As Roberto Esposito observes, in recent years the political right and left seem to have swapped roles with respect to institutions: the right attacks the state institutions it had long defended, while the left, which in the 1960s and 1970s regarded them as reactionary, now protects them. Esposito proposes to overcome this opposition between the defence of the established order and the rejection of institutions through an “instituting thought” capable of reconnecting institutions to the flow of social life.

Istituire la vita brings together, alongside Roberto Esposito’s opening essay, texts by Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli, Filippo Barbera and Sophie Gosselin, which, in dialogue with instituting thought, seek the source of the institutional dimension in vital and ecological processes, in bodies and in communal rituals.

In an age when the neoliberal order is collapsing, the questions that accompanied decolonization and the ecological and energy crises of the 1960s and 1970s re-emerge in this book: in what ways are the institutions of industrial society enemies of life? Which institutions deserve to be defended, and which should instead be abandoned or reinvented?