conclave of princes and cardinals is discussing how to lead the world
and what their flock must believe in order to go to Heaven; in another
room, isolated at the far end of the palace, in his study turned into a
laboratory, Galileo is deciphering the laws that govern the world and
make the heavens go round. Between the two rooms, there is no possi-
ble overlap, because the concern in the first one is with multiple be-
liefs and in the second with a single reality. On the one hand, there is
the multiplicity of secondary qualities that maintain all human beings
in a state of illusion; on the other, there is one human being dealing
with truth, alone with nature, defining the primary qualities that are
invisible to everyone else. Here indeed we have the two-house collec-
tive of the old Constitution.
In the fall of 1997, in Kyoto, there was just one conclave to welcome
the great figures of this world, princes, lobbyists, heads of state, cap-
tains of industry, scientists and researchers from every discipline, and
to decide in common how the planet was faring and how we should all
behave toward it from now on to preserve the quality of our sky.^4 Ye t
the Kyoto conference did not settle for bringing together the two an-
cient assemblies, one for politicians and one for scientists, in a third
house that would be bigger, broader, more organic, more synthetic,
more holistic, and more complex. No, politicians and scientists, in-
dustrialists and militants found themselves on the benches of thesame
assemblywithout being able to count any longer on the ancient advan-
tages of salvation from the outside by Science, or to murmur with a
shrug of the shoulders: “What do these arguments matter to us? The
Earth will keep on turning without us, whatever we may say!” We have
gone from two houses to a single collective. Politics has to get back to
workwithoutthe transcendence of nature: here is the historical phe-
nomenon that we are forcing ourselves to comprehend.^5
The end of nature is not the end of our difficulties. On the contrary,
as we discover the precipices over which we risk falling at every step,
we come to understand the advantages that the immoderate use of the
notion of nature gave our predecessors: by using this notion to short-
circuit both politics and the sciences, they simplified all obstacles as if
by magic. But we who are no longer either enchanted or fascinated
by nature, after the forced march of approach in the previous chap-
ter, find ourselves up against the wall—that is, ready to get down to
POLITICS OF NATURE
56