Isabelle Stengers > Quotes

“If learning to think is learning to resist a future that presents itself as obvious, plausible, and normal, we cannot do so either by evoking an abstract future, from which everything subject to our disapproval has been swept aside, or by referring to a distant cause that we could and should imagine to be free of any compromise. To resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance, that it is populated by practices that remain vital even if none of them has escaped the generalized parasitism that implicates them all.”
― Isabelle Stengers

“Citizens expect solutions from science for all sorts of social problems: unemployment, depleted oil reserves, pollution, cancer … the path that leads to the answers to these questions is not as direct as a programmatic vision of research would have us believe …”
― Isabelle Stengers, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science

“the fact cannot be separated from the possible.”
― Isabelle Stengers, Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse