Making Sense in Common

Isabelle Stengers, professor of the philosophy of science at the UniversitÉ libre de Bruxelles, has authored or coauthored more than twenty-five books, many of them published by University of Minnesota Press. She received the grand prize for philosophy from the AcadÉmie FranÇaise in 1993.Thomas Lamarre is Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

"With her lifelong intellectual companion, Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers reactivates an old sort of thing, a necessary thing that is almost impossible to imagine in our corrupt times-namely, ‘common sense,’ ‘making sense in common.’ This vital book thinks deeply about a shareable problematic for holding serious thinkers and doers together to face something real and particular, here and now, not all the time everywhere. Making Sense in Common activates the speculative imagination that things really could be different so that they might actually become different."-Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene"Common sense gets bad press. It is dismissed as a woefully unrigorous middle ground between the expert knowledge systems it disdains and alternative knowledges, like those of Indigenous peoples, whose existence it is loath to acknowledge. But what if we turned things around, moving from common sense to the sense of the common? This is the wager of Isabelle Stengers’s book: that the commonplace of common sense can give way to a problematic space for the negotiation of differences involving all, with a shared commitment to 'staying with the trouble.' In a major reversioning of her political thought, Making Sense in Common endeavors to reactivate common sense as a pragmatic opening onto a metamorphic universe of becoming-together in the face of the world's seemingly intractable problems."-Brian Massumi, author of Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism"Under the cloak of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, Isabelle Stengers unfurls a brilliant critique of the science of expertise and the devastating consequence it is having on our common ecological future. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about the politics of science and is looking for a new way of doing philosophy."-Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism