Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

bizarre character of its owninanimism*: a politicization of the life of
the pluriverse so complete that everything always had to come back to
a “unanimism” that was not subject to debate. By indulging in the
“narcissistic wounds” that the revolutions of Science were supposed to
have inflicted on the poor humans who had discovered with Galileo,
then Darwin, then Freud that there was no connection between the
world and humanity, they disguised even more imperfectly the emer-
gence of an ever-more-extreme anthropocentrism that gave a new
group of scientists the right to institute the reign of the indisputable
order of Science.^39 Relishing with despair the indifference of the world
to our passions, (political) epistemology had sent public life back to
the empire of the passions, keeping for itself, with disconsolate mod-
esty, only the empire of stubborn matters of fact. We now know how
to begin again quite simply to undertake democratic politics instead

POLITICS OF NATURE

88

Box 2.1. The political role of objects differs radically from that of articulated

propositions: the first make public life impossible, while the second allow it.

Convocation impossible because of the metaphysics of nature

What objects say they are What objects do

Indifferent to human passions

Mute

Make all the difference

Speak in indisputable fashion

Amoral Serve as source of all morality

Essential, since they alone are real Provide no value, since

they are not human

Invisible except to scientists Form only basis for the visible

Involontary Drive all volition

Inanimate Animate all actions

Not anthropomorphic Give form to humans

Not anthropocentric Are oriented toward human politics

Convocation possible because of an experimental metaphysics

Articulated propositions

Spokespersons that are doubted

ssociations of humans and

nonhumans

Recalcitrant actants