be the problem, in the following section, of finding a proper body for
them.
To understand the nature of the beings to be collected, we must
completely do away with the opposition between two types of assem-
bly. This is the only way to define the job that ecology and politics
have in common. It will be objected that “things” and “people” still
remain, and that we are still using the expressions “humans” and
“nonhumans”: even if we displace our attention toward the speech
prostheses they have in common, even if, to convoke them, we fuse
procedures that come both from the laboratory and from representa-
tive assemblies, the fact remains that our gaze, as if we were watching
a tennis match, turns now toward objects, now toward subjects. Thus,
the sciences and the politics do not yet have any common population.
Let everyone take care of his own side, and the cows will be well
looked after—at least as long as they are not mad. It will never be pos-
sible to believe that these two terms have to be fused to consider a
mix, which would be nothing but a frightful melting pot, a monster
even stranger than the nonhuman speech brought into play in the pre-
vious section. What is the common matter on which the scientist’s
calling and the politician’s both come to bear?
The image of a tennis match is not a bad one. Far from referring to
isolated spheres that have to be brought together by a higher con-
sciousness, or “surpassed” by a dialectical movement, the notions of
object and subject have just one goal: to return the ball to the other
side, while keeping the adversary in a constant state of alert. We can
say nothing about subjects that does not entail humiliating objects; we
can say nothing about objects that does not entail shaming subjects. If
political ecology used these notions as its point of departure, it would
succumb at once to the polemic they carry within themselves. If it
claimed to “get beyond their contradiction” through a miraculous fu-
sion, it would die even faster, poisoned by a violence that runs counter
to its physiology.^23 To put it still another way, subjects and objects do
not belong to the pluriverse whose experimental metaphysics we need
to reconstruct: “subject” and “object” are the names given to forms of
representative assemblies, so that they can never bring themselves to-
gether in the same space and proceed together to take the same sol-
emn oath. I am not responsible for thrusting these notions into the po-
litical discussion. They are already there; they have always been there.
POLITICS OF NATURE
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