mobilizing. They wanted to wipe out what they took to be a cancer
that was going to invade the entire university body and soon metas-
tasize among hapless, defenseless students. Then, through a sudden
mutation, one noticed that the term “science wars” had a premonitory
sense and became the symptom of a much more formidable evil.^44 Not
only did the sciences no longer suffice to ensure peace, but Science
made peace impossible, for it put at the beginning of history, and out-
side it, what has to come at the end. While people were fighting Lilli-
putian battles against “postmodernism,” a Great War had already be-
gun, added to all the others, in which the sciences were no longer a
supporting force, as before, but rather its tactics and strategy as much
as its logistics. To the monster of multiculturalism has now been
added the hideous specter of multinaturalism. The science war has be-
come once and for all a war of the worlds.
In abandoning mononaturalism, political ecology does not promise
peace. It is only beginning to understand what wars it has to fight and
what enemies it has to learn to designate. It is finally discovering the
dangers that made it subject to a threat of pacification worse than the
evil it was fighting: indisputable objects on the one hand, subjects bar-
ricaded within arbitrary identities on the other. In losing the help of
the simplifiers, it is rediscovering the essential source of peace to
which it had never had the right to have recourse because nonhumans
had been militarized in the uniform of objects: things, those partial
assemblies capable of creating agreement, provided they are taken
as propositions convoked according to due process by a Republic*
finally extended to nonhumans. We have lost the simplification of na-
ture, but we have also released ourselves from the complication that it
introduced by simplifying the situation too quickly. No facility, but no
impossibility in principle. No transcendence, but no prison of imma-
nence either. Nothing but the ordinary work of politics. People had al-
ways wanted, up to now, to save themselves from the inhuman by ap-
pealing to Science, and to save themselves from Science by appealing
to the human. But another solution remains to be explored: to save
oneself from Science and from the inhuman by appealing to the sci-
ences and to the propositions of humans and nonhumans finally as-
sembled according to due process.
Terrible luck, really. At the very moment when totalitarianism was
collapsing, globalization was beginning. Are not “total” and “global”
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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