Although each of these two Constitutions finds the requirements of
the other scandalous, one cannot be deemed rational and the other ir-
rational, for each claims to speak in the name of reason, and each de-
fines unreason in its own way. The old form of organization considers
that reason can unfurl its effects only on condition that facts be abso-
lutely distinguished from values, the common world from the com-
mon good. If we start to confuse the two, the old form asserts, we are
defenseless in the face of the irrational, since we can no longer put an
end to the indefinite multiplicity of opinions through an indisputable
point of view that would be exempt from any point of view. For the
new form of organization, conversely, by confusing Science with the
sciences and the prison of the social world with politics, that is, by re-
fusing to take the question of the common good and that of the com-
mon world, values and facts, as a single, identical goal, one takes the
terrible responsibility of prematurely interrupting the composition of
the collective, the historic experimentation of reason (see Chapter 5).
It is clearly difficult to imagine a more pronounced contrast: whereas
the Old Regime needs to set up an opposition between the rational
and the irrational in order to make reason triumph, I claim that we
can achieve this end byabstainingfrom making a distinction between
the rational and the irrational, by rejecting the distinction as a drug
that paralyzes politics. I gladly recognize, however, that the irrational
does exist: the whole framework of the old Constitution is completely
unreasonable.^1
To understand to what extent the two regimes differ, we have to go
straight to the heart of the matter as we approach the most difficult
chapter in this book. The term “collective” does not mean “one”;
rather, as I have said above, it means “all, but not two.” By this term, I
designate a set of procedures for exploring and gradually collecting
this potential unification. The difference between the collective to be
formed and the vague notions about superorganisms, the “union of
man with nature,” “going beyond objects and subjects,” on which the
philosophies of nature rely heavily, thus depends on our capacity not
to rush toward unity. If dualism will not do, monism will not do ei-
ther. Now, the end of Chapter 2 offered no more than a vast melting
pot: the associations of humans and nonhumans that were from then
on, as we saw, going to form the propositions* that the new collective
has to articulate, one with another. We still have to describe the forms
POLITICS OF NATURE
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