Enchanting Theory with Fiction: The Onto-Tales of Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret

This paper aims at discussing the different ways in which subjectivities are produced by psychological practices, with a focus on clinical practice. This research is conceptually based on Isabelle Stengers’ and Vinciane Despret’s Political Epistemology and Bruno Latour’s and John Law’s Actor-Network Theory. For these authors, scientific knowledge is produced not as a representation of reality through well-formed sentences, but as modes of articulation between researchers and investigated entities. To investigate these modes of articulation produced by clinical practices, we observed the modes of articulation present in specific psychological techniques with regard to their users, especially in a therapeutic environment. These techniques follow a wide range of therapeutic approaches (psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, Gestalt therapy and institutional analysis) are currently being observed at the DPA (Division of Applied Psychology) at UFRJ (Federal University from Rio de Janeiro) through interviews and an ethnographic approach. Furthermore, we will discuss processes related to interns and patients. With regard to the interns, we observed a very complex and almost impossible mode of negotiation with respect to the practices, concepts and duration of therapy among the therapy groups at DPA. Their education in these different therapeutic approaches can be likened to a process of purification: beyond the discussion of some basic concepts, much of the interns’ education consists in the constant criticism of other approaches. It is also very rare to observe students who practice more than one approach: beyond the pragmatic problem in articulating very different practices, there is a constant process of critique between both groups to which the intern belongs. With regard to patients it was possible to perceive two response patterns: 1) Canonical answers about what therapy is and what its goals are, demonstrating docility regarding the psychologist’s authority. 2) Answers with a more inquisitive position about psychology, with an underlying understanding that it is a way of seeing the world, a philosophy of life, thus presenting a more recalcitrant position. In this case patients link therapy to very diverse practices, and they do so in a very active way, in a process that resembles what Foucault calls the techniques of the self (a group of practices and exercises used actively by someone aiming to transform themselves into an ethical being). We can find such techniques among patients in various practices, e.g. writing in diaries, the singular appropriations of the discourse of the therapists, and even exercises of self-questioning and problematization of the instances of collective life, such as prejudice, stereotypes and subliminal messages. Thus, we can define patients in various ways, but not as passive and patient creatures.

This article reports on speculative engagements in group conversations with elderly citizens on the biomedical possibilities of modifying aging in the future. The participants oriented themselves towards the future of aging through memories and present embodied perceptions. To constrict the analysis, we draw on Isabelle Stengers’ speculative thinking and, to conceptualize the multiplicity of temporalities in our data, we build on Henri Bergson's theorization on time. The analysis of the conversations on technoscientific change illustrate how experiences of aging and the life-span are constituted in and through relations with human and more-than-human others. We theorized these connections of the personal and the collective as living temporality with two temporal logics: Intergenerational time involving other humans in the past, present and future, and evolutionary time that connects the aging body to other living beings and the planet. Within these articulations of the experience of time various alternative perspectives into what is considered as ‘normal’ aging emerged as counternarratives to biomedical models of temporal change. Methodologically, we show that as speculative thinking foregrounds experiential knowledge, it provides a vessel for unruliness and freedom that allows other types of aging futures to emerge alongside bioscientific ones.

This provocation reviews the growing interest in practices of description in literary, cultural, and environmental studies. It argues that in the environmental humanities the craft of description is essential but somewhat neglected. The multispecies worlds encountered by environmental humanities researchers necessarily have to be well described, not only objectively but also rhetorically, to engage readers. Different kinds of expertise (literary, scientific, philosophical, historical) are needed to indicate possible solutions for the problems at hand. We thus offer the slogan: describe first, theorize later, building on the pragmatism of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers in the analysis of passages from the recent writings of Thom van Dooren, Anna Tsing, Vinciane Despret, Lesley Green, and Deborah Bird Rose. Our analysis highlights the important functions that descriptions play in the practice of environmental humanities as they take time to carefully narrate encounters with living worlds. Drawing on these exemplars, the article concludes that these worlds are multirealist and call for interdisciplinary descriptive craft and eventually theoretical frameworks. Environmental humanists themselves are partially defined through their descriptive expertise, which is that of the interdisciplinary “general practitioner” whose practice overturns the traditional distinctions between theory, description, and explanation.

Architecture typically overlooks the presence of animals and the role design plays in domestication. Domestication makes settled human societies possible through the shared burden of labor with animals. The farms, laboratories, “pet-friendly” offices and homes in which animals work are places where humans work too. This article explores one interspecies workplace: a pet-food research facility employing hundreds of dogs owned by the Mars company in Tennessee. The dogs are housed in circular buildings that depart from the linear arrangements of most kennels. In trying to understand this design strategy and the collaborative relationship between humans and dogs in the petfood laboratory, theories of animal labor are drawn from Vinciane Despret, Jocelyne Porcher, Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers. This architecture fosters the transformation of the individual and the formation of a specific mode of collective action, the pack.

Author(s): Cary Wolfe Title (English): Experimental Forest: Notes Toward an Installation Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022). Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 72-91 Page Count: 19 Citation (English): Cary Wolfe, “Experimental Forest: Notes Toward an Installation,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022): 72-91. Author Biography Cary Wolfe, Rice University Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is Founding Director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory. His books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003) What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010), Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chi[1]cago, 2012) and, most recently, Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, 2020) and Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations (Minnesota, 2021). In 2007 he founded the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published more than sixty-five volumes to date by noted authors such as Donna Haraway, Roberto Esposito, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Serres, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida, Vinciane Despret, and others.

The study of performance improvement strategies in both government and private organizations is a crucial issue in the government's efforts to carry out mental revolution in order to realize good government and good governance. The application of performance enhancement strategies through a work-based culture-based work culture based on religious teachings is used to accommodate the facts of the diversity of beliefs and cultures of organizational resources that on one hand have the potential to generate multiple conflicts, and on the other hand can also be strength and capital for the growth of the organization. Research object is approached with ethical and emic point of view together. From an ethical point of view, this research will formulate concepts that are consistent and accepted as general truths, such as the values of work culture in the view of religions as a universal truth. While in the emic point of view, the formulation of Mutual Understanding of Spiritual Awareness (MUSA) model departs from the cultural values of work that have been practiced by culture-specific individuals, with certain characteristics and forming different ways of thinking and acting on each individual organizations. This study uses a sociological approach in terms of how social systems such as work culture are formed in an organization with each interdependent part. Thus, the work culture with the MUSA models will serve as a social document, which can intrinsically be discussed through the structure of the object, the description in the content of cultural values of work, with the intention of binding the individual organization in a work rhythm that supports the performance and productivity of its members. The type of this research is literature study with qualitative method that will formulate Mutual Understanding of Spiritual Awareness (MUSA) models as a performance improvement strategy based on work culture through data source relevant to research object. The primary data source is the literature related to the concept of integrity, professionalism, innovation, responsibility, and exemplary. Supporting data comes from sources of support such as government regulations on guidelines for the development of organizational work culture, and others. Furthermore, the research data collected by document technique because the source of data comes from books, scriptures, journals, regulations and others with the construction of ideas and concepts of researchers so that gave birth to a new model of organizational culture development strategy in the form of training and development (training and development) . The results of this research are performance improvement model through organizational culture based on Mutual Understanding of Spiritual Awareness (MUSA) in training and development format.

Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical substrate. This article explores the work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body.

This interlude explores the polemical works of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, particularly their engagement with Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and the persistent struggle for intellectual equality in universities. Stengers and Despret illuminate how women, despite increased inclusion, are still expected to conform rather than challenge established academic norms. Their call for making a “joyful fuss” signifies a Nietzschean affirmation of intellectual resistance—a demand that universities fulfill their democratic ideals by fostering a space for diverse knowledge and perspectives. The chapter further examines Woolf’s notion of “The Anonymous and Secret Society of Outsiders,” considering its relevance to contemporary philosophy and its role in questioning institutional authority. By tracing Stengers’ shift from chemistry to philosophy and her advocacy for philosophical inquiry as a refuge for marginalized thinkers, the discussion highlights the ongoing need for spaces that encourage disruptive, yet constructive thought. Ultimately, the chapter argues for the necessity of reshaping academia into an institution that embraces openness, critical engagement, and intellectual expansion as a means of achieving genuine inclusivity.

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

The Concept of 'Force' and Its Role in the Genesis of Leibniz' Dynamical Viewpoint GEORGE GALE 1. Leibniz' interests knew no boundaries. His knowledge encompassed the total range of subjects investigated by seventeenth-century scientists. It is because of this diversity of interests that his philosophy contains such a varied mixture of elements. Any given essay might refer in turn to ethical principles, legal maxims, physical data, and metaphysical consequences. Given such a melange, it is obvious that later scholarship has had to discover, classify, and interpret possible interactions between one discipline and another in the production of the Leibnizian system. Although interesting in itself, and valuable simply as scholarly work, such investigation additionally has practical value, since it can (and does) suggest to our own minds possible pathways of intellectual stimulation and cross-fertilization. Properly utilized, such knowledge tends, for example , to keep the Physics Department's door open to visiting philosophers (and vice versa, as I hope to show in the present essay). Given these values, we can see good reason to make the try at understanding the communication which went on between the various and sundry departments of Leibniz' knowledge. Past scholarship has made varied claims along these lines. Couturat, for example, daimed that Leibniz' logical ideas were of great significance in the later development of his philosophical notions.' Russell, whose own dissertaLouisCouturat , "On Leibniz'Metaphysics,"in H. G. Frankfurt,ed., Leibniz (NewYork: Doubleday&Co.,AnchorBooks,197~),t9. An earlierversionof Sec.4 was presentedat the Symposiumon Leibniz'Dynamics,held in Loccum,W. Germany,July 198~. I have benefitedconsiderablyfromthe commentsof J. E. McGuireand HowardBernsteinonearlierversionsofthisessay. [45] 46 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 tion had barely preceded Couturat's in the making of the same claim,~later forcefully seconded Couturat's analysis in a review published soon after the appearance of the latter's influential piece.s This line of interpretation, that is, conceiving the development of Leibniz' systematic thought as if it had originated in his logical fundamentals, remains a strong and viable force even in contemporary Leibnizian studies. For example, it is not entirely unfair to locate Rescher's main focus within this tradition, although, of course, his strong arguments for the logical fundamentality of the Principle of Perfection constitute a clear and valuable addition both to the power of the logistical interpretation of Leibniz and to our own general understanding of the great thinker.4 On the other hand, there is also a tradition of long standing which finds a main region of Leibniz' cross-fertilization to lie along the physics-tometaphysics axis. In the present century, a main contributor to this line of thought is Gueroult.5 Gueroult argues---against a host of his contemporary commentators--that the mature Leibnizian physics and metaphysics make much more than "a fortuituous and superficial contact with one another. ''6 In more recent scholarship, we find Ian Hacking seconding Gueroult's claim over against the logistics, although he does not himself present any especially new arguments about the physics-metaphysics conception.7 In my own work over the last few years I have also argued for the significance of the influence of Leibniz' physics upon his metaphysics, although from a point of view quite different from Gueroult. 8 However, it has slowly become clear to me that both my own and Gueroult's analysis are incomplete in a certain way. In particular, both view the relationship between Leibniz' physics and metaphysics too simply, as if the influences ran in one direction only. This now seems wrong to me. As I will attempt to show, Leibniz' physical views and his metaphysical views were knit together in a strongly communicating network. At one moment, influence might run along the physics-to-metaphysics axis. Yet, at the very next moment , the influential flow would be reversed. My examination focuses upon what Leibniz himself claimed was the direct connection between physics and metaphysics, namely, the interpretation of ' B. Russell,A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Allen& Unwin, Ltd., a937),v. 3 B. Russell,"RecentWorkson the Philosophyof Leibniz,"in Frankfurt, Leitraiz, 336. 4 N. Rescher,The PhilosophyofLeibniz (EnglewoodCliffs,N.J.: PrenticeHall, t967). 5 M. Gueroult, Leibniz: Dynamique et Metaphysique (Paris...

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

For this special issue, which commemorates the centenary of Lawrence Stenhouse’s birth, this article reflects on a conversation about Lawrence which took place in 1989 (between Stephen J Ball, John Elliot and Bob Burgess), focusing on one of the core principles of his approach to and conception of education – the contestability of knowledge. It is asserted that Lawrence’s stance, as exemplified by the Humanities Curriculum Professor is a fundamental challenge to the power-knowledge configuration of the school curriculum. It is suggested that Lawrence’s scepticism is as relevant today as it was in the time of the Humanities Curriculum Project and provides a starting point for an ontological politics of education. The article concludes by linking Lawrence’s view of knowledge to the work of some contemporary scholars like Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Sylvia Wynter.

New problems accompany new technologies, and there is a rapid change in society as a result of mobile technology, broadband internet and sophisticated games, which of course bring many benefits. However some people selfishly exploit these new technologies for personal gain to the detriment of others. Applying ethical theories to these new and emerging technologies from a legal, ethical and social point of view can provide some interesting insights. This paper surmises some issues arising from the games development industry, and applies theories from an ethical, societal, legal and moral point of view. Data was gathered from 42 computing students across various disciplines and their views/opinions on ethical issues of computer games are presented. The majority of these students were undeterred by the violent content in computer games, and considered aspects such as the graphics, mechanics and storyline as the most appealing aspects of computer games. However, many of them believed that moral and ethical standards should be taken into account by games developers, and by parents when purchasing games for their children.

What happens to political thought if we take the problematic nature of the human-animal distinction, not as something to be demonstrated, but rather as a given? Departing from well-established positions in animal studies, The Animal-To-Come takes up this question to develop new ways of thinking animal politics today. Premised on an original interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s work, the book formulates a thought of ‘the animal-to-come’ as a means for reflecting on and further developing ‘the question of the animal’ in contemporary humanities inquiry. Conventionally read for their potential to foster an expanded animal ethics, Derrida’s reflections on animals and animality are here recast in terms of institutionality and politics, laying the foundation for a thought of animals and animality that ventures beyond the critique of political and philosophical anthropocentrism. Thus eschewing ethics-based approaches grounded in animal vulnerability, the book sets out to review prevailing concepts of power, politics and culture in terms of their capacity to enable novel images of ‘zoopolitics’. Along the way, it engages with established figures in Continental philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Isabelle Stengers), as well as introducing and exploring recently translated work in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Vinciane Despret’s ‘ethology of ethology’ and Dominique Lestel’s empirical and constructivist phenomenology of human-animal relations. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the argument is supported by analyses of ‘human-animal’ distinctions as forms of institutional (rather than ontological) difference, revealing new potentialities in human-animal interactions while lending empirical support to philosophical points.

Albinism is a global public health issue but it assumes a peculiar nature in the African continent due, in part, to the social stigma faced by persons with albinism (PWAs) in Africa. I argue that there are two essential reasons for this precarious situation. First, in the African consciousness, albinism is an alterity or otherness. The PWA in Africa is not merely a physical other but also an ontological other in the African community of beings, which provides a hermeneutic for the stigmatising separateness or difference of the PWA. The second reason hinges on a distinction drawn by Jürgen Habermas between the ethical point of view and the moral point of view. While the former consists of the ethos, customs, or idea of the good shared by a group of persons with a shared tradition or way of life, the latter consists of what is good for all and transcends particular traditions or ways of life. Consequently, the African ethical point of view, the ethics of solidarity, justifies within the African worldview the established alterity and, by implication, stigmatization of PWAs. On this view, actions that promote harmony and prevent discord and disequilibrium among accepted beings in the African community are permissible. I further show that unless there is a change in the physical and ontological conception of PWAs and a leap from the ethical point of view to the moral point of view, the negative attitudes toward PWAs will not change. The leap to the moral point of view does not suggest an abandonment of the ethical point of view but only recommends that the two meet halfway in respect for universally accepted norms of human actions. To achieve this, I will show that much needs to be done in the areas of policy formulation, law, health care services, and education.