Fra normalizzazione e individualizzazione. Soggetto, corpi, anarchia

In this work I try to define the implicit assumptions about the human nature moving from which contemporary social theory develops the notions of normalization and individualization. Though the current relevance of such concepts seems to be inevitably connected with the emergence of the largely contested theoretical formulations by post-structuralist philosophy about the infamous 'death of the subject', social theory seems not fully understand the implications of this idea for the study of diversity, for traditional distinctions between theory and practice, and, above all, between subjectivity and objectivity. My main point is that the post-structuralist critique of the subject, in particular as offered by Michel Foucault, constitutes a useful resource for Western thought in relation to the ways it formulates theoretical model of human nature. In this sense, to develop alternative formulations of human nature implies the possibility to re-formulate in an alternative way problems which are the corner-stone of the whole field of social sciences. An example is constituted by the possibility to critically revise a theory of Western society's contemporary crisis emerging from the exhaustion of the emancipatory potential of individualism, which results in the unexpected coincidence between social processes of normalization and individualization. This theoretical trend culminates in the identification of a possible solution to such a crisis through the adjustment of traditional political institutions to instances of change coming 'from the bottom', alluding with this expression to the existence of an original and fundamental innovative nucleus of the human sphere in general. It coincides, when related to society at large, with a nucleus of shared values, and, when related to the single individual, with its innate instinct to sociality, based, at the end of the day, on the physiological and objective structure of the human body. On the contrary, the post-structuralist critique to the subject describes the bodies as carriers of an irreducible diversity, which remains inexpressible in its own terms. Such critique leads to an epistemological approach according to which traditional conceptual distinctions between a 'top' and a 'bottom' lose their meaning, and become an effect, rather than a cause, of the unstable and variable relations of power of which social reality is composed. In this sense, post-structuralist philosophy of the subject opens up the issue of power, a traditionally exclusive domain of political philosophy, to the contribution of the whole of social sciences.