exploration of experimental metaphysics. Unexpected consequences
proliferated nevertheless, and were always surprising, for they had no
reasonable relationship with the matters of fact that set them off. It
was thus possible to pile up attempts on the ruins of previous trials,
without ever talking about trials, or attempts, or ruins: each time,
modernization struck forever, indisputably, definitively, irreversibly—
even if it meant going back later on to repair the damage it had done
by means of a new objectivity, this one just as definitive. Within the
narrow framework of modernism, the moderns never managed to
profit even clumsily from experimentation. They bounced violently
back and forth between absolute knowledge and unforeseen catastro-
phes, without managing to plug in to history and its enigmatic events,
which had to be decoded blindly.^19 Curiously, for people so obsessed
with history, time passed in vain for the moderns. Bombarded with
sciences and technologies, they never used these to become wiser,
since they never managed to read in these events the meticulous ex-
ploration of their own collectives of humans and nonhumans.
If the historical experience we are trying to decipher has not only
dismantled the old framework of nature with its dual scientific and
political power but has also proposed countless institutions and pro-
cedures that await only a new gaze to become immediately obvious,
armed from top to bottom, the same does not hold true for the power
to follow up, which is still inextricably confused with the question of
the State. Now, the State mixes together powers that have to be distin-
guished: preoccupied with Old Regime politics, itself confused with
Science, the State resembles the powers of divine right before the con-
stituents of the eighteenth century began to redistribute them into
separate functions. What is a State freed of the mad ambition to sub-
stitute itself for politics, for the sciences, for economics, and for mo-
rality, one that would devote itself exclusively to supplying assurances
that the powers of taking into account and of putting in order are
implemented according to due process? What is a State that would
see itself neither as a collective nor as the common world nor as the
end of history? What is a State that would no longer believe that it
was endowed with the power of “divine Science”? A State finally capa-
ble of governing?^20
I should acknowledge right away that I do not have the same re-
sources to make this power to follow up clearly apparent as I did for
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
201