emy from a criminal, he makes the error of completely forgetting nonhumans and con-
fusing politics in general with just one of the functions (that of institution* of exteri-
ority) in which political skill plays a role (Schmitt 1976 [1963]). To make his work
usable, I have had to undertake a risky genetic manipulation and blend Schmitt’s “en-
emy” with Hans Jonas’s “sense of danger” ( Jonas 1984): it is easy to see that the exte-
rior is not a nature, but an otherness capable of doing us harm and even of doing us
in, and that “decision-making” corresponds to only a seventh of the collective’s func-
tions.
- I see the current quarrel over genetically modified organisms as the first example
of the internecine wars (technological, economic, juridical, organizational, and geo-
political—in short, worldwide and total after their fashion), since the appeal to the sci-
ences cannot in any case calm the debate by making it zero in on a common world.
Even the mad cow episode is, from this viewpoint, less “innovating,” since one can still
imagine retroactively that one “should have been able” to foresee the dangers, thanks
to the sciences and technologies. With genetically modified organisms, the sciences
and technologies are clearly participating in the combat as an additional source of un-
certainty. And the debate is important preciselybecausethere is no clear-cut risk. What
is at stake is clearly a cosmogram: a world in which one wants to live. - In an article that has been very important for this book, Viveiros de Castro
(1998) shows to what extent ethnography is wrong to spread the rumor that other peo-
ples always designate themselves by an ethnocentric expression that means “men” or
“real men.” In the case of the Amazon region, at least, a mistake in translation gave the
first person plural—“we”—as the proper name of the people. The same problem arises
with the use of the first person plural in the designation of the collective. There is no
people consisting of “us,” at least not yet. - At the University of Chicago I myself experienced the weakness of such a formu-
lation when I had simultaneously to confront the anger of the “Sokalists” who were de-
manding that I consider cosmology as absolutely and not relatively different from “the”
indigenous cosmologies, and the amusement of anthropologists who were demanding
that I respect the diversity of “the” indigenous cosmologies without requiring in addi-
tion that they confront the requirement of the unity of reality, the one that is imposed
by the principle of symmetry and that would have consisted in explaining “the” cos-
mology of physicistsin the same termsas those of indigenous peoples. They were all in
harmony as they avoided my way of posing the argument: the former in order to main-
tain the unity of nature, the latter in order to maintain the multiplicity of cosmologies.
For the former, I was a relativist anthropologist; for the latter, I gave too much credit to
the sciences, while demanding that reality be spoken of once again. The naturalists
were indignant that I was speaking of multiplicity; the culturalists were indignant that
I was still singing the same old song about unity. The indignation alone was the same,
even though it was focused on exactly what kept the peace in the other camp. Every-
body was pounding on the table, but out of synch with the other camp, and that gave
the conversations a fine drumbeat effect! I had never before felt to this extent the divi-
sion of functions between naturalists and culturalists. If, thanks to the science wars, we
now know what effect the culturalist explanation based on cosmology “among other
things” has on a cosmologist, we do not know, so far as I can tell, what effect being re-
NOTES TO PAGES 207–211
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