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from throat to throat killing us without meaning to. The situation
is tragically reversed in ecological change: this time, the pathogen
whose terrible virulence has changed the living conditions of all
the inhabitants of the planet is not the virus at all, it is humanity!”
Although Latour immediately adds that “this does not apply to
all humans, just those who make war on us without declaring war
on us,” the agency which “makes war on us without declaring war
on us” is not just a group of people but the existing global socio-e-
conomic system – in short, the existing global order in which we
all (entire humanity) participate. We can see now in what resides
the truly subversive potential of the notion of assemblage: it comes
forth when we apply it to describe a constellation which also com-
prises humans, but from an “inhuman” standpoint, so that humans
appear in it as just one among the actants. Recall Jane Bennet’s des-
cription of how actants interact at a polluted trash site: how not
only humans but also the rotting trash, worms, insects, abando-
ned machines, chemical poisons, and so on each play their (never
purely passive) role. There is an authentic theoretical and ethico-
-political insight in such an approach. When the so-called New
Materialists like Bennett oppose the reduction of matter to passive
mixture of mechanic parts, they are, of course, not asserting the
old-fashioned direct teleology, but an aleatoric dynamics imma-
nent to matter: »emerging properties« arise out of non-predicta-
ble encounters between multiple kinds of actants, the agency for
any particular act is distributed across a variety of kinds of bodies.
Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon, where the limits of
sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating
in the relevant assemblage. Say, an ecological public is a group of
bodies, some human, most not, that are subjected to harm, defined
as a diminished capacity for action. The ethical implication of such
a stance is that we should recognize our entanglement within larger
assemblages: we should become more sensitive to the demands of
these publics and the reformulated sense of self-interest calls upon

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