nonhumans are required to meet separately, the former protected by
the politics of power and the latter by the epistemology police. And if
no written articles of law can be found, then people begin to clamor
loud and long for a change in the form of our public life through the
rewriting of a Constitution better adapted to the new concerns.
If we use the word “collective*” in the singular, it is thus not in or-
der to signal the same type of unity as the one implied by the term
“nature,” and still less to designate a utopian “reconciliation between
man and nature.” Nature “in general,” as we are well aware, was in fact
never stable, but always in the process of serving as a pendant to the
irremediable breakup of the social and human world. Now, in the
word “collective,” it is precisely theworkof collecting into a whole
that I want to stress. The word should remind us of sewage systems
where networks of small, medium, and large “collectors” make it pos-
sible to evacuate waste water as well as to absorb the rain that falls on
a large city. This metaphor of thecloaca maximasuits our needs per-
fectly, along with all the paraphernalia of adduction, sizing, purifying
stations, observation points, and manholes necessary to its upkeep.
The more we associate materialities, institutions, technologies, skills,
procedures, and slowdowns with the word “collective,” the better its
use will be: the hard labor necessary for the progressive and public
composition of the future unity will be all the more visible.
By the word “collective” in the singular, I therefore mean not the so-
lution to the problem of the number of collectives (which I shall ad-
dress only in Chapter 5), but simply the reactivation of a problem of
progressive composition of the common world—a problem that the
division into two houses of the old Constitution did not allow us even
to begin to raise, since nature, prematurely unified, appeared to have
resolved the problem once and for all. I have no idea whether there is
just one collective or whether there are three, several, sixty-five, or an
infinite number. I use the word only to mark a political philosophy in
whichthere are no longer twomajor poles of attraction, one that would
produce unity in the form of nature and another that would maintain
multiplicity in the form of societies.Thecollective signifies “every-
thing but not two separated.” By taking an interest in the collective,
we are going back to square one in considering how to recruit an as-
sembly, without continuing to worry about the ancient titles that sent
some to sit in nature’s ranks and others on society’s benches. In the
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
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