Dalla biopolitica al pensiero istituente. Le letture di Gilles Deleuze nella filosofia di Roberto Esposito

his article focus on the role of Gilles Deleuze in Roberto Esposito’s thought, and in particular on the relevance that his reflection has recently assumed in Esposito, as the origin of one of the two contemporary paradigms of political ontology: the constituent one. According to Esposito, this paradigm seems today to have lost its ability to respond to the current crisis of politics, because it has inherited from Deleuze a theoretical orientation that fails to think the conflict, without dissolving it in a relentless production of differences, which risk self-neutralisation. Even in what might seem a possible alternative path in Deleuze’s thought, in which some conceptual figures avoid this risk, allowing an adequate consideration of the conflict, Esposito sees the same danger of neutralisation that he perceives in general in Deleuze’s political ontology. This article discusses these figures, and in particular the concept of minority, as it appears in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka (Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Les Éditions de Minuit 1975