When the moderns, God’s equals, finally became coextensive with
Creation, they chose that moment to fall into the most complete isola-
tionism and to believe that they had exited from history! It is hardly
astonishing that their clock stopped at the same time that their bi-
cameralism was collapsing, crushed under the weight of all those
they had recruited, even as they claimed they were not taking them
into account or offering them a common world. If there is a lesson to
be drawn from the myth of Frankenstein, it is exactly the opposite of
the one drawn by Victor, the unhappy maker of the infamous monster.
At the moment when he is proclaiming his guilt and shedding croco-
dile tears for having played sorcerer’s apprentice with his misguided
innovation, he dissimulates under this venial sin the mortal sin of
which his creature rightly accuses him: fleeing from the laboratory
and abandoning the creature to itself, on the pretext that, like all inno-
vations, it was born monstrous.^10 No one can take himself for God and
not then send his only son to try to salvage the great project, so badly
begun, of fallen Creation.
Political ecology does better than serve as successor to modernism,
itdisinventsmodernism. It sees retrospectively in this contradictory
movement of attachment and detachment a much more interesting
history than the one in which a front of modernization advances in-
exorably from the darkness of archaism to the brightness of objec-
tivity—and much richer, of course, than the antinarrative of the anti-
moderns, who reread that story according to the equally inexorable
trend toward a decadence that is claimed to have drawn us further and
further from a rich, warm matrix, to hurl us into the frozen world of
mere calculations. The moderns have always done the opposite of
what they said:this is what saves them!There is not one thing that is
not also an assembly, a “Ding.” Not a single one of the indisputable
facts that is not the result of a meticulous discussion at the very heart
of the collective. Not one matter of fact that does not drag behind it a
long train of unexpected consequences that come to haunt the collec-
tive by obliging it to reshape itself. Not one innovation that does not
redesign cosmopolitics from top to bottom, by obliging everyone to
recompose public life. Not once in their short history have moderns
known how to distinguish facts from values, things from assemblies.
Not once have they managed to render insignificant and unreal what
they thought they could exclude for good and without due process.
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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