The article discusses the experience of Michel Foucault's appeal to liberal economic theory, which became his way to avoid subject metaphysics and teleological history. The author shows how Foucault, after going through a series of searches in the 1960s, ascertained the death of a subject who had been a central figure in European philosophy since Descartes. For Foucault, this statement was a rejection of the metaphysics of the New Time and the definition of his place in history as a postmodern one. In his later works, Foucault replaces the sovereign subject with a multiple and pluralistic model of subjectivity. The transition from the register of the history of philosophy to the register of the history of ideas allowed him to move away from the metaphysics of the subject into the space of positive knowledge, but the methodology and ideological position of a historian of philosophy provided him immunity from teleological history. Thus, as the author demonstrates, Foucault represents a type of a nomadic intelle