Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

struggle against the simple states of nature, or else, finally, by asking
the indisputable will of the Sovereign to decide against everything and
everyone. I shall succeed in restoring the confidence of my readers, de-
prived of the distinction between facts and values, only if I can make
them see for themselves, at the end of this chapter, that for political
ecology there is another transcendence, another externality, which
owes nothing either to nature or to moral principles or to the arbi-
trariness of the Sovereign.^28
Although this exteriority does not have the grandiose and formida-
ble aspect of the three courts of appeal to which the old Constitution
had entrusted the task of saving public life, it has the great advantage
of being easy to find, provided that we agree to extend the work of the
collective a bit. I maintain that I am replacing the difference between
the common world and the common good with the simple difference
betweenstoppingandcontinuingthe movement of the progressive com-
position of the good common world (according to the definition given
for politics*). Let us take a look at Figure 3.2.
The preceding section did not trace the dynamics of the entire col-
lective, but only one cycle of its slow progression, its painful explora-

POLITICS OF NATURE

122

Perplexity Consultation

Institution Hierarchy

12

4 3

Externalized entities

Appellant entities Collective at t 0

Figure 3.2 The collective is defined only by its movement: the entities thrown out by
the power of rank ordering return as appellants, in the next iteration, to “trouble” the
power of taking into account.