ness we are retracing, modernism believed itself infinitely more moral
than all its predecessors!
The Old Regime appropriated essences for itself at the outset,
through the invention of a primary metaphysics to which it denied
the very quality of a metaphysics, in calling it instead simply nature.
While humans could of course discover its laws, through a history
of the sciences that remained miraculous, these laws could never be
the object of an explicit procedure. On the contrary, it was asserted,
institution and truth remained contradictory.^60 An amusing reversal
of things, when we think of the immense work of fabrication, arti-
fice, discussion, composition, and arrangement that has to be accom-
plished in order finally to arrive at any certainty at all where facts are
concerned. Far from being unaware of this work, the lower house of
political ecology is, on the contrary, organized to institute essences.
Instead of taking truth and institution to be opposites, it draws, on the
contrary, all the profit possible from their synonymy, since it—and it
alone—can finally determinethe variations in degrees of certainty,that
is, of diffusion, of verification of the facts.^61 It is no longer going to
have to populate the world, as was done under the Old Regime, with
experts unknown to ordinary folk, with ignorant beings who know
nothing, with discoveries popping up unexpectedly. Instead of waiting
for the historians of the sciences to remind it of the means necessary
to the exercise of truth, it is going to equip itself with these means,
these mediations, these embodiments,at the outset.The lower house is
finally going to include in its budget the progressive extension of as-
sured truths, bypaying the full pricefor the institutions necessary to
their establishment.^62
Modernism thought itself highly virtuous because it thought it did
not have to eliminate excluded parties from the collective through
violence. It was content to note, sanctimoniously, their radical nonex-
istence in the form of fictions, beliefs, irrationalities, nonsense, lies,
ideologies, or myths. In this we can clearly see the extent of its perver-
sion: it thought itself more moral because it did not believe it had any
enemies, while it was so thoroughly scornful of those it excluded that
it considered them lacking in any real existence at all! The accusation
of irrationality made it possible to reject beings, to consign them to
limbo, without due process, and to believe this arbitrariness more just
than the meticulous procedure of the State of law...Aheftydose of
POLITICS OF NATURE
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