Someone will object that it is necessarily a question of a utopia,
since power relations will always come to break up the State of law
and oppose to the delicate procedure deployed here the wordless bru-
tality of the established order. It is true that I have not made use of
the resources offered by critical discourse. I have unmasked only one
power, that of nature. I had a very powerful reason to do so: society
plays the same role in critical discourse that nature plays in the dis-
course of the naturalizers.Societas sive natura.To assert that under-
neath legitimate relationships there are forces invisible to the actors,
forces that could be discerned only by specialists in the social sciences,
amounts to using the same method for the metaphysics of nature as
was used for the Cave: it amounts to claiming that there exist primary
qualities—society and its power relations—that form the essential fur-
nishings of the social world, and secondary qualities, as deceitful as
they are intensely experienced, that cover with their mantle the invisi-
ble forces one cannot see without losing heart. If the natural sciences
have to be rejected when they employ that dichotomy, then we have to
reject the social sciences all the more vigorously when they apply it to
the collective conceived as a society. If the common world has to be
composed progressively along with the natural sciences, let us be care-
ful not to use society to explain the actors’ behavior. Like nature, and
for the same reason, society finds itself at the end of collective experi-
mentation, not at the beginning, not all ready-made, not already there.
It is only good for attempting to take power—without ever managing
to exercise it, since it is even mistaken about its own strength.
The social sciences—economics, sociology, anthropology, history,
geography—have a much more useful role than that of defining, in the
actors’ place and most often against them, the forces that manipulate
them without their knowledge. The actors do not know what they are
doing,still lessthe sociologists. What manipulates the actors is un-
knownto everyone,including researchers in the social sciences. This is
even the reason there is a Republic, a common world still to come: we
are unaware of the collective consequences of our actions. We are im-
plicated by the risky relations of which the provisional ins and outs
have to be the object of a constantre-presentation. The last thing we
need is for someone to compose in our stead the world to come. But to
inquire into what binds us, we can count on the human sciences’ offer-
ing the actors multiple andrapidly revisedversions that allow us to un-
derstand the collective experience in which we are all engaged. All
CONCLUSION
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