samepropositions, subject to each of the four requirements:What dis-
cussion procedure must be followed? What is the provisional result of the dis-
cussion?Behind the false distinction between facts and values was hid-
den an essential question about thequalityof the procedure to be
followed and about theoutlineof its trajectory, a question now liber-
ated from the confused quarrel that (political) epistemology sustained
with ethics.^32
Readers will probably notice that I havereplacedthe fact-value dis-
tinction with another one that is no less clear-cut and no less absolute,
but which cuts across the other and is in a way superior to it. I am not
speaking of the “shuttle” between taking into account and putting in
order, but of the much more profound difference between, on the
one hand, the short-circuit in the composition of the common world
and, on the other, the slowing down that is made possible bydue pro-
cess,which I have chosen to call representation*. I have nothing in
principle against dichotomies. On the contrary, I do not hesitate to
make this profound contrast betweenaccelerationandrepresentation
play a central normative role. This is the source from which we are go-
ing to draw our indignation and our legal and moral standing. “Repre-
sent rather than short-circuit,” such is the goal of political ecology. As
I see it, there is a reserve of morality here that is much more inex-
haustible and much more discriminating than the vain indignation
whose goal was to prevent the contamination of values by facts or of
facts by values.
At the beginning of this chapter, I was looking for a way to obtain
the reality, the externality, and the unity of nature through due pro-
cess. At the end of the chapter, we know, at least, that we are not con-
fronting an impossible task. We simply have to modify our definition
of externality, since the social world does not have the same “environ-
ment” at all as the collective: the former is definitive and made up of a
radically distinct material; the second is provisional and produced by
an explicit procedure of exteriorization. When a member of the old
Constitution looked outside, she was looking upon a nature made up
of objects indifferent to her passions, to which she had to submit or
from which she had to tear herself away. When we look outside, we
see a whole still to be composed, made up of excluded entities (hu-
mans and nonhumans) in whom we have explicitly decided not to be
interested, and ofappellants(humans and nonhumans) who demand
POLITICS OF NATURE
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