to add another certainty: tomorrow, the collective will be more intri-
cate than it was yesterday. We shall indeed have to involve ourselves
still more intimately with the existence of a still larger multitude of
human and nonhuman beings, whose demands will be still more in-
commensurable with those of the past, and we shall nevertheless have
to become capable of sheltering them in a common dwelling. We no
longer expect a rain of fire that would put us all in agreement by kill-
ing off everything through the force of objectivity. There is no end to
our history. The arrow of the moderns was the only thing that presup-
posed the end of history. Since gradually becoming acosmoshas no
end, there is thus, for political ecology, no Apocalypse to fear: it comes
back home, to theoikos,to ordinary dwellings, to banal existence.
Not content just to put an end to the history of the moderns, politi-
cal ecology also suppresses the strangest of that history’s aberrations
by offering it, retrospectively, an entirely different explanation of its
destiny. The moderns, while they were obsessed by time, had actually
never had any luck with it, for to make their vast machinery work,
they needed to place the world of indisputable matters of fact outside
history. They have never found the way, for example, to institute an
even slightly credible history of the sciences: they have had to settle,
under that name, for a history of humans discovering an indisputable
and atemporal nature.^9 The moderns were thus caught in a dilemma
that they expelled to the outside like all the rest, but that ended up,
like all the rest, catching up with them: they went forward with the
hope of taking into account fewer and fewer propositions, whereas
they had set in motion, in the course of several centuries, the most for-
midable machine for stirring up the greatest possible number of enti-
ties—cultures, nations, facts, sciences, peoples, arts, animals, indus-
tries, an immense shambles that they never stopped mobilizing or
destroying at the very moment when they were asserting their desire
to simplify, purify, naturalize, and exclude. They got rid of the rest of
the world at the very moment when they were taking the world, Atlas-
like, on their broad shoulders: they claimed to be externalizing every-
thing precisely when they were internalizing the whole earth! Imperi-
alists, they declared that they depended on no one; indebted to the en-
tire universe, they thought they were free of any liaison; implicated
everywhere, in up to their ears, they wanted to wash their hands of all
responsibility...
POLITICS OF NATURE
192