settle for “power relations,” for a multiplicity of irreconcilable view-
points, for Machiavellian cleverness alone. The first had reality but
no politics; the second had politics and mere “social construction.”
Both had in reserve a quick shortcut that could bring discussion to an
end: irrefutable reason, indisputable force, right and might, knowl-
edge and power. Each house threatened to exterminate the other. Only
the Third Estate, the collective, suffered from this long cold war, for it
was forever deprived of a scientific and political competence by the
shortcuts of power or those of reason.
Still, the lessons of Chapter 1 are exclusively negative: if we have un-
derstood that nature cannot serve as a model for politics, we still do
not know how to find a better one than nature. This is the consider-
ably more difficult question that we must now confront: how can we
draw up a Constitution that will allow us to achieve a common world
through due process? But first of all, what term should we use to de-
scribe what will replace this kingdom divided against itself? The ven-
erable word “Republic” is admirably suited to our task, if we agree to
bring out the overtones of the underlying Latin wordres,“thing.”^1 As
has been frequently noted, it is as if political ecology found again in
theres publica,the “public thing,” the ancient etymology that has
linked the word for thing and the word for judicial assembly since the
dawn of time:Dingandthing, resandreus.^2
The empire of the modernist Constitution, now on the decline, had
made us tend to forget that a thing emerges before anything else asa
scandal at the heart of an assembly that carries on a discussion requiring a
judgment brought in common.This way of looking at things does not en-
tail an anthropomorphism that would take us back to the premodern
past—a past that is only exoticism on the part of the moderns, of
course—but rather the end of a ruinous anthropomorphism through
which objects, indifferent to the fate of humans, were in the habit of
intervening from the outside and acting without due process to sweep
away the work of political assemblies. Indeed, appearances notwith-
standing, the famous “indifference of the cosmos to human passions”
offers the oddest of anthropomorphisms, since it claims togive formto
humans, while silencing them through the incontestable power of ob-
jectivity devoid of all passion! The nonhumans had been kidnapped
and turned into stones that could be thrown at the assembleddemos.
POLITICS OF NATURE
54