propositions are presented as having acquired habits. To be sure, hab-
its have the same weight as human interests; but, unlike human inter-
ests, habits can be revised during the proceedings if the game is really
worth it. We are told, for example, that ethologists specializing in
toads transformed the mores of these creatures into indisputable es-
sences, and this in turn obliged highway builders to hollow out costly
“toadways” in their embankments, so that the toads could get back to
their birthplace to lay their eggs. It seems, however, that, unfaithful to
Freud’s interpretations, the toads, unlike humans, were not trying to
return to the primal pond. Indeed, ethologists noted that the toads,
encountering a pond at the foot of the embankment, believed that
they had come back to their point of origin and laid their countless
eggs there, instead of taking the costly and dangerous tunnels. After
the experiment, the location of the egg-laying site was thus trans-
formed from essence to habit: what was not negotiable became nego-
tiable; the head-on conflict between batrachians and highways had
changed form. As we shall see later on, the composition of a com-
mon world through experimentation and discussion becomes possible
again only at the moment when members agree to pass from a polemic
of essences* to a conciliation of habits.
The Return to Civil Peace
“Inanimate objects, do you then have a soul?” Perhaps not; but a poli-
tics, surely. By secularizing, by dedramatizing, by civilizing, by de-
mobilizing the quarrels of the tradition, we have replaced certainties
about the distribution of beings with three uncertainties. The first has
to do with speech impedimenta: Who is speaking? The second has to
do with capacities for association: Who is acting? The third and last
has to do with the recalcitrance of events: Who is able? Here are a
few welcome banalities that take us away from the stupefying depths
through which ecological thinkers claimed to be able to “reconcile
man and his environment.” They had taken as their starting point a
distribution of objects and subjects that did not describe the regions of
the pluriverse but that had the goal of circumventing politics. They
might as well have tried plowing with tanks. By accusing other cul-
tures of animism, the epistemology police carefully dissimulated the
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