you better guarantees for the protection of your essential require-
ments, would you agree to modify the metaphysics of nature that ap-
pears to you, for the time being, to be the one aptest to protect you,
even though it originates in the Cave that prevents us, for our part,
from existing? Would you be ready to give up that metaphysics if, for
that price, you could bring nonhumans and thedemosinto the expand-
ing collective? Nothing proves that the diplomat will succeed (noth-
ing proves that I have succeeded, either—it is up to the reader to
judge). This uncertainty makes diplomacy a riskier calling than an-
thropology, since the latter always knows in advance where to find the
essential inessentials (in nature) and where to find the inessential es-
sentials (in representations), while for the diplomat, the smallest slip
of the tongue is enough to trigger stoning by both camps.
And yet the diplomat has a wild card up her sleeve that the modern-
ist anthropologist lacked: she agrees to engage with collectives that
find themselves, with respect to the precise distribution of require-
ments and expressions,in the same uncertaintyas the one in whose
name she is dealing. That is why they have declared themselves for so
long to be at war: there is no common arbiter above them. Neither the
one who sends her nor the one who agrees to greet her knows exactly
why they are fighting—or even whether they are fighting. If metaphys-
ics is not experimental, there is nothing to negotiate, since the es-
sences are always already there and the identities all the more de-
cisively entrenched in that they are unjustifiable. But by no longer
claiming to speak in the name of nature, by no longer accepting the
polite indifference of multiculturalism, the diplomat who follows in
the wake of the anthropologist gives herself opportunities to succeed
that were not open to her predecessors. Civilization can contaminate
just as barbarity can. For the first time, the other collectives—how
many? no one yet knows—meet a civilized representative who asks
them what their habits and their properties are.^40 There is always a
tendency to minimize how terrifying it is for any proposition to be
forced to bifurcate abruptly, in order to cut itself into two halves, one
both rational and common, the other irrational and private. How can
one speak the language of thelogosif, as the Indians said of the whites,
the moderns have forked tongues? It hardly matters with what respect
that irrationality, adorned with the name “culture,” is surrounded; it
hardly matters how many museums are devoted to it; it hardly mat-
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
215