a settlement is by means of acts of political philology. 45 Consider in this regard Ozen Nergis Dolcerocca’s commentary on the term “settlement” in Turkish, which underscores the politics of linguistic cosmopolitics: