ests—with, to keep them on the straight and narrow, values all the
more indisputable, in that they were at once fundamental and unus-
able! Despite the drastic elimination of entities to be taken into con-
sideration (most of them being relegated to the status of mere beliefs),
the task of ordering under the modernist Constitution proved to be so
unfeasible that people have turned back, like the lazy despots of fairy
tales, to selection by the violence of power or by the harsh necessities
of facts—which amounts, as we know, to the same thing, Might and
Right sailing the same ship. The lower house finds itself situated be-
fore a much larger number of propositions than under the Old Re-
gime, but these are no longer essences requiring that they occupy the
choice seats in the collective without any possible argument: they have
become propositions endowed with habits.
The demography of the collective has exploded, to be sure, butits
room for maneuver has increased as well.If it has to take in many more
candidates than those which the crude metaphysics of nature left out
in the cold and if it does not mean to delegate to anyone else the
task of putting in order, which it must fully assume, the lower house
is no longer dealing with humans endowed with their indisputable in-
terests, but with associations of humans and nonhumans articulated
enough to be composed of habits, the list and the composition of
whichmay vary slightly.In other words, we are going to be able to dis-
cuss, negotiate, make some adjustments, come to terms, together with
different entities; we are going to be able to begin a shuttle that was
impossible even to imagine in the time of the Old Regime, with its ob-
jects that camped across from subjects without any possible relations
other than the civil war of dialectical contradictions.^59 If the upper
house was experimental (in order to go looking for candidates as well
as juries), the lower house is no less so, even if the investigations it un-
dertakes have to do with the best way to manipulate propositions in
order to establish them in a hierarchy, before seeking the best way to
close off discussion.
The word “negotiation” still retains a pejorative sense, because one
measures the deals negotiators make by the yardstick of an ideal situa-
tion that of course has all the advantages—except it does not exist! As
long as we think we are chipping away from the inside at a fixed sum
of positions through a series of compromises, over all the arrange-
ments floats the shadow of a transcendence that would escape all
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
175