also much more complicated, for the same reason—for want of short-
circuits, it is going to have to start all over and compose the common
world bit by bit. In other words, it will have toengage in politics,an ac-
tivity to which we had finally gotten rather unaccustomed, given the
extent to which confidence in Science had allowed us to postpone the
day of reckoning in the belief that the common world had already
been constituted, for the most part, under the auspices of nature.
How should we designate the associations of humans and non-
humans of this collective in the process of coming together? The term
I have been using up to now is very awkward, for no one imagines ad-
dressing a black hole, an elephant, an equation, or a jet engine, with
the resounding label “citizen”! We need a new term that has no whiff
of the Old Regime about it, one that allows us to recapitulate in a sin-
gle expression the speech impedimenta, the uncertainty about actions,
and also the variable degrees of reality that define civil life from now
on. I am offering the termpropositions: I am going to say that a river, a
troop of elephants, a climate, El Niño, a mayor, a town, a park, have to
be taken as propositions to the collective. The word has the advantage
of being able to pull together the meanings of the four preceding sec-
tions. “I have a proposition for you” indicates uncertainty and not ar-
rogance; it is the peace offering that puts an end to war; it belongs to
the realm of language now shared by humans and nonhumans alike; it
indicates wonderfully that what is in question is a new and unforeseen
association, one that is going to become more complicated and more
extended; finally, although the word comes from linguistics, nothing
limits it to language alone, and it can serve to signal the recalcitrance
of the “position-takings” that some adopt and refuse to relinquish,
even as it is managing not to give external reality the stubborn form of
an indisputable brute matter of fact. I do not seek to claim that the
pluriverse is composed of propositions, but simply that in order to be-
gin its civic work of collection, the Republic is going to consider only
propositions instead of and in the place of the earlier subjects and
objects.
Once again, it is not a matter of ontology, or even of metaphysics,
but solely of political ecology.^35 The use of the term “proposition” sim-
ply allows usnotto use the old system ofstatement, through which
humans used to speak about an external world from which they were
separated by a gulf that the slender bridge of reference sought to cross
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
83