to prove decisive for the good health of the collective. We must not
only admire butextend to everyonethis capacity to maintain one’s own
questions, no matter what pressures may be brought to bear by more
prestigious disciplines or better-established institutions. In particular,
this is the only way to benefit from the contribution of the primary
qualities without authorizing them to drive off the secondary qual-
ity. The right to ask one’s own question in one’s own terms could be
included in the Bills of Rights.
What is the contribution of the sciences to the final task (no. 6),
which consists in offering the entire collective a scenarization by de-
picting it in the form of a whole, by dividing up its inner and outer
limits, by acting as if the search for a common world had found its
definitive haven? Here again, once it has been saved by procedures,
poison becomes medicine; the minor sins of mad scientists are trans-
muted into virtues of the new citizens of the collective. The metaphys-
ics of nature* had all possible disadvantages when it was practiced by
Science; now, on the contrary, it becomes a key responsibility of the
sciences. Nothing is more indispensable than the multiplication of the
great narratives through which researchers “package” the entire col-
lective and human and nonhuman history in a grandiose generaliza-
tion from tiny bits of laboratory knowledge. The great scientific narra-
tives on the origin of the world from the Big Bang to the thermal death
of the sun, on the evolution of life from the amoeba to Einstein, of uni-
versal history “from Plato to NATO,” the daily breakfasts with God
about “the theory of everything,” each of these crazy frescoes pro-
poses a possible unification, and it hardly matters then that the wild-
est imaginary scenarios mingle with attested facts; it hardly matters
that people dream of applications impossible to prove, that they ex-
ceed all the limits of good sense. It hardly matters, even, that the most
ascetic reductionism claims to reign by virtue of having eliminated
most of the world’s entities. On the contrary, the fewer entities there
are to take into account, the more convincing the totalization will be.
On this great, hastily set-up stage, all that matters is the production of
a common world, one that has now become licit and is offered to the
rest of the collective as a newoccasionto unite. Naturalization is no
longer a defect, either, when nature no longer reigns separately: it be-
comes a dress rehearsal, an offer of service, one possible scenario, sug-
gesting what the collective could become if it were unified. It is no
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