(((Knowledge Ecology)))

From THIS interview. Beautiful.

I didn’t become a philosopher to comment on concepts, to cite authors, to theorize, or to rack up points against my colleagues, but because I discovered the effectiveness of concepts, of certain concepts – it started with Deleuze, Whitehead, and Leibniz – for dissipating the sad anaesthesia that makes people think in circles, for launching thought into adventure. In the US I would surely have become a feminist, perhaps a witch, probably not a philosopher… As a woman, I also refuse to forget the ease with which the philosophers have ratified the exclusion of women. In short, I did not “convert” to philosophy in general. I discovered in philosophy the possibility of transforming a “wrong” that I suffered into a creation. And it’s not about theoretical creations, they only have value if they can relay away from what happened to me, if they can be relevant and can be taken up by others, in their own situations, and can help them stop suffering from what is poisoning them.

-Isabelle Stengers