the common world, thedemoshad grown accustomed to waiting for
the help from on high of Science. In the absence of an appeal to the
other world, public life seemed likely to cave in on itself. To keep the
assemblies from constantly yielding to arbitrariness, contradiction, vi-
olence, and dispersion, we had been led to believe that we had to sup-
port them, shore them up on solid buttresses that no human hand
could soil. How could we have imagined that the impossibility of
calming public life derived precisely from the help offered by reason?
The medicine was killing the patient! By changing its exteriority, the
new notion of collective I am putting forward profoundly modifies the
type of transcendence in the shadow of which political philosophy has
always agreed to live. If there are indeed countless transcendences (the
multitude of propositions that knock on the door), there is no longer
theunified transcendence capable of putting an end to the logorrhea of
public assemblies. Politics is no longer threatened by that sword of
Damocles consisting of salvation brought by reason.
Political philosophy has never stopped trying to find out what type
of rationality could put an end to civil wars: from the City of God to
the social contract, from the social contract to the “gentle bonds of
commerce,” as Adam Smith put it, from economics to the ethics of
discussion, from morality to the defense of nature, politics has always
had to make honorable amends for the lack of reason characteristic of
human beings threatened by quarrels. Even when thinkers less ob-
sessed with transparency, or wilier in their approach, sought to define
a domain proper to politics, they always did so by making too many
assumptions about the native inferiority of that simple cleverness. In
seeking to avoid thediktatsof the epistemology police, they continued
to obey them, for they were defining politics as twisted, violent, lim-
ited, Machiavellian, virtuous in its own way, perhaps, but radically in-
capable, alas, of acceding to the lively clarity of knowledge.^1 Asare-
sult, no one defining politics has ever accorded it a treatment, and
even less a mission, equal to that of reason. Recognizing a narrow
niche forRealpolitikalongside Science andNaturpolitikstill does not
put the sciences and politics to work on the same building; we are
still not speaking of the politics of reality, of realistic politics, of real
politics.
Instead of being rehabilitated, politics has been increasingly neu-
tralized. Transfusing Science into the collective amounted to pumping
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