ABSTRACT
The social world is the site of a perpetuation of an incessant taxonomic work, where the emergence of identity categories is the result of an intersection of different technical and technological efforts: legal, medical, economic and theoretical studies contribute to producing classifications of human kinds. Human kinds are the only class in which the object classified is shaped by and in its turn, shapes the classifier: [The social context provides] concepts that frame the self-understanding and intentions of the constructed agent. On a broader (“social”) level, human kinds are crafted by experts, who supply them with a (continually updated) series of descriptions about standards and norms of conduct. On a narrower (“individual”) level, they mark the perimeter of assumable identities: human kinds provide subjects with available “ready-made” ways of being and patterns of conduct. The functioning of human kinds might be seen as working along a series of displacements.
