Dalla morfologia di Goethe alle ontologie multispecies di Haraway

Una filiazione proto-ecologica

Abstract

The paper brings into dialogue Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vegetal morphology, as articulated in Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790), with several key concepts in Donna Haraway’s thought, including contact zone, sympoiesis, and becoming-with. Through a transhistorical and theoretical comparison, the study explores the possibility of reading Goethe’s work as a proto-ecological epistemological laboratory, capable of anticipating – albeit in germinal form – many of the concerns that characterize contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist thought. In particular, the paper highlights how Goethe’s conception of metamorphosis as a dynamic and relational principle of life resonates with Haraway’s sympoietic ontology, in which knowledge emerges as a situated, material, and interspecific practice. For Goethe, the plant becomes a figure of interdependence and living memory – a space of co-production between forms and environmental that, in light of Haraway’s thought, can be interpreted as a ‘contact zone’. The aim is twofold: on the one hand, to contribute to an ecocritical (re)reading of the classical-Romantic naturalistic tradition by proposing a relational genealogy of knowledge; on the other, to foreground Goethe’s morphological legacy as a theoretical resource for contemporary ecocritical reflection.