attachmentsbetween humans and nonhumans, and who can imagine,
in order to redistribute bonds and passions, likes and dislikes, recom-
binations of goods and people that are as yet unknown. By freeing up
this competence, we are going to link the fate of humans and non-
humans, possessors and possessions, more intimately. Persons will be
more solidly associated with goods and goods with persons.
More remarkable still is the aptitude of economics to fulfill the
requirement of relevance pertaining to consultation (no. 2), by discov-
ering for each type of attachment theprocess of interesting—that is, of
inducing interest—which is proper to it, the juries that alone are quali-
fied to judge it, whether in the form of consumers, specialists, experts,
amateurs, or tasters, or in the form of exploiters, exploitees, outcasts,
or profiteers.^41 By all possible mediations, interests are going to be-
comearticulable.If we are going to talk about “liberating the produc-
tive forces,” then we have to leave the upper house full latitude to ar-
ticulate the processes of interesting. Under the old and new regimes
alike, economicssums upthe attachments, but the meaning of the term
“summary” has changed: whereas before, the summarywas substituted
for the whole as primary qualities were substituted for secondary
ones, from now on the summaryis addedto the whole. With the Old
Regime, one could dispense with everything that one did not incor-
porate into the calculation; with the new Constitution, we retain in
memory what we would be at risk of forgetting: we cannot even hope
ever to be rid of these things.^42 Even more than through the action of
scientists and politicians, with the help of economists propositions
can be expressed; interests have a say in the matter. Through the circu-
lation of its tracers, economics makes the collectivedescribable.
The Contribution of Moralists
Let us recall the goal of our itinerary once more. By enumerating the
succession of gifts set down in each of the baskets by the various fair-
ies, we are going to begin to understand the nature of these functions
other than as hybrids of science, politics, administration, and moral-
ity. If they give us for a moment the impression of a badly stitched-to-
gether consensus, it is because we can only gradually wipe out the
artifices of a long separation between the various professions. Later, in
the second section, we shall discover the functions of the collective
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