Isabelle Stengers’ revaluation of care as a practice of hesitation is a profoundly generative way to rethink what it means to care beyond instrumental or managerial logics — and it opens a space for ethics as a mode of attentive dwelling rather than immediate action or quick fixes.
Let’s explore this with the gentle patience that Stengers herself models, because hesitation is not indecision but a kind of attentive pause — a moment pregnant with possibility, openness, and respect for complexity.
1. Hesitation Against the Logic of Control
Stengers critiques the modern scientific and bureaucratic impulse to master and control phenomena by reducing them to predictable, manageable objects. This impulse mirrors how care is often practiced in institutions: as efficient intervention, as measurable outcomes, as problem-solving.
By contrast, hesitation interrupts this logic. It resists the rush to immediate action or judgment. It demands that we slow down enough to listen deeply, to engage with uncertainty, and to recognize that situations — and people — are never fully knowable or controllable.
In this sense, hesitation is a form of respectful ignorance: acknowledging what we do not know and cannot fully grasp, and thus refusing to impose premature solutions.
2. Care as a Collaborative and Transformative Process
Stengers envisions care not as a unilateral giving or fixing, but as a collaborative ongoing process that requires patience and mutual attunement. Hesitation allows space for otherness — for the singularity of the person or situation cared for — to emerge rather than be swallowed by generic categories or protocols.
Care becomes an act of shared vulnerability, where the caregiver is also changed by the encounter. Hesitation opens up a temporal and ethical space where both sides dwell in complexity rather than closure.
3. Ethics in the Face of Uncertainty
This is an ethics of responsibility without mastery. Stengers draws on feminist and postmodern thought to argue that ethics begins not with clear rules but with the uncertainty and fragility of situated encounters.
To care, in this framework, is to inhabit that fragile moment of hesitation where one might do harm or good, speak or listen, act or refrain — but cannot know fully in advance what the right move is.
Hesitation, then, is a productive pause that keeps open the ethical dimension of care as a lived practice, not a checklist.
4. Political Implications: Care Against Bureaucratic Capture
Stengers also warns that bureaucratic institutions tend to capture care, stripping it of hesitation, reducing it to procedures and measurable outputs. This depoliticizes care, turning it into a technocratic function that forecloses on real ethical engagement.
Her call for hesitation is thus a call for resisting the colonization of care by bureaucratic rationality and capitalist efficiency. It is an invitation to reclaim care as a site of political and ethical possibility.
5. Connecting to Broader Thought
This resonates with:
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The slow scholarship movement, which values deep reflection over rapid publication.
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The care ethics tradition that highlights relationality and vulnerability (e.g., Joan Tronto, Eva Kittay).
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The feminist critique of masculinist logics of control and mastery.
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The refusal of cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant), choosing instead to dwell in the discomfort of ambiguity.
In Summary
Isabelle Stengers asks us to hesitate — not out of fear or paralysis, but as a radical ethical stance that acknowledges our limits, honors complexity, and opens space for care as a mutual transformation rather than a one-way transaction.
It is a revaluation of care as a practice of thoughtful attunement, an invitation to slow down in a world that demands speed and certainty.
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