to put an end to civil wars by making peace over laboratory facts observed by gentle-
men, the twenty-first century is reopening the question and discovering with some
horror that laboratory facts can be both real and contestable. As for the gentlemen...
(See the conclusion.)
- See the astonishing work of diplomacy by Sahlins (1995), in which he grapples
with one of his opponents who purports to define the Hawaiians as responsible for
Captain Cook’s death thanks to universal “good sense,” confused with the opinion of
the British about God. See also the tremendous effort by Viveiros de Castro, who has
become the spokesperson for the philosophy of the Amerindians of the Amazon re-
gion, to assess the difficulty of the enterprise of justice: if the Amerindians agreed to
define a common world, it would be necessary to change metaphysics. It is moreover
from them, through the intermediary of Viveiros de Castro, that I learned the use of
the word “multinaturalism,” since their collective presupposes a human culture com-
mon to all human and nonhuman beings, andnaturesthat differ according to bodies
(Castro 1998). - To this, oh! so catholic goal, Viveiros de Castro always replied that “his” people
in the Amazon would simply answer with a polite but firm “No way!” To be one world,
to live under one roof—that also has to be negotiated, and persistently. - I encountered it in Africa without understanding it, some thirty years ago; it was
only in Tobie Nathan’s practice that I myself recognized the difference between en-
countering a patient under the auspices of anthropology and encountering a patient
under the auspices of risky diplomacy (Nathan 1994). Naturally, those who cry, as did a
well-known Parisian psychoanalyst, “Without a universal unconscious there is no more
French Republic,” accuse Nathan of culturalism—just as the Sokalists accuse me of so-
cial constructivism. Through all these misunderstandings we see the reaction of mod-
ernism, incapable of imagining a successor to the nature-culture opposition. If you
want the encounter to occur on a new basis, if you want those you are addressing to
share in the common basis of essential requirements, if you want nonhumans to make
a difference that is not only in fact, you are necessarily a traitor. Yes, the diplomat is a
traitor, but he may succeed where the faithful fail, because he alone doubts that his fel-
low citizens have succeeded in already discovering their real war goals. - Structuralism, like Hegel’s solitary syntheses, had the disadvantage of establish-
ing the common world and its laws of composition (symmetry, inversion, similarity,
opposition, condensation, and so on) without taking into account those whose cultures
were being thus unified and whose opinions were taken to be as vain as the secondary
qualities* for the metaphysics of nature. After recognizing both the importance of this
distinction between objective and subjective and the impossibility of applying them,
Lévi-Strauss sees no other solution than to invent a newunknown,the structural un-
conscious that “enables us to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once
oursandother:which are the condition of all the forms of mental life of all men at all
times” (Lévi-Strauss 1987 [1950]), 35). - It is slanderous to speak of diplomats as mere rug merchants. If we take, for ex-
ample, the debate between American creationists and evolutionists, we are not going to
split the difference, with an ill-conceived compromise between a world created six
thousand years ago and an Earth formed six billion years ago, and agree, for example,
NOTES TO PAGES 213–217
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