relativism, all that does not concern us and no longer has the vocation
of summing up the history of our attachments. It is a dispute between
elites to decide what will administer the death blow to thedemosfirst:
the staggering acceleration of natural law, or the staggering accelera-
tion of violence. To move on to the new Constitution, we have to
abandon the help offered by those two shortcuts of public life; we
have to replace Science with the sciences and society with the slow
work of political composition.^3 They do not blend together any more
than they fight each other, as we have shown at length: if we speak of
the sciences in the plural and of politics in the singular, it is precisely
because their functions are different, the former allowing us to main-
tain the diversity of the candidates for existence and the latter allow-
ing us to keep on returning to the unity of what brings them together
in a single collective—the old Constitution, in a word, did just the op-
posite, by speaking of Science in the singular and of political interests
in the plural.
Politics is thus opposed to the shortcuts of violence exactly to the
same extent that it is opposed to the shortcuts of reason. By distin-
guishing between values and facts, the Old Regime enjoyed the advan-
tages of a double transcendence: it could extricate itself from simple
matters of fact by appealing to values, and it could always appeal,
against the outdated requirements of values and law, to the harsh real-
ity of facts. The new Constitution does not benefit from these tran-
scendences. It can appeal to nothing other than the multiplicity of
something that lies outside itself, without any more unity than legiti-
macy, and that puts the Constitution in danger, because the Constitu-
tion can never be free of it. Deprived of the help of transcendence, we
at first believe we are going to suffocate for want of oxygen; then we
notice that we are breathing more freely than before: transcendences
abound in the propositions that are external to the collective.
With its two explicitly convoked houses, the collective obliges us to
slow down, that is, tore-present, again and again, the pains of the pro-
gressive composition of thecosmos.Instead of distinguishing between
fact and rights, as tradition demanded, it requires of facts that they be-
come legitimate;^4 it now distinguishes between the ill-formed amal-
gams of facts and rights and associations of humans and nonhumans
obtained according to due process. The only question that counts for
it is the scientific, political, moral, and administrative question: Are
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
187