of the collective to come from nothing but thevery movementof inces-
sant resumption, rather like the way burning brands trace shapes in
the darkness of night only through the rapid motion to which we sub-
ject them. If politics stops, even for a second, there is no longer any-
thing but a point, a lie, a madman who says “we all”in the placeof oth-
ers. It is that requirement, properly stupefying, that makes politicians
incomprehensible in the eyes of all the other professions, and gets
them accused, in a facile way, of lying and imposture.^31 No one is going
to emulate that skill.
Have we mixed up the sciences with politics? On the contrary, now
that the scientists and the politicians are collaborating on the same
tasks, we finally understand their profound difference, the one the old
Constitution never made it possible to bring out, because it was hope-
lessly buried in an impossible distinction between the truth of things
and the will of humans—as if it were easier to say what entitiesare
than what theywant.Politicians and scientists all work on the same
propositions*, the same chains of humans and nonhumans. All en-
deavor to represent them as faithfully as possible. Must we say that
scientists do not adulterate what they say, unlike politicians, who sup-
posedly practice the art of lying and dissimulation, as if the former
had to convince and the latter to persuade? No, because both callings
delight in the art of transformations, the former to obtain reliable in-
formation on the basis of the continual work of instruments, and the
latter to obtain the unheard-of metamorphosis of enraged or stifled
voices into a single voice. Must we admit that they all have the same
job? That is not true either, because the meaning of the word “fidelity”
differs profoundly for the two types of skill: scientists have to main-
tain the distance between the propositions that they load into lan-
guage and what they say about them, so that these two things will not
be confused, whereas politicians have precisely to confuse them by
continually modifying the definition of the subjects who say “we are,
we want.” The former are guardians of the “them,” the latter masters
of the “us.”
It was thought that political ecology had to bring humans and na-
ture together, whereas it actually has to bring together the scientific
and the political ways of intermingling humans and nonhumans.
There is indeed a division of labor, but there is not a division of the
collective. The powerful impact of political ecology comes precisely
POLITICS OF NATURE
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