aration of powers: at least since Montesquieu, the concept comes from
them. The very idea that one must not unify the work of the collective
too rapidly without composing it ahead of time out of watertight com-
partments, such is the decisive contribution of political philosophy,
the invention of a State of law, the notion of which will take on new
meaning once it is connected to the notion of the autonomy of scien-
tific questioning. Still, the politicians are going to defend the frontier
by drawing on a different resource from the one scientists use. They
are going to insist on the classic distinction between the phases of de-
liberation and those of decision. The first house is going to look to
them likethe precinct of freedom—where people inquire, speak, con-
sult—and the second like the spacewhere necessity is forged—where one
establishes hierarchies, chooses, concludes, and eliminates. But this
venerable distinction between deliberating and deciding is going to
take on new meaning with the new Constitution. By attributing free-
dom to humans and necessity to nature, the Old Regime did not risk
slicing up the collective, as Socrates demanded, according to its actual
joints. Producing freedom and instituting necessity do not take us
back to a division between nature and society, between object and sub-
ject, but to the bicameralism of political ecology, to the respect for the
distinction between the power to take into account and the power to
put in order. The formula may still appear shocking, but people delib-
erate and decidejust as muchabout facts as about values.
It is probably the last competency of the politicians, the one that
produces a scenario for the collective as a whole (no. 6) that is the
most decisive and that has been neglected the longest. The collective,
as we understand now, is not a thing in the world, a being with fixed
and definitive borders, but a movement of establishing provisional co-
hesion that will have to be started all over again every single day.
Its borders, by definition, cannot be the object of any stabilization,
any naturalization, despite the continual efforts of the great scientific
narratives to unify what brings us all together under the auspices of
nature. To this totalization, the politicians bring a provisional unity
through the incessantly resumed circuit of its envelope, what I have
called its progressive composition.^30 The politicians do not hope to
fall, by an unanticipated stroke of luck, on an already-constituted
“whole,” or even to compose once and for all an “us” that would no
longer need to be reconsidered. They expect the outline of the borders
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
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