guaranteed in advance. He consents only, quite rightly, to “parley,” in
the fine diplomatic expression, and to “make representations.” He
never speaks of what may be rational or irrational. In other words, the
distribution of essences and habits depends on the talks. Never (and
here lies the greatness of his mission) does he resign himself, either, to
the incommensurable—that is, at bottom, to war. There is more wis-
dom in the disgraced figure of the diplomat that in the respected fig-
ure of the modernist anthropologist because the latter respects only
because he scorns, while the former, if he does not scorn,does not re-
spect either.^36 He swallows his pride. He is said to be false and hypocrit-
ical, whereas, on the contrary, he is indignant, and he despairs of ever
being able to discover what has to be preserved and what has to be re-
jectedfor each situationin the elaboration of the common world, in the
triage of the best of all possible worlds.
How does the ecologist diplomat work? What is the secret of some-
one who agrees to seek the language of the common house, the one
about whom one must say, according to the etymology ofoikos-logos,
that she “speaks the language of dwellings,”that she “articulates the col-
lective”?Let us keep in mind that she never opens the debates with
the either-or injunction imposed by the old Constitution, since she
has understood that that preliminary condition had previously con-
demned all pourparlers to failure: “We shall reach agreement on the
common world, on nature, all the more quickly if you could only leave
in the cloakroom all the ragged irrational garments that only divide us
and that refer only to subjectivity or to social arbitrariness.”^37 No, now
she has to look for the difference between two distinct elements:the
essential requirementson the one hand, theexperimental metaphysicsthat
expresses them on the other. In Figure 5.1, which goes back to the
ninety-degree reversal of Figure 3.1, we have picked up the distinction.
The two opposing pairs do not divide up the possible worlds in the
same way. Whereas culture never offered anything but a particular
viewpoint on common nature, and could not supply any enlighten-
ment about its single particularity, every collectivecan participate in the
manufacture of the common world of essential requirements—an expres-
sion that I borrow, like that of traceability, from the world of standard-
ization practice and quality control. In other words, with the old prin-
ciple of triage, what was essential was always already known; with the
new, what is essentialis still to come.^38 As for the expressions, it is no
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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