Un’etologia spinozista. Gilles Deleuze lettore di Jakob von Uexküll

A Spinozist Ethology: Gilles Deleuze as a Reader of Jakob von Uexküll

Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with the work of Jakob von Uexküll can be traced back to the late 1970s. Although his direct knowledge of Uexküll’s writings was limited and largely mediated, Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt played a decisive role in shaping Deleuze’s rereading of Spinoza. In this context, Deleuze conceives Spinoza’s Ethics as a form of ethology, a practical science of modes of existence, explicitly referring to Uexküll as a ‘distant successor’ of Spinoza himself. But Deleuze’s engagement goes further: it is through Uexküll that key Deleuzian concepts such as territory, rhythm, and concatenation emerge and develop. This paper aims to reconstruct a systematic account of how Deleuze appropriated Uexküll’s thought, not merely as a textual source but as a conceptual operator. It explores both the historical-philosophical dimension and, as a direct consequence, the integration of Uexküllian motifs into Deleuze’s own theoretical framework.

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