the problem of taking into account (“How many are we?”), the lower
house asks the question “Who are we?” This “we” is variable in its ge-
ometry; it changes with every iteration. Unless we are dealing with
repetitious collectives that already know, have always already known,
of what they are composed—but these collectives, whether on the
right or the left, whether based on racial identity, the nature of things,
humanism, or the arbitrariness of the sign, do not belong to the realm
of political ecology. They all stem from the Old Regime, since, for
them, two distinct domains of reality order all facts and all values in
advance. Their metaphysics is not experimental but identity-based.
We are only interested here in the collectives whose composition is
going to be modified with each iteration—even if they have to reinvent
themselves in order to remain the same.
The lower house asks new questions of precedence, etiquette, po-
liteness, ordering. Although it does not call the work of the upper
house into question, it has no part in precautions, states of alert, au-
dacity, or risk. The propositions are right there, they speak, they have
their jury, no one rejects their metaphysics, but respect for their pres-
ence in no way solves the new problem: How can these contradictory
beings be made to livetogether?How can a world be produced that is
commonto them? No amount of pluralism can push the question fur-
ther. The lower house of political ecology finds itself before a titanic
task that no assembly has ever before attempted to accomplish—ex-
cept on the mythic stage of myths. We have indeed deprived this sec-
ond house, intentionally, of the great resource of modernism, which
consisted ineliminatingmost beings because of a want of rationality or
a lack of reality, so as to reach an understanding with those which re-
mained, among themselves, that is, among rational humans. The risk
that we have made the collective take will be all the greater to the ex-
tent that the upper house has fulfilled its task more completely. In fact,
if the candidate entities arrive on time, well articulated, each one ac-
companied by the jury of its choice, the lower house will be constantly
solicited by beings who will raise the question of compatibility with
the common world for themselvesin their own terms.Thanks to the
treatment of the upper house, they will have becomeeven more irreduc-
ible to all the othersand even more incommensurable with all the oth-
ers! The more subtle and alert, the more civil and civilized the higher
house is, the more relativism increases.^58 Every time the lower house
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
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