Una specie sovraumana. Istituzioni e natura umana secondo Deleuze

The paper discusses the link between the expressive conception of society and the creative conception of human nature in Gilles Deleuze’s work, in order to sketch the main features of his philosophical anthropology. Firstly, I describe the substitution of a repressive model of social life with an expressive one: I insist on the interplay between tendency/nature and institution/culture, and I highlight the fictional dimension of all human acts, thus of all institutions. Secondly, I use some examples to go deeper into the Deleuzian interpretation of the jurisprudence as what advances by working out from singularities, and I explain how the Principle of Singular Reason and the immanent and expressive causality rule the human process of institution. Finally, I focus on some general implications of the Deleuzian connotation of human nature, showing in which sense for Deleuze man is naturally alienated, and clarifying the meaning of a Deleuzian “overhuman” image of human being.