12 PARSE JOURNAL Abstract Tis article strives to continue the lure of Whitehead’s call: that “Philosophy cannot exclude anything”. Tus speculative philosophy extends William James’s radical empiricism. Its task is to locate itself on the ground of experience in its multifariousness, and to preserve what experience makes important. But importance can never be reduced to a matter of fact. To make a situation important consists in intensifying the sense of the possible that it holds in itself and that insists in it, through struggles and claims for another way of making it exist. 13 The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism DIDIER DEBAISE ISABELLE STENGERS Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Isabelle Stengers, Professor of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, has written Recherche Scientifque (FNRS) and the Director of the Centre of Philosophy numerous books, among which the following have been published in English at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he teaches contemporary translation: In Catastrophic Times (2015), Women who Make a Fuss (2014) philosophy. He is the co-founder, with Isabelle Stengers, of the Groupe with Vinciane Despret, Cosmopolitics I and II (2010 and 2011), Tinking with d’Études Constructivistes (GECO). His main areas of research are Whitehead (2011), Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011) with Philippe contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links Pignarre, Te Invention of Modern Science (2000), Power and Invention: between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He is Situating Science (1997), A History of Chemistry (1996) with Bernadette director of a collection at Les presses du réel, member of the editorial board Bensaude-Vincent, A Critique of Psychoanalytical Reason (1992) with Léon of the journals Multitudes and Infexions. He wrote two books on Whitehead’s Chertok, and Order out of Chaos (1984) with Ilya Prigogine. Starting with the philosophy (Un empirisme spéculatif and Le vocabulaire de Whitehead), defense of the passionate adventure of physics against its enrolment as model edited volumes on pragmatism (Vie et experimentation), on the history of of rationality and objectivity, she has developed the concept of an ecology of contemporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions), and he wrote numerous practices afrming a speculative constructivism in relation with the philosophy papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. He has just of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and William James, and the published a new book entitled L’appât des possibles which will shortly appear in anthropology of Bruno Latour. English (Nature as event, Duke University Press, 2017). 14 PARSE JOURNAL 1. Alfred North White- PECULATIVE THINKING, as has been shown, inter alia by Eduardo head, Modes of Tought. Toronto: Macmillan. 1966 as we seek to inherit it, is Viveiros de Castro and Deborah [1938]. p. 2. expressed for the frst time, Danowski, they are the last spasms of a with the greatest accuracy, in reaction to catastrophes ahead.2 2. Danowski, Deborah and De Castro, Eduardo Alfred North Whitehead’s Viveiros. “L’Arrêt du Sexhortation “Philosophy can exclude In this context, it seems to us essential to monde”. In De l’univers 1 clos au monde infni. Emilie nothing”. A strange proposition, which, put forward a certain number of proposi- Hache (ed.). Paris: Editions while appearing to be a description of tions, which do not in any way claim to Dehors. 2014. philosophical activity in general, or of describe, and in so doing, to pin down, a 3. Tis was the title of a kind of heuristic prudence, in efect shifting scenario, but rather to highlight the symposium which denotes a deliberately polemical, violent what could in our view make necessary we organised at Cerisy in summer 2013, and which position. Te case is simple: modern that which we have called elsewhere 3 resulted in the publication philosophy has become bogged down “speculative gestures”. A proposition Gestes spéculatifs. Didier in the forms of a purifcation, of a has no descriptive vocation, much less Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (eds.). Dijon: Les reverting to principles, of a criticism of a normative one, but comes under what presses du réel. 2015. what is merely appearance, seduction or Whitehead called “Lure for Feelings”, a 4. Whitehead, Alfred North. alienation, which it believed was its own way of giving rise to possibles. Process and Reality. An Essay way of claiming to compete on at least in Cosmology. New York, NY: equal, if not superior, ground with that of Macmillan Publishing Inc. The Pragmatic Constraint 1929. p. 338. the experimental sciences. It believed, as in a belief one holds to in the face of all 5. See also on this subject Latour, Bruno. Enquête sur odds, that this was the condition of every Let us return to Whitehead’s exhorta- les modes d’existence: Une possible experience, of all knowledge, of tion. If he states this as a requirement, anthropologie des Modernes. all political constitution. How ironic to determining a possible trajectory of Paris: La Découverte. 2012. note today, in the guise of new specula- speculative thinking, this is because 6. Souriau, Étienne. Te tive proposals, clearly quite diferent there might be new dangers or tempta- Diferent Modes of Existence [1943]. Univocal. 2009. p. from the one we will be invoking here, tions taking hold of philosophy, which 131. (Paris; Presses Univer- the same lure towards purifcation and he intends to resist. In a nutshell, sitaires de France. 2009. pp. sovereignty, the same formalist fascina- we would express this danger as an 110-111). tions of all kinds, the same relation to immoderate taste for false problems, for 7. James, William. Essays in demiurgic decision as those which laid drastic alternatives, for a kind of lazy Radical Empiricism Dover Publications. 2003 [1912]. down the motorways of modern thought. thinking or stupidity arising “naturally” If speculative thinking today is undoubt- in every situation: belief or truth, 8. Whitehead, Alfred North. edly gaining a new lease of life, it is experience or representation, facts or Modes of Tought. New York, NY: Macmillan Company. important not to confuse Whitehead’s values, subjective or objective, etc. Tese 1938. plea with formalist sacralisation, identi- alternatives, which appear so innocently fying speculation with purely formal and theoretical, are in fact unstoppable war abstract decision-making, which governs machines, spinning in a vacuum and an important part of philosophy today. producing a desertifcation of all modes How could we believe for one single of existence: reducing thinking to mere moment that a break has occurred, when representations, fctions to imaginary all underlying gestures ft so clearly into realities, values to subjective projections the context of continuity, and form a onto nature. One might counter that kind of new hyper-modernism? Perhaps, philosophy has never ceased displaying DIDIER DEBAISE AND ISABELLE STENGERS 15 dualities of this kind, bifurcations, yet rarely are they in a considerable part of contemporary speculative so celebrated, dramatised, highlighted at all levels of thinking. But Whitehead’s position, afrming that experience as during the modern period. To all these nothing must be excluded, does not for all that state alternatives, like any false problem, questions of a that everything must be taken into consideration: pragmatic nature should be addressed: what might it stipulates that we must reject the right to their aim be? What are their efects? What is it on disqualify. Experience must create constraint. It is this occasion that we are attempting to disqualify? experience upon which philosophers must confer the power to make them think. Tis position places To exclude nothing means therefore resisting the Whitehead’s speculative thinking in the extension terms of the alternatives that so inexorably seem to of what William James called “radical empiricism” foist themselves upon us, leading to false choices. (pace all those who take school distinctions too We are hence dealing with problems of a new kind, seriously): “To be radical, empiricism must not admit and Whitehead expresses this in a form, which, at in its constructions any element that is not directly frst glance, appears cryptic. “Philosophy cannot experienced, nor exclude from them any element neglect the multifariousness of the world—the that is directly experienced”.7 Te two parts of the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”4 So proposition form a crucial double constraint. Firstly, speculative thinking calls on us to explore modes to exclude nothing, to factor in the multiplicity of the of existence in their own setting, in their mode dimensions, which make up an experience here and of success, in their immanent demands.5 Faced now, not taking anything away for a priori reasons, with the drying up of modes of existence, Étienne whatever disqualifcations might apply to it. Ten, Souriau makes a similar plea when he declares, as not to allow a principle of judgement outside the a true research programme, as a new philosophical situation, which would domesticate this multiplicity input: in terms of categories or requirements alien to it. Any thought is, from this viewpoint, absolutely located, At present, we must identify and study those embedded in the situation from which it emerges and diferent planes, those diferent modes of existence, which gives it meaning. It is a matter, we might say without which there would be no existence at all— with Gilles Deleuze, of thinking through and by the no more than there would be pure Art without milieu, of thinking, with everything an experience statues, pictures, symphonies, and poems. For art implies, enfolds within itself, and with no principle is all the arts. And existence is each of the modes of critical sorting at work, tending to purify, isolate, of existence. Each mode is an art of existing unto make of it a self-sufcient “case”.