CHAPTER FIVE
▲▲▲Exploring Common Worlds
Through construction, the collective feeds on what remains outside,
which it has not yet collected. But how can we talk about that which
escapes it entirely? Earlier, it would have been defined as a mix of
nature and societies. Nature unified the primary qualities in a single
homogeneous furnishing; the cultures regrouped the diversity of the
secondary qualities in as many incommensurable aggregates. If the
unified universe of nature had nothing to do with humans, it was still
possible to bring peace tomanydisunified cultures by falling back on
the onenature. At least one question seemed to have been resolved:
that of the plurality of inhabited worlds. Yet neither mononaturalism
nor multiculturalism can continue to sum up the risky situation in
which the collective, as I have defined it, now finds itself. There would
be too many indisputable essences on the one hand, too many arbi-
trary identities on the other. I have no solution other than to pursue
my obstinate effort to discover whether or not a successor to this
traditional compromise (one nature, multiple cultures) exists some-
where, by raising a seemingly strange question:How manyother col-
lectives are there?
If it were surrounded by essences and identities, the collective
would succumb at once (it would become a society*). It must provide
an environment for itself that is completely different from the envi-
ronment of a culture surrounded by a nature, by becoming sensitive to
the whole that has not yet been collected and that harbors all those
which it has excluded and which can appeal to be recognized again as
present. To succeed in carrying out the impossible task of composing
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