Economic rationality is not only surrounded by, but founded on the unknowability of the totality of the process. Homo reconomicus is the one island of rationality possible within an economic process whose uncontrollable nature does not challenge, but instead founds the rationality of the atomistic behavior of homo reconomicus. Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It· is originally and definitively constituted from a multiplicity of points ofview which is all the more irreducible as thissame multiplicity assures their ultimate and spontaneous convergence. Economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; economics is a di!'iciplinewithout totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility ofasovereign point ll{view qy:er the totality ofthe state that he has to govern.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 1453