listing them in advance in the categories of “fact” or “value.” It has to
come to terms with this diversity and bring it to an end through a
painful series of adjustments and negotiations. The escape route of
“matters of fact” is no longer possible. There no longer exists any help
from the outside that could simplify the solution, neither that of na-
ture nor that of violence, neither right nor might. When the solution
is eventually found (as seems to be the case for the eight thousand
French automobile deaths!), all the propositions that connect the
prion, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the meat-distribution system, and
the theories of infectious diseases will be stabilized and will become
bona fide members of the collective—requirement no. 4 of closure of
the institution. Their presence, their importance, their function will
no longer be subject to discussion. The prion and its attachments will
henceforth have an essence with fixed boundaries. Their descriptions
will be found in manuals. Victims will be indemnified. Causalities and
responsibilities will have been apportioned through an operation that
could be called cause attribution, if we agreed to use this expression to
cross scientificcausalitieswith juridicalaccusations.^20 The prion and its
entourage will have been completely internalized, the collective hav-
ing changed profoundly, now that it is composed of—in addition to all
the entities that it accepted heretofore—prions responsible for dis-
eases that are dangerous for humans and animals, and that could be
avoided if the production of animal-based meal and the conditions of
slaughter were modified. The prion will have becomenatural:there is
now no reason to deprive ourselves of that adjective, which is very
convenient for designating, on a routine basis, full-fledged members of
the collective.
By requalifying in our own terms the mad cow episode, so typical
of the matters of concern whose proliferation cracked the narrow
framework of the old Constitution, we have not lost sight of the essen-
tial demands of reality, relevance, publicity, and closure: they are all
present; only the “self-evident” difference between facts and values is
missing from the roll call, only the indisputable externality of a prion
that has always already been there. But this addition would add nei-
ther clarity nor morality; it would add only confusion. More precisely,
itwould add a facileness,an arbitrariness, a short-circuit, a shortcut, by
allowing a proposition to jump directly from perplexity to institution,
POLITICS OF NATURE
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