audacity is required to prefer this exclusion based on the nature of
things—on the things of nature—over an explicit, progressive, deliber-
ate process of excluding certain entitiesfor the time beingasincompati-
blewith the common world.^63
The second manner, that of the lower house, has the immense ad-
vantage of being civil: if it creates enemies for itself, it does not claim
to humiliate them by withdrawing existence, in addition to their pres-
ence in the collective, from them.^64 It simply tells them this: “In the
scenarios attempted up to now, there is no room for you in the com-
mon world. Go away: you have become our enemies.” But it does not
say to them, draped in its cloak of high morality: “You do not exist;
you have lost forever any right to ontology; you will never again be
counted in the construction of a cosmos”—which modernism, imbued
to the core with virtue, repeated to them over and over without the
slightest scruple. By excluding, the lower house trembles at the possi-
bility of committing an injustice, for it knows that the enemies that
threaten to put it in danger one day can become its allies the next.
Since it knows that the upper house will reconsider its decisions
later, on appeal, the lower house can finally accept responsibility for
theestablishment of causes,the general stabilization of responsibilities
and causalities. People have always spoken about laws of nature; peo-
ple have always spoken with irony about the legal metaphor that in-
appropriately mixed together nature, indifferent to humans, and the
juridical forms of the City. Now, with the lower house of political ecol-
ogy,the laws of nature finally have their own Parliament,a public assem-
bly that votes on them, records them, and institutes them. Yes, after
its deliberations, entities do indeed find themselves bound by efficient
causalities, and the chain of responsibilities finds itself quite definitely
assured. The prion is indeed responsible for mad cow disease; the
minister of health is indeed responsible for the deaths from blood
transfusions; God is not to blame for the earthquake that destroyed
Lisbon; the law of gravity explains all we need to know about the fall
of bodies in the void; the State retains ownership of the coastline; the
elephants let the Masais’ cattle share their pasture. Properties have
thus been conferred upon propositions, and these latter are at last
endowed with a lasting substance, of which they are now only the
qualities.
All these attributions, all these fixings of bonds, all these decisions
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
179