egory, while “woman” was marked. By saying “man,” one designated
the totality of thinking beings without even thinking about it; by say-
ing “woman,” one marked the “female” as apart from thinking beings.
No Westerner today would take the word “man” to be unmarked.
“Male/female,” “man/woman,” “he/she”: these terms have slowly
taken the place of what was formerly self-evident. The two labels are
both marked, coded, embodied. Neither can claim any longer to desig-
nate effortlessly and incontestably the universal on the basis of which
the other remained an “other” eternally apart. Thanks to the immense
work of the feminists, we now have access to conceptual institutions
that allow us to mark the difference not between man and woman but
between, on the one hand, the former pair made up of man, an un-
marked category, and woman, a single marked category, and on the
other hand the new and infinitely more problematic pair^57 made up of
the two equally marked categories of man and woman. We can foresee
without difficulty that the same thing will very soon hold true for the
categories of nature and culture. For the moment, “nature” still has
the resonance that “man” had twenty or forty years ago, as the un-
challengeable, blinding, universal category against the background of
which “culture” stands out clearly and distinctly, eternally particular.
“Nature” is thus an unmarked category, while “culture” is marked.
Now, however, through a movement just as vast in scope, political
ecology proposes to do for nature what feminism undertook to do and
is still undertaking to do for man: wipe out the ancient self-evidence
with which it was taken a bit too hastily as if it were all there is.^58
What Successor for the Bicameral Collective?
With this first chapter, we have covered both the easiest and the most
difficult ground. The easiest, because it was still only a matter of clear-
ing away false problems before addressing the truly arduous questions
of the new public institutions to be built. The most difficult, because
we now know what concerns these new institutions have to address. If
we have made a forced march across landscapes that merited a more
leisurely pace, at least we have reached our base camp. The combined
findings of science studies, political ecology, social sciences, and com-
parative anthropology, which we have sketched out in turn (and each
of which, as I am well aware, would have warranted a much more ex-
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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