uses the epistemological myth of a nature “that imposes itself of its
own accord”; it is good sense that speaks of “striking self-evidence”
and “gripping facts.” To give political ecology a new foundation, we do
not have to choose between a reasonable theory that presupposes a
mute nature and speaking humans, on the one hand, and a far-fetched
theory that turns lab coats into the speech prosthesis of nonhumans,
on the other. We find ourselves faced with an old wives’ tale that pre-
supposes in the same breath mute things and speaking facts, things
that speak on their own and indisputable experts. And I am proposing,
very reasonably, to make this mythic contradiction comprehensible by
restoring all the difficultiesthat a human encounters in speaking to hu-
mans about nonhumanswiththeir participation.
In other words, while the new myth may already exist, the concep-
tual institution that would make it fruitful does not yet exist. This
institution is what we have to invent. Like all modernist myths, the ab-
errant opposition between mute nature and speaking facts was aimed
at making the speech of scientistsindisputable;thus, this speech passed
through a mysterious operation resembling ventriloquism, from “I
speak” to “the facts speak for themselves” to “all you have to do is shut
up”! We can say what we like about the allegory of the Cave, but we
can associate it neither with reason nor with simplicity. There can be
nothing more archaic, more magical, even if the myth of the Cave also
serves as the primal scene for the monstrous marriage of the episte-
mology police with political philosophy blessed by sociology.
I do not claim that things speak “on their own,” since no beings,
not even humans, speak on their own, but alwaysthrough something or
someone else.I have not required human subjects to share the right of
speech of which they are so justly proud with galaxies, neurons, cells,
viruses, plants, and glaciers. I have only called attention to a phenome-
non that precedes thedistributionof forms of speech, which is called a
Constitution. I have simply recalled what ought to be taken as self-evi-
dent from now on: between the speaking subject of the political tradi-
tion and the mute things of the epistemological tradition, there always
was a third term,indisputable speech,a previously invisible form of po-
litical and scientific life that made it possible sometimes to transform
mute things into “speaking facts,” and sometimes to make speaking
subjects mute by requiring them to bow down before nondiscussable
matters of fact.
As I said in the Introduction, we do not have a choice between en-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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