ters, even, that a common structure may make it possible, by a series
of transformations, to pass from one irrationality to the other in such
a way that, thanks to the science of anthropology, irrationality ends up
resembling an ersatz reason. The fact remains nevertheless that the
collective encountered has been deprived of all contact with the very
essence of phenomena.^41 Everything that is essential belongs to the
visitor who is teaching the native a lesson; the native is rich only by
virtue of his difference.
Do we really know what would happen if, instead of this modernist
approach, we entered into contact after the fashion of the ecological
diplomat? Can one imagine the power of the balm that would then fall
upon all the wounds opened up by the encounters that have taken
place under the auspices of nature? The virtue of the diplomat, the
factor that always makes him “a piece of shit in a silk stocking,” as Na-
poleon famously said of Talleyrand, is that he imposeson the very ones
who sent himthis fundamental doubt about their own requirements.
“At bottom,” he says to them, “you don’t know, either, what you were
holding to before I got the negotiation going. You have just discovered
how much you care about this treasure; you would perhaps be pre-
pared, then, to house it in a different metaphysics, if by doing so you
could increase the size of the common house. Would you be ready to
shelter those whom you took to be enemies but who have just taught
you what you cherish more than anything in the world?” We have put
the plow before the horse. No, in fact, we don’t care that much about
nature: let us define rather what we do care about, and then let us give
this treasure a name that is dear to us. “Where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also” (Luke 12:34).
To put it differently, the diplomat is charged with what the later
Kant called “the kingdom of ends.” The ecological crisis, as we have
often noted, presents itself above all as a generalized revolt of means.
Nothing and no one is willing any longer to agree to serve as a simple
means to the exercise of any will whatsoever taken as an ultimate end.
The tiniest maggot, the smallest rodent, the scantest river, the farthest
star, the most humble of automatic machines—each demands to be
taken also as an end, by the same right as the beggar Lazarus at the
door of the selfish rich man. At first glance, this proliferation of ends
appears untenable: modernism stiffens against it. Then, once the mod-
ernist parenthesis is closed, a question that several centuries had left
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