I do not claim that politics once translated into ecology will be eas-
ier. On the contrary, it is going to become more difficult, more de-
manding, more procedural, indeed, more bureaucratic, and, yes, grop-
ing. We have never seen the establishment of a State of law simplify
life for those who were used to the conveniences of a police state. Sim-
ilarly, imagining a “State of law of nature,” adue processfor the discov-
ery of the common world, is not going to make life easier for those
who claim to be sending back to the nonexistence of the irrational all
the propositions whose looks they do not like. They are going to have
to argue and come to terms, without skipping any of the steps we have
covered in the preceding chapters. But, as we have seen many times,
by losing nature, public life also loses the principal cause of its paraly-
sis. Freed from transcendences that are as inapplicable as they are ben-
eficial, politics breathes more freely. It no longer lives in the shadow of
the sword of Damocles, the threat of salvation from elsewhere. Agree-
ment is going to have to be reached.
Is the hypothesis I have developed normative or descriptive? I have
proceeded as though the new Constitution described a state of things
that is already in place, lacking only certain adequate terms to become
self-evident to those best prepared to see it. This was the only way to
rejoin common sense. The difference between the descriptive and the
normative depends, moreover, on the distinction between facts and
values: thus I could not use it without contradicting myself. There is in
“mere description” an overly powerful form of normativity: whatis
defines the common world and thus all thatmustbe—the rest hav-
ing no existence other than the nonessential one of secondary quali-
ties. Nothing is more anthropocentric than the inanimism* of nature.
Against the norm dissimulated in the politics ofmatters of fact,then,
we had to be even more normative. For the rest, there is nothing less
utopian than an argument that aims at nothing but putting an end to
that utopia, the modernist eschatology that is still expecting its salva-
tion from an objectivity originating elsewhere. It is to thetopos,the
oikos,that political ecology invites us to return. We come back home
to inhabit the common dwelling without claiming to be radically dif-
ferent from the others. In any event, having arrived much later than
the avant-garde, a little earlier than Minerva’s owl, intellectual work-
ers can never do much better than to help other intellectuals, their
readers, rejoin what thedemosalready brought into the state of things
some time ago.
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