Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

longer a matter, with the new touchstone, of representations that are
all equally respectable and all equally false, of worldviews or symbolic
elaborations, but of a painful pulling away, a grueling metamorphosis,
in order to know the price that a collective would be ready to pay to
agree to let others come into the common house that is under con-
struction.^39 Apart from a diplomatic trial, no collective can differenti-
ate between what is essential and what is superfluous: it will go to war
over anything, because it sees everything asequallynecessary. Only
slowly, through preliminary negotiations, pourparlers, will a collective
agree to reconsider its own constitution, by differentiating what is es-
sential from what is superfluous according to other principles. It will
undertake this exhausting taskonly on condition that the other will agree
to subject itself to the same triage.How far we are from the peaceful dis-
tinction, always already made, between the nature of things and the
representations that humans make of them. What seemed to make
good sense was lacking in common sense.
I gave an example of this diplomacy in Chapter 3 when I attempted
to extract the essential requirements that found themselves impris-
oned in the difference between facts and values. I then returned to the
negotiating table with a sort of “deal”: if we were to promise to offer

POLITICS OF NATURE

214

Requirements

Expressions

DIPLOMACY

ANTHROPOLOGY

ONE NATURE MULTIPLE CULTURES

Already unified

without due process

But all equally without

access to reality

What cannot be lost without

losing the collective

What can be given up as the price

for an extension of the collective

12

4 3

Figure 5.1 Whereas anthropology classifies what it encounters as nature or cultures,
diplomacy has to carry out a triage between what is expendable and what is essential.