in large part to the work of laboratories. Now we have to test the re-
ciprocal proposition and look at terms often reserved for the afore-
mentioned objects, for example, “reality.” “Citizens” are equipped for
speech; they can act and associate among themselves; we now face the
task of procuring a proper body for them.
Retaining the part of the notion of external reality that was associ-
ated with the old polemics of the Cave is of course out of the question.
But we also know that abandoning that polemics does not deprive us
of all contact with reality, does not consign us to the tragic destiny
with which we were threatened by the epistemology police. Here, too,
we can appreciate the full difference between the work accomplished
by the subject-object opposition and what the association of humans
and nonhumans allows. No one would ever appeal to subjectivity ex-
cept to avoid the abomination called reifying, objectifying, or natural-
izing. To keep that monster from seizing power, one would doany-
thing;one would even maintain that there are such things as subjects
“detached” from nature, endowed with consciousness and will, with
an imprescriptible right to liberty—in short, subjects that are radically
and forever exempt from the cruel necessity of causal chains. And it is
indeed a monster that threatens the subject, since, under cover of na-
ture, there emerges the indisputable speech that we have shown, in the
second section above, to be so very aberrant.
But why would anyone resort to such an aberration? It takes power-
ful reasons; otherwise, this indisputable speech would at once appear
for what it is: a contradiction in terms. When people make up their
minds to use it without remorse, it is in order to struggle against an-
other abomination: the violence of political passions, the vagaries of
the opinions, beliefs, values, and interests that threaten to invade the
definition of the facts, dissolve objectivity, ruin access to things them-
selves, and replace the real world with the old refrain of human feel-
ings. To keep this other monster from seizing power, one would do
anything;one would even maintain that, apart from all human society,
there are indisputable, objective, eternal laws that are absolutely ex-
empt from the agitations of the crowd and before which subjects must
kneel in humility. At each swing of the pendulum, the range widens:
one absurdity is followed by a larger one that has the opposite mean-
ing. This infernal oscillation is what has gradually rendered the notion
of external reality useless, over the centuries. There is seemingly noth-
POLITICS OF NATURE
78