tions, when it is accurate, passes wholesale over to the side of nature.
In other words, the fact of adding the history of the sciences does not
modify the distinction between nature and representations of nature
in a lasting way: it blurs it onlytemporarily,during the brief period
when the scientists are wandering around in the dark. As soon as they
find something, what they attest to belongs clearly to nature and no
longer in any way, shape, or form to representations. During all this
time, anyway, nature has remained safely out of play, out of range, im-
pregnable, as little involved in the human history of the sciences as in
the human history of attitudes toward nature–unless we wish to re-
duce the history of the sciences to history, period, and forever bar sci-
entists from discovering truth, by locking them up forever in the nar-
row cell of social representations.
We should not be surprised by this objection: we are well aware that
the double rupture between history and nature does not stem from
lessons drawn from empirical studies but has the goal of cutting ob-
servation short, so that no example can ever blur the politically neces-
sary distinction between ontological questions and epistemological
questions by threatening to bring together, under the single gaze of a
single discipline, the two assemblies of humans and things. The goal
of (political) epistemology as a whole is to prevent political epistemol-
ogy by limiting the history of the sciences to the messy process of
discovery, without this latter’s having any effect whatsoever on the
lasting solidity of knowledge. I maintain, on the contrary, that by mak-
ing the history and sociology of the learned City visible, I am aiming at
blurring the distinction between nature and societydurably,so that we
shall never have to go back to two distinct sets, with nature on one
side and the representations that humans make of it on the other.
“Ah, I knew it—here the social constructivist is showing the tip of
his donkey’s ear! Here are the sophists who proliferate in the ob-
scurity of the Cave. You want to reduce all the exact sciences to simple
social representations. Extend multiculturalism to politics. Deprive
politics of the only transcendence capable of decisively putting an end
to its interminable squabbles.”^44 And yet it is precisely on this point
that science studies, in combination with militant ecology, allows us
to break with the deceptive self-evidence of the social sciences by
completely abandoning the theme of social constructivism. If the ob-
jectors continue to be suspicious, it is because they do not understand
POLITICS OF NATURE
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