hard not only to save modernist nature, but also to extend its lease, by
offering it a more important role in short-circuiting public life. Their
efforts are obviously desperate ones, because these theorists end up
quenching the fire of democracy that they had sought to revive, by fur-
ther humiliating humans through a still more indisputable recourse to
the real truth of the natural order. The gulf between theory and mili-
tant practice explains the slenderness of ecology’s contributions to
the common philosophy of politics and sciences. This slowness to re-
act appears all the stranger in that, in one way or another, each eco-
logical crisis has involved the scientific disciplines, researchers, and
their uncertainties. Without specialists in atmospheric science, who
would have felt global warming? Without biochemists, who would
have spotted the prion? Without lung specialists and epidemiologists,
who would have connected asbestos with lung cancer? The legacy of
the Cave must really weigh heavily, for us to have remained ignorant
for so long of the political novelty of ecology: the constitutional crisis
of all objectivity.
To remove this contradiction between the practice of ecological or
public health crises and the lesson that theorists wrongly claimed to
be drawing from them—“Let’s go back to nature!”—we needed to be
interested in the sciences and in politics at the same time, and we
needed to reject the old Constitution altogether. “We cannot hold on
to nature!” I am not proposing to replace a well-organized system with
a quirky one, but to substitute two houses put together according to
due process for the two illegitimate houses of the old Constitution.
We are not going to enter a land where milk and honey flow: on the
contrary, by eliminating the easy solutions offered by nature, we have
only created new difficulties! The only difference, but it is a crucial
one, is that we are going to be able to take advantage of the life-sized
experiment, so to speak, in which the collective is engaged. Where the
Old Regime took shortcuts but learned nothing from its experiences,
we are going to set in motion a complicated procedure for learning
how to practice experimental metaphysics*.
The modernist Constitution in fact saw debates over ecology merely
as a mixture to be purified, a mixture combining rationality and irra-
tionality, nature and artifice, objectivity and subjectivity.^1 The new
Constitution sees in these same crises disputes that bear not on ratio-
nality and irrationality but on a completely different topic: every-
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