Natascia Tosel

Natascia Tosel is a researcher in the field of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law, with a particular interest in French Contemporary Philosophy. After finishing her BA at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, she obtained a master’s degree with honours at the University of Padua where she also received her PhD in Philosophy in 2017. She spent a semester at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and worked as a researcher at the University of Paris VIII.  

Tosel’s research engages French Theory (with particular reference to Deleuze and Foucault), Gabriel Tarde’s Micro-sociology (and its contemporary developments, such as Latour’s Actor-Network Theory), as well as the Legal and Institutional Theory of Santi Romano and Maurice Hauriou in order to explore the current relation between social movements, legal practices, and political institutions.

She is the author of the monograph Gabriel Tarde. Molecolare, Desiderio, Imitazione, Invenzione, Fatti Futuri (2022), and co-author of the volume Deleuze and Anarchism (2019). She has also published several articles in Italian and French journals.

Juridification — the increasing recourse to the courts to seek satisfaction for political demands — seems an unpleasant procedure. Many scholars describe it as a de-politicizing, de-democratizing, and bureaucratizing process that transfers political authority to the courts and produces an erosion of democracy. The project intends to contribute to this debate by embracing an archaeological and genealogical approach in which Gabriel Tarde’s analysis of social imitation and Michel Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct provide the main theoretical framework.

The current proliferation of legal practices is the sign that the traditional form of mediation that is pivoted on political participation and parliamentary representation is being gradually replaced by plural mediations mainly channelled through law. The core idea of the project is that social actors are increasingly using legal remedies as tactical tools in their social and political struggles. A juridical case, making a particular situation visible and speakable, produces local discursivities, the repetition of which can generate a semiotic and linguistic displacement of normative categories, that is, a model of counter-conducts that affect the social.