Coupure sémiotique et crise de la représentation. Trois réponses de la philosophie classique allemande (Hegel-Goethe-Schelling)

My thesis explores the various strategies employed by Goethe, Hegel and Schelling to overcome the dualisms created by modern mechanism. The thesis thus begins with the post-Kantian debate over mechanism and the Cosmology of the Moderns; In the first part of the dissertation, I explore Hegel’s recourse to Keplerian cosmology as an alternative to Newtonian celestial mechanism and show how this opposition permeates not only conceptions of nature, but also theories of political economy at the time; in the second part devoted to Goethe, I revaluate Goethean morphology as a truly original answer to mechanistic dualisms, advocating for the ecological relocation of freedom in nature and so as an answer to Kant’ antinomy of teleological judgment. I present a reading of Goethe’s morphological method as oscillating between a strict structuralist approach to natural phenomena and a poststructuralist one, with a role given to nature’s freedom to excess or transgress its own norms. I then explore the revival of the Goethean morphology in the second half of the twentieth century. I sketch the Goethean legacy of Ilya Prigogine non-linear physics, René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, Mandelbrot’s fractals and Henri Atlan’ emergence of complexity through noise. I indicate how they offer an innovative answer to the Kantian antinomy of teleological judgment, via the development of mathematical and geometrical tools, able to objectively describe self-organised natural phaenomenon and show the impact of those new epistemologies on political and economical thoughts. Finally, in the last part of the thesis, I turn to Schelling’s speculative physics as an answer to the dualisms of mechanistic thinking. Drawing on Freud, Deleuze and Lyotard, I think Schellingian “pure productivity” as both a positive principle creating new orders and new realities by way of disruption and as a negative principle if taken to excess. I draw the political and economical consequences of the concept of “pure productivity” on the critic of capitalism’ contemporary excessive speculative tendencies.