work—provided that our readers, like the Hebrews in the desert, do
not start to miss the bitter sweetness of the onions of Egypt.
Difficulties in Convoking the Collective
How are we going to manage to convoke the collective on new
grounds? There is no shortage of ecological thinkers who clamor to
“get beyond” a disastrous opposition between “man and his environ-
ment.” Why not conceive of the convocation quite simply as the reuni-
fication of things and people, objects and subjects? At first glance, it
seems that, if we were to bring the two terms together, the set and its
complement, we would achieve the sought-for unity very quickly, and
without any shots being fired, we would find ourselves in a unified
kingdom upon which the division into two houses would no longer
impose a state of apartheid. Political ecology would then be defined as
the conjunction of ecology and politics, things and people, nature and
society. It would suffice to join the two assemblies together to solve
the problem of the composition of the common world and thus have
an excellent Constitution at our disposal. Unfortunately, “the” collec-
tive, appearances notwithstanding, cannot be achieved by a simple
adding togetherof nature and society. This is the first difficulty.
If it were enough to bring “man and nature” together in order to re-
solve ecological crises, the constitutional crisis that ecological crises
have unleashed would have been resolved long ago—whereas in fact it
is just beginning. If crises manifest themselves in the disappearance of
nature, they manifest themselves even more clearly in the disappear-
ance of the traditional means for convoking the two assemblies of na-
ture and society. To bring the two together would be to commit a
crime against knowledge, morality, and politics simultaneously.^6 We
now know why: nature used to make it possible to subject the human
assembly to a permanent threat of salvation by Science that paralyzed
it in advance; conversely, the prison of the social world made it possi-
ble to subject the assembly of nature to a permanent threat of pollu-
tion by violence. The two houses that were constituted for their mu-
tual paralysis thus clearly cannot be brought together without further
ado: the procedure for convoking them has first to be redefined from
top to bottom. For the time being, there is nothing in political philoso-
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
57