should not have been able to fail in its career. Let us not forget the
fairy Carabosse! On the pile of gifts offered by her sisters, she put
down a little casket markedCalculemus!But she did not specifywho
was supposed to calculate. It was thought that the best of all possible
worlds was calculable, provided that the labor of politics could be
short-circuited. This was enough to spoil all the other virtues, given
how much heroism would have been needed to resist the attractions
of that facile approach. Now, neither God nor men nor nature forms at
the outset the sovereign capable of carrying out this calculation. The
requisite “we” has to be produced out of whole cloth. No fairy has told
us how. It is up to us to find out.
The Work of the Houses
After all the frightful difficulties of this book, we have finally reached
harvest time. Historians have often described the solemn entry of sov-
ereigns into their fine cities in the old days. Following their example,
let us try to go back over everything we have just traversed and imag-
ine the solemn entry of the sovereign capable of composing progres-
sively the best common world, while remaining faithful to Leibniz’s
proud injunction: “Let us calculate!”
We can now deploy the institutions of the common world in a pub-
lic configuration that has been conceived for them at last. Let us not
deny ourselves the pleasure. For the first time, thanks to a somewhat
reconceived political ecology, associations of humans and nonhumans
can finally enter into the collective in a civil way. No one requires
them any longer to be split in two, at the gates of the city, separated
into objects and subjects; no Sphinx blocks the approaches to the city
to demand that they answer a stupid riddle: “Are you objective or sub-
jective?” For the first time, nonhumans can enter into civil society
without having to be converted into objects in order to come bombard
the ramparts of the city, humiliate the powerful, drive off obscuran-
tism, raise up the meek, silence the chatterers, or stop the tongues
of the counselors. For the first time, no treason has surreptitiously
opened up the postern to bring them into the city so that they can re-
establish the moribund democracy “on the solid bases of reason.” The
“first time,” of course, for our fine Western cities, for it seems that the
“others,” which are called “cultures” with slightly condescending re-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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