that militarized objects were made to play under the old Constitu-
tion. Mute, they nevertheless had the capacity to speak by themselves;
amoral, they nevertheless dictated the most important of moralities to
humans, the one that forces us to bow to the undeniable evidence of
matters of fact; external to all human enterprise, they were neverthe-
less merged without the least difficulty, through the intermediary of
laboratories and industry, into daily life; inanimate, they nevertheless
formed the animation, not to say the souls, of all our bodies; they were
invisible, yet scientists never lost sight of them; they were inessential,
because they lacked speech and values, yet they formed the very es-
sence of reality, in defining the common world; they were indifferent
to our passions, yet they made all the difference in the conflicts waged
by humans over passions; they were devoid of all will, yet their surrep-
titious action was what led poor human wretches to act. If the ex-
changes of competencies between humans and nonhumans to which
we are about to turn appear surprising, I have to ask my readers to be
kind enough to keep on comparing their simplicity to the monstrous
bric-a-brac that we have gotten into the habit of calling, a bit too hast-
ily, reasonable and self-evident; I must ask them to recall that we are
leaving the soldiers in their barracks, and that we are speaking only of
the civil life of humans and nonhumans.
First Division: Learning to Be Circumspect
with SpokespersonsSince the composition of the common world, now that it is no longer a
given from the outset,has to be the object of a debate,the only way to
recognize the “citizenry” within the collective that may be relevant for
public life is to define the collective as an assembly of beingscapable of
speaking.Political philosophy traditionally required discussion to take
the place of violence; now, it also has to be able to replacebothsilence
and the nondiscussable. Why might this vague word “discussion,”
borrowed from the fracas of human assembly, serve to redefine politi-
cal ecology, which bears precisely on beings that do not speak, that be-
long to the nature of mute things?^10 Politics talks and palavers; nature
does not, except in ancient myths, fables, and fairy tales. Yet a slight
displacement of our attention suffices to show that nonhumans, too,
POLITICS OF NATURE
62