stead of existing by themselves, they are going to be able to unroll the
long chain of nonhumans, without which freedom would be out of the
question.
As for the scientific disciplines, once they have been made visible,
present, active, and agitated, while ceasing to be threatening, they are
going to be able to deploy the formidable potential of the pluriverse
that they have never had the opportunity to develop up to now, since
they have been constantly crushed under the obligation to produce ob-
jects “of nature” as rapidly as possible, while avoiding “social con-
structions,” in order to return to society as quickly as possible and re-
form it by means of unchallengeable reason. By loosening the mortal
grip of epistemology and sociology, political ecology allows the scien-
tific disciplines, freed of their task of (political) epistemology, to mul-
tiply the enclosures, the arenas, the laboratories by means of which
humans and nonhumans—both newly liberated—associate. Science is
dead; long live research and long live the sciences!
Everything remains to be done, but at least we have emerged from
the Cave era! Public speech no longer lives under the permanent
threat of salvation from on high that would invoke laws not made by
human hands to short-circuit the procedures that allow us to define
the common world. Surprise: when we abandon that ancient figure of
reason, we are not abandoning either external reality or the sciences
or even the future of reason. The old opposition between scientists
and politicians, between Socrates and Callicles, between reason and
power, yields from now on to a different and more fruitful opposition
between the perennial quarrel opposing epistemologists to sophists,
on the one hand, and the issue of the collective on the other hand. The
old Constitution, invented to keep the prisoners of the Cave in captiv-
ity, has had ample time to roll out its effects; it is time now to make an
effort to imagine a political philosophy for assemblages of humans and
nonhumans. As we shall see in the following chapters, since West-
erners have always governed, under cover of nature, with a two-house
collective, we may as well do it right this time, explicitly, in the full
light of day andaccording to due process.
POLITICS OF NATURE
52