out more rapidly still the little blood it had left.^2 Contrary to the
threats of (political) epistemology, thedemosdid not suffer from a lack
of Science but from an excess of it. This result appears paradoxical
only to those who depict the collective in the somber colors of a soci-
ety plunged into the obscurity of representations. But as we have now
understood, politics does not resemble the prison of the social any
more than the sciences resemble Science. Politics can no more be re-
duced to mere immanence than Science can offer the succor of its
transcendence. The moralists never tire of contrasting relations based
on reason with relations based on force, the force of a convincing ar-
gument with that of a gun held to the head, as if that opposition were
the only important one, the one that had to be preserved to protect
against dissolution into anarchy. We recognize in this impossible scen-
ography of reason against force, Right against Might, the old princi-
ples of the separation of powers. In the new Constitution, the differ-
ence between relations based on force and relations based on reason
counts for much less than the distinction between enemies and appel-
lants, between the current stage of the collectiveand its re-collection in
the next round.Those that have been rejected as enemies, either by the
argument that condemns them to definitive irrationality or by the pis-
tol that kills definitively, will return in any event to haunt the collec-
tive at the next stage. The only difference that matters now comes
from the following question: Who are you capable of absorbing and
rejecting? You can make the enemies insignificant, you can even defi-
nitively refuse to hear them out, but you will only be postponing the
moment when you will see them coming back, augmenting thearrears
of the collective. If you invented that immense theater of Right and
Might just to avoid having the knife put to your throat, then you can
surely be better and more securely protected against arbitrariness by a
Constitution that would accept no shortcuts—and especially not that
of reason.
“What? You want us to put violence and reason, Might and Right,
Knowledge and Power, on the same plane?” Yes, on the same plane,
that is, asequally foreignto the functions of the Republic: such is the
hypothesis of political ecology as recharacterized in this book. The
struggle between reason and violence, the dispute between Socrates
the philosopher and Callicles the sophist, the opposition between
demonstration and persuasion, thepas de deuxbetween realism and
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