gaging in political ecology and not engaging in it. By refusing to en-
gage in it, we would be accepting the strangest of all possible distribu-
tions: the speaking subject could see himself silenced at any moment
by a more authoritarian speech that would never appear as such, since
it would remain indisputable and no one could cut it off.By defending
the rights of the human subject to speak and to be the sole speaker, one does
not establish democracy; one makes it increasingly more impracticable every
day.^21 Conversely, everything becomes clear if one agrees to situate the
Republicbeforethe distribution of forms, genres, and speaking times,
and if one allows the unfolding of the whole gamut of speech impedi-
menta that preclude over-hasty pronouncements about who is speak-
ing and with what authority. I am not replacing the old metaphysics of
objects and subjects by a “richer” vision of the universe in which hu-
mans and things would speak as poets; I am only keeping open once
again the problem of the assertion of the right to speak, a right that is
necessary to the new assembly of humans and nonhumans. One can
refuse to raise the question of who is speaking, but then one should
2. How to Bring the Collective Together
Democracy can only be conceived if it can freely traverse the now-
dismantled border between science and politics, in order to add a se-
ries of new voices to the discussion, voices that have been inaudible up
to now, although their clamor pretended to override all debate:the
voices of nonhumans.To limit the discussion to humans, their interests,
their subjectivities, and their rights, will appear as strange a few years
from now as having denied the right to vote of slaves, poor people, or
women. To use the notion of discussion while limiting it to humans
alone, without noticing that there are millions of subtle mechanisms
capable of adding new voices to the chorus, would be to allow preju-
dice to deprive us of the formidable power of the sciences. Half of
public life is found in laboratories; that is where we have to look for it.
Forgetting laboratories had only disadvantages: political discussion
was deprived of the multiplicity of voices that can make themselves
heard and thus modify the future composition of the collective; the
lab coats were obliged to become experts, to intervene with authority,
forgetting their own perplexity, their skills, and their instruments, to
intervene and short-circuit the debate time after time with indisput-
able facts and laws cast in bronze.^22 On the one hand, then, humans
were deprived of the immense reservoir of democracy constituted by
nonhumans; on the other, the lab coats were deprived of the opportu-
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
69