present chapter, I shall try to define the equipment of “citizens,” as it
were, who are called to sit in a single assembly, whereas they had al-
ways before, to extend the metaphor, lived in a society of Orders
known as the Nobility, the Clergy, and the Third Estate: I am con-
vinced that when these two houses are brought together, the effects
for the future Republic will be the same as those produced when, in
Versailles, in 1789, the Third Estate, the Nobility, and the Clergy re-
fused to sit separately and to vote by Order.
While the revolutionary examples have their charm, still, the con-
stitutional upheavals of the past concerned humans alone! Now, to-
day’s counterrevolutionary upheavals also concern nonhumans. What,
then, for the associations of humans and nonhumans, is the equivalent
of the one-man-one-vote principle invented by my French ancestors
when they refused to hold their sessions according to the divisions of
the Old Regime? Here is the second difficulty that we shall have to
resolve if we are going to learn how to convoke the collective.
Will we have to go so far as to give nonhumans voting rights?^9 I
need only invoke this sort of difficulty to bring a dreadful specter into
view: the obligation to engage in metaphysics, that is, to define in turn
how the pluriverse is furnished and with what properties the members
of the Republic must be endowed. I then fall into a painful contradic-
tion: it is as if I had to define a metaphysics common to humans and
nonhumans, whereas I have rejected the nature-society distinction
precisely because it imposed a particular metaphysics without due
process, ametaphysics of nature, to choose a deliberately paradoxical
expression. If, as so many ecological thinkers have invited us to do, we
have to extricate ourselves from traditional metaphysics in order to
embrace a different, less dualistic, more generous, warmer metaphys-
ics, we shall never manage to draft the new Constitution, for any
metaphysics has the disagreeable characteristic of leading to intermi-
nable disputes. I am quite willing to reopen a public discussion that
has long been prohibited, but I cannot expect the debate to depend on
prior agreementabout the furnishing of the pluriverse—which is just
what the kingly power that parceled out the primary qualities we all
share and the secondary qualities that divide us sought to obtain on
the cheap and without discussion. I want this common world to be
achievedafterthe new Constitution has been drafted, not before. So
we find ourselves confronting a classic problem ofbootstrapping:if we
POLITICS OF NATURE
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