Virgin Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and here appearing in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an ＂ecology of practices＂ into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary--like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.

Isabelle Stengers is Emerita Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles and is the author of numerous books, including Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism.

Andrew Goffey is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham.