tensive treatment), come together to raise one single question:What
collective can we convoke, now that we no longer have two houses, only one
of which acknowledged its political character?What new Constitution
can replace the old one? As for the question “Must we have a politics
that is oriented toward humans or one that also takes nature into ac-
count?” we now know that this is a false dichotomy, since, at least in
the Western version of public life, the laws of nature and those of hu-
mans have always coexisted, each under threat from the other. We
know, too, that today for the first time there is a credible alternative to
this bicameral politics, since it is as implausible to assimilate the work
of the sciences to Science as it is to reduce politics—as the progres-
sive composition of a common world—to the Cave politics of power
and interests. Contrary to the cries of horror that the defenders of the
old Constitution continue to emit (though with less and less effect), it
is perfectly possible to speak of external reality without immediately
confusing it with its hasty unification by a power that dares not bear
that name and that still displays itself under the less and less pro-
tective cover of the epistemology police. Thus, for the first time we
can remove the parentheses from that particular form of (political)
philosophy born in the ages of the Cave and imagine itssuccessorby
speaking openly of political epistemology, provided that we bring the
sciences—and not Science—together with the question of the collec-
tive—and not with the social world understood as a prison.
Like all the results that we shall try to obtain, this one is extravagant
only in appearance. Only its banality makes it difficult. More pre-
cisely, we have so little experience innotdramatizing the question of
nature,notturning it into a gigantomachy, that we have trouble recog-
nizing how simple it is to gain access to a not yet gathered multiplicity.
The new distinction toward which we are being led, as we see it, by
political ecology no longer divides nature from society, ecology from
politics; instead, it separates two operations that we are going to learn
to characterize in Chapter 3. One bears upon the multiplication of en-
tities and the other on their composition, their arrangement. In other
words, as we can see more clearly now, nonhumans are no longer ob-
jects at all, and no longer social constructions, either. Objects are not
innocent inhabitants of the world:the object was the nonhuman plus the
polemic of nature imparting a lesson to the politics of subjects.Once freed
from this polemic, from this bifurcation of nature,^59 nonhumans are
going to occupy an entirely different position.
POLITICS OF NATURE
50