speak? These are the questions that keep the upper house in a con-
stant state of agitation and that no form of incongruity, no sin against
good sense and conventions, must be allowed to disturb. This is how
political ecology rediscovers the oldest democratic intuition and puts
it back in its place, in the audacious elaboration of an experimental
metaphysics whose results, by definition, are not yet known, results
that must be judged by those who have translated them into their own terms.
The upper house has now completed its task: it has detected the
candidates for existence, translated their propositions into its own
language, found for each the jury that can answer for its quality in
sponsoring it. In the terms of our historical fiction, this amounts to
saying that each group of foreigners makes its solemn entrance into
the city, behind a more or less vast group of members of the collective
with whom they have established bonds of friendship or who have
been designated as their judges, sponsors, constituents, or guarantors.
Let no one object on this point that there is no real assembly capable
of fulfilling these two functions of perplexity and consultation in a sat-
isfactory way. We are no longer seekingsatisfaction.It is not a matter
of doing things well once and for all, but only of proceeding as best we
can to one of the iterations of the collective. In this sense, all collec-
tives are and always will be ill-formed. We shall see in the following
chapter all the moral, scientific, and political profit that can be drawn
from the setting into motion of the collective placed in apprenticeship
by experimentation. All that matters to us for the moment is that the
cortege can be large enough to head toward the seat of the second
power, the power to put in order exercised by the lower house.
Reception by the Lower House
The more sensitive, receptive, and alert the assembly, the more it sup-
plies the next one with the essential conditions for the ceremony that
is to follow. Once they have reached the second assembly, the require-
ments that apply to the propositions are going to change in every re-
spect. Whereas in the upper house, concern with the new entrants’
congruence with the members of the collective who were already in
place was ruled out, in the lower house the question of compatibility,
of the articulation of the propositions among those already recog-
nized, becomes a sacred duty. If the upper house was concerned with
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