act sciences, not because the latter would treat their candidates for existence as objects
that can be mastered at will, but on the contrary because they discover day after day,
in laboratory failures, the recalcitrance of objects. See the important arguments in
Stengers 1996 and Despret 1996; for a commentary, see Latour 2000.
- Need I recall that relativism is a positive term that has absolutism as its contrary
and that refers, as Deleuze put it so well, not to the relativity of truth but “to the truth
of the relation” (Deleuze 1993)? - A beautiful example is provided by the French law on the official organization of
a controversy over various ways to deal with long-term nuclear waste; see Barthe 2000. - The whole problem of the sociology of the sciences lies in the fact that it first
juxtaposed these two terms to bring out their contradiction in a critical form, before
thoroughly modifying their relations in a noncritical form. On thisfelix culpaof sociol-
ogy, see Latour 1999c. - Once again, common sense goes further than good sense in the recognition of
these thousands of intermediate steps in the degrees of certainty between existence
and nonexistence. We need only think about the countless nuances of realism regard-
ing simple affirmations of the following sort: cigarette smoke leads to death; speeding
on highways is responsible for fatal accidents. In what world must we live, finally, for
these utterances to take on definitive truth? This notion of variable degree is all the
more important in that we find ourselves before an unexpected configuration: the arti-
ficial continuation of scientific controversies that we had thought finished. This is the
case of studies on the dangerousness of cigarettes, on global warming, on the Shroud of
Turin, on the risks associated with nuclear accidents, and so on. The presence of the
scientific disciplines is now clearly distinct from the closing of debates. - This requirement has become even more crucial in a time where revisionism has
generalized its strange mixture of conspiracy theory and absolute belief in indisputable
matters of fact. One should now be able to fight against the artificial continuation of
scientific controversies on everything from the link between cancer and cigarettes to
global warming and concentration camps. Here again, matters of fact reveal them-
selves to be a weaker defense than sturdy matters of concern, on condition of being
well instituted and constantly kept up. - To the great surprise of the modernists, constructivism may turn out to be a
more peaceful and universal language than naturalism (Latour 2002e). - Carl Schmitt deserves credit for bringing back to light the essential political im-
portance of the enemy whom one does not hate, but I am of course extending the
meaning of this term to nonhumans, or rather to composite propositions produced by
humans and nonhumans. Here is Schmitt’s famous distinction: “The distinction be-
tween a friend and an enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of union or separa-
tion, of association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without
having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other dis-
tinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need
not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage
with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and
it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a particularly intense way, existentially some-
thing different and alien, so that, in the extreme case, conflicts with him are possible.
NOTES TO PAGES 171–179
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