mute about the reality of their requirements. The outside is no longer
either strong enough to reduce the social world to silence or weak
enough to let itself be reduced to insignificance. In the new sense we
have given back to this word, the excluded entities require the collec-
tive to present itself and torepresentitself at their appeal—that is, to
say that it risks once again the fate of all its representative agencies.
What the civilized collective aims at is not indifference: the outside
makes all the differenceand the collective becomes all the more civilized
in that it learns to become sensitive to these contrasts. “Nothing hu-
man is foreign to me,” says the Latin sage; let us say, rather, “Nothing
that is foreign to me is inhuman.”^33
What is going to make it possible to survey the borders by asking in
a civilized way the question of the number of collectives to be assem-
bled? If we have to be somewhat mistrustful of classical anthropology
because it would accept unity too quickly, as it has accepted multiplic-
ity (because it would accept multiplicity only against a background of
unity), do we have to resign ourselves to entering into a relationship
only in the form of ignorance, conquest, or war? We need to add to
anthropology the competencies of a much older calling, that ofdiplo-
mat*, which can complement the power to follow up defined in the
preceding section, while serving it as scout and interpreter.^34 In fact,
contrary to the arbiters who always rely on a superior and disinter-
ested position, the diplomat always belongs to one of the parties to the
conflict.^35 But the diplomat has one peculiar and decisive advantage
over the anthropologist: a potential traitor to all camps, he does not
know in advance in what form those whom he is addressing are going
to formulate the requirements that may lead to war or peace. He does
not open talks by respecting the social representations hypocritically
because he knows in advance that they are “all equally false,” any more
than he knows in advance that it would be possible to reach an under-
standing, if only the parties could succeed in speaking of the common
world, always already there, that of nature, that of good sense, that of
the facts, that of the agreement of minds and of common knowledge.
At no moment does the diplomat use the notion of a common world
of reference, since it is to construct that common world that he con-
fronts all the dangers; at no moment, either, does he regard “simple
formulations” with respectful contempt, since any one of them, how-
ever impalpable, may hold the key to the agreement that nothing has
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