DELEUZIAN INTERSECTIONS Science, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rodje L Berghahn Books New York * OxfordChapter I Experimenting with What is Philosophy? Isabelle Stengers Perplexities ‘Te is in their full maturity, and not in the process of their constitution, that concepts and functions necessatily intersect, each being ctea‘ed by their own specific means’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 161), In other words, scientists do not need philosophers, and philosophers should not intervene when scientists are at work, or ate facing new troubling questions, even if it may scem obvious that the elucidation of philosophical presuppositions could play a role, and even if it seems quite desirable that scientists expel creation, and concepts, as associated with philosophical creation, indeed intersect but only nent with new philosophical possibilities. Functions, as associated with scientific after they have achieved their own specific process of self-fulfilment, that is, also after they have fully unfolded their requisites and consequences and, as such, do not entail that philosophers and scientists share a common concern about the questions arising from this unfolding, ‘Philosophy can speak of science only by allusion, and science can speak of philosophy only as of a cloud. If the two lines are inseparable it is in their respective sufficiency, and philosophical concepts act ro more in the constitution of scientific functions than do functions in the constitutions of concepts’ (ibid.). “Taking a position that sounds like a biblical prohibition, ‘Thou shall not mix’ immature creations, Deleuze and Guattari seem to turn their backs against all those who had promoted them as the thinkers of productive connections, the creation of detertitorializing processes escaping fixed identities, transgressing boundaries and static classifications. The ‘sufficiency’ of the philosophical and scientific lines has also been a matter of disappointment for those who took for granted that Deleuze and Guattari would he allies in the debunking of the self-proclaimed autonomy of science and philosophy, underlining che open character of the process of the constitution of scientific enunciatior and cultural impe that subvert its very identity, that undermine the very persona of the philosopher. Instead, they got exemplifications from so-called ‘great philosophers’, Plato, Descartes, even Kant. As if, when the question ‘What is philosophy?’ was directly at stake, Deleuze had chosen to side with his great forerunners and forget his allies in deterritorialization. as well as its undetermined boundaries with politics, economics lism, ‘They anticipated 1 joyful celebration of experimentations40 Isabelle Stengets Asif philosophy itself, as the work of Dead White Males, was suddenly innocent of any connection with power, gender, imperialism, and so on. To those matters of perplexity and disappointment, I would add my own, which concerned the very ‘modern’ character of the tripartition between philosophy, art and science, whose complementary lines seem together to define the notion ‘creation’, Why this privileged connection between creation and modernity? In producing such questions, What is Philsophy? confronts its reader with an alternative between two lines of thought. One may try to understand what felt li Iretayal in the terms of the book. Alternatively, one may experiment with ‘outside’ hould connect different aspeets of the book that would otherwise appear (© be mutually independent, In any ca ingredients, which, if the expetimentation is not a fail case, what matters is ¢o follow Deleuze’s own advice: we should be interested in tools for thinking, noc in an exegesis of ideas. An idea is always engaged in what he called matter; always a specific one. An idea needs to be engaged in this way in order to enable ulation of how and why this idea indeed matters and what kind of difference it makes: the process that Deleuze calls ‘actu a process of ar tiow’ of ‘effectuation. Before following this second line of thought, I shall describe what is entailed by thinking in terms of the fits line. 1 start by recalling that for Deleuze and Guattari che question ‘What is Philosophy? is not a gene J one. It isa question they posed at ‘that twilight hour when one distvusts even the friend! (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2), And itis a question about a thteatened practice, the beginning of which they associa ‘contingent reason’ and the end of whick may also be contingent: no ‘natural death’ but a destruction. In other words Deleuze and Guattati do not define philosophy as a transcultural, transepochal of humanity as such (a Chinese philosophy, an African philosophy ...). When they talk about the need for a “pedagogy of concept ive must understand that ‘concepts’ ate irreducible to ‘expressions’ of thought, that they e with at ate something you need to encounter and expetience in order to understand that very particular adventure of thought that is called philosophy. And that nobody would “snise’ philosophy if ever the conditions for this encounter disappeared. Obviously pedagogy is not, in this case, a matter of faithful transmission; rather, it isa matter of relays. Relay transmission is always contingent as it implies both a taking king over is always a creation, but the act of handing over also requires a creation. As Deleuze tof ed him as a philosopher. To create the concept of concept, as distinct from science’s functions and at's blocs of sensation, isto create and over and a handing over The alled in his Abécédaire,' it was the ev encounteting concepts that produ hand over what makes up the particular necessity of philosophy. However, the point is not, or not only, the survival of philosophy. The point of What is Philosophy? is our ‘ack of resistance to the present’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 108), a lack of resistance that science and probably art also shate, entailing the very strong likelihood that they also may well be desteoyed. Learning how to resist is a task that tolerates no economy. No great masterword (not durdre) designating a common enemy may spare those who belong to a threatened practice from asking what Kind of