La regolazione istituzionale dell’energia e del valore. Politiche di modernizzazione anti-riflessiva nella società del dopo-sviluppo

The essay focuses on the transformations of the subject in the transition from the social-democratic era to neoliberalism, combining the perspective of Bataille’s general economy with Simmel's sociology of value. Against the widespread thesis according to which the neoliberal turn is a further step along the unilinear modern path towards the «free search for value», the author argues that neo-horizontalism responds to the breakdown of the projective logic towards value adopted by the subject during the thirty glorious years. In order to reactivate social dynamism, the neo-horizontal regime sets up, on the one side, a mobilizing precarization device that places the subject back in a «servile» situation of subjection to his own vital needs, where the reflexive distance between subject and object needed for value is abolished; on the other side, the same subject is diluted in the frame of a neo-communitarian sociality aimed at the extermination of value. In this sense, a «de-thinking subject » emerges as the protagonist of the contemporary social scene.