This recent review of by Michael Halewood gives a nice and concise overview of Isabelle Stengers’ quite dense Cosmopolitics I. Steven Shaviro’s lenghty summary of the book (+ a response of Stengers herself) can be found on his Pinocchio Theory blog here. My own attempt to deal with Cosmopolitics has still been somewhat undetermined; I find it hard to deal with her mixture of the innumereable complexities of science studies’ research of scientific experiments and a Deleuzian, Whiteheadian conceptual rigour. At the same time, I’m well aware that the book does (perhaps together with Hans Jürg Rheinberger’s work and Caspar Bruun Jensen’s recent publication) provide one of the most daring (indirect) attempts to try to sort out, to develop what might be called the ‘ontology’ of science studies (i.e. perhaps somewhere between Graham Harman, Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda). In other words, the next few weeks of my holidays will be dedicated firstly, to the Dutch translation of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and, secondly, to an effort to theorize Stengers take on both Deleuze, Whitehead and its relation to object-oriented ontology’s affiliation with actor-network theory.
