They have been created to instill mutual horror. The only question
thus becomes whether one can bring this reciprocal disgust to an end
in order to form a different public life around them.
Here is the turning point where we are going to grasp the enormous
difference between the civil war of the subject-object opposition and
the civil collaboration between the human-nonhuman pair. Just as the
notion of speech, in the preceding section, designated not someone
who was speaking about a mute thing, but an impediment, a difficulty,
a gamut of possible positions, a profound uncertainty, so too the hu-
man-nonhuman pair does not refer us to a distribution of the beings
of the pluriverse, but to an uncertainty, toa profound doubt about the
nature of action,to a whole gamut of positions regarding the trials that
make it possible to define anactor*.
Let us begin with the good-sense evidence from which we are going
to seek to distance ourselves little by little. According to tradition, the
social actor endowed with consciousness, speech, will, and intention,
on the one hand, has to be distinguished from the thing that obeys
causal determinations, on the other. Although they are often condi-
tioned, even determined, human actors can nevertheless be said to be
defined by their freedom, whereas things obey only chains of causal-
ity. A thing cannot be said to be an actor, in any case not a social actor,
since it does notact,in the proper sense of the verb; it only behaves.^24
It is easy to see how these definitions paralyze political ecology.
They oblige it in effect to choose too soon between two catastrophic
solutions, each of which returns to the vocabulary of two illicit assem-
blies: naturalization on the one hand, socialization on the other. Ei-
ther it takes the model of the object and extends it to the entire
biosphere, humans included, in order to solve the problems of the
planet—but then it no longer has at its disposal human actors en-
dowed with the freedom and will to do the triage and decide what
must be done and what must not be done—or else, conversely, it ex-
tends the model of will to everything, including the planet—but then
it no longer has the raw, unattackable nonhuman matters of fact that
allow it to silence the multiplicity of subjective viewpoints, each of
which expresses itself in the name of its own interests. Let us not
imagine that political ecology has a middle way at its disposal, an in-
termediate solution that would combine a bit of naturalization and a
bit of socialization, for then it would have to draw the line between
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