Philosophy of Isabelle Stengers

Over more than four decades, the work of Isabelle Stengers has ranged widely across many different subjects, from the practices of physics, biology and chemistry to psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, ecology, gender, climate change, animism, capitalism, witchcraft, medicine, drugs and the history of philosophy.

Providing a comprehensive overview of Stengers’ work, Grant Maxwell situates her as a primary figure in a philosophical tradition extending from Leibniz, James and Guattari to perhaps her main precursors, Deleuze and Whitehead. In doing so, he explores how Stengers’ constructivism resists the hierarchical binarity characteristic of modernity, constructing the means to create coherence among problematic differences – a creation which could potentially transform the binary constructions of gender, capitalism and climate change.