Have we pulled out the splinter that made walking painful? The
wound is still there; it will still hurt for a while, but it is now a scar and
no longer an oozing sore. We have removed the principal source of in-
fection, the traditional notion of representation that poisoned every-
thing it touched—the impossible distinction, contradicted every day,
between ontological and epistemological questions. It was this distinc-
tion, in fact, that imposed the exclusive path that led from nature to
society and back, owing to the intermediary of two miraculous con-
versions. It was this distinction that obliged us either to move closer
to things, while distancing ourselves from the impressions humans
had of them, or to move closer to the human categories, while pro-
gressively distancing ourselves from things themselves. It was this
distinction that imposed the impossible choice between realism and
constructivism. We shall no longer speak of “representation of na-
ture,” designating by that term the categories of human understand-
ing, while, on the other hand, “nature” in the singular remains even
more remote. And yet we shall retain the crucial word “representa-
tion,” but we shall make it play again, explicitly, its ancient political
role. If there are no more representations of nature in the sense of the
two-house politics we have criticized, it will still be necessary torepre-
sentthe associations of humans and nonhumans through an explicit
procedure, in order to decide what collects them and what unifies
them in one future common world.
In fact, by abandoning the notion of nature, we are leaving intact
the two elements that matter the most to us: the multiplicity of non-
humans and the enigma of their association. In the following chapters
we are going to use the word “representation” to designate the new
task of political ecology, but I hope to have removed the ambiguity
that has weighed too long on a term that has been so closely associated
with the destiny of the social sciences. We may suppose that the tasks
of these sciences will be more inspiring than to prove that there exist
“cultural and social filters through which” humans must necessarily
pass “to apprehend objects out there, while always missing things in
themselves.” By refusing the support that the social sciences claimed
to be offering it, political ecology frees these sciences to do other
jobs and directs them toward other infinitely more fruitful research
paths.^49 It is of the pluriverse that they should speak, of thecosmosto
be built, not of the shadows projected on the wall of the Cave.
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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