matically zeroing in on the best of all possible worlds if the State’s
claims did not intervene stupidly to distort its calculations. By shuf-
fling the whole of the collective together, political economics would
thus remain the unsurpassable horizon of our time: ecology would
have only to let itself be swallowed up by economics as the prophet Jo-
nah let himself be swallowed by the whale.
“Nature,” as we now know, does not refer to a domain of reality but
to a particular function of politics reduced to a rump parliament, to a
certain way of constructing the relation between necessity and free-
dom, multiplicity and unity, to a hidden procedure for apportioning
speech and authority, for dividing up facts and values. With political
economics, naturalism inundates the inside of the collective. Thanks
to the notion of self-regulating markets, it will be possible to do with-
out the question of government altogether, since the relations that are
internal to the collective are going to be similar to those which con-
nect predators and their prey within ecosystems.^7 The power relations
put an end to discussion in any form, but the power in question is not
the Sovereign’s; it is the power, vouched for by Science, of inevitable
necessity. No balance, no equilibrium is preferable to the forces of re-
call of “nature in us.” The ideal, moreover, would be to have no gov-
ernment at all.^8 Inside the collective itself the bulk of relations be-
tween humans and nonhumans will become an autonomous sphere as
distinct from that of politics and values as the stars, the vast seabeds,
or the penguins of Adélie Land. The three natures combined will stifle
the collective for good. The laws of the nature that is cold and gray, the
moral requirements of the nature that is warm and green, the harsh
necessities of the nature that is “red in tooth and claw” put an end to
all discourse in advance: politicians may have the last word, but they
have nothing more to say.
Thanks to a detour via the meaning of the word “save,” the genius of
the language has given the verb “economize” the pejorative sense of
“to spare oneself the trouble,” to take a shortcut—in short, to short-
circuit. Nothing is better suited to political economics, which we can
in fact define as “how to economize the political,” “how to shortcut
the work of doing politics for good.”^9 The four functions we sorted out
in Chapter 3 are going to allow us to understand how this “Science of
values,” this axiology, manages to avoid both politics in the name of
Science and the sciences in the name of the requirements of morality.
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