Abstract

This paper aims to inquiry the role of institutions as what characterises human specificity. In order to do so, I firstly analyse Bimbenet’s phenomenological theory of institutions, that conceives the latter as what elicits a symbolic decentralisation of human subjectivity. Secondly, I recall Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology of institutions in order to give account of the question concerning how the institutionalising praxis emerges, that is how anthropogenesis corresponds to the adoption of techno-cultural modes of adaptation. Thirdly, I use Sloterdijk’s anthropo-technology to question Gehlen’s understanding of the human as a deficient being. In this way, the relationship between technics and human is inverted, and human biological constitution is conceived as the effect of the primal technical praxis, and not as its cause. This enables us to understand the human as that living whose way of existence is fundamentally defined by techno-symbolical action, that is the making of institutions.