By using objectivity to short-circuit political procedures, people had
dared to confuse the sciences with this shortcut authorized by vio-
lence—and to do so in the name of the highest morality and the most
delicate of virtues! With nature people sought to reason—that is, to
force—their way through. Yes, a genuine intellectual imposture, but
one that has fortunately lost its effect.
The only innovation our project offers is that it seeks a successor for
this “kingdom divided against itself” by drawing upon the resources of
the Third Estate, resources that prejudice alone confused with the
gathering of slaves held in chains in the Cave, prisoners of the social
world. Now that the emergence of nature no longer comes into play to
paralyze the progressive composition of the common world, we have
to become capable of convoking the collective that will be charged
from now on, as its name indicates, with “collecting” the multiplicity
of associations of humans and nonhumans, without resorting to the
brutal segregation between primary qualities and secondary quali-
ties that has made it possible up to now to exercise the kingly func-
tions in secret. This competency on the part of the Third Estate does
exist, but it lies hidden in the form of a double problem of representa-
tion that the old Constitution required us to treat separately: episte-
mology seeking to know on what condition anexactrepresentation of
external reality is possible; political philosophy seeking to know on
what condition a representative can represent his fellowsfaithfully.No
one can recognize what these two questions have in common, now,
since the radical distinction between them has become the very sign
of the highest moral virtue: we must take every precaution, they say,
not to “mix” questions of nature with questions of politics, not to con-
fuse being with what ought to be!^3 It is by the absence of mixing, we
are told, that we have always recognized, and continue to recognize,
the virtue of a moral philosophy. History, during all this time, full of
sound and fury, fortunately took on the responsibility of doing just the
opposite: mixing natures and politics in all possible forms, and over
the last several decades finally imposing the necessity of an explicit
political epistemology* in place of the old epistemology police.
An anecdote will allow us to illustrate the passage from a divided
kingdom to the Republic of things. The philosophy of the sciences has
always used the Galileo affair to its advantage. Assembled in a room, a
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
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