Mark, Image, Sign: a semiotic approach to Spinoza

Abstract

Instead of reading Spinoza’s account of the imagination in an anthropocentric way, as dependent on the traditional doctrine of human faculties, the author considers it as a consequence of its physics and its cosmology. The knowledge by signs, as Spinoza calls imagination, has to be rooted in his theory of marks and images, and concerns all beings (human and non-human) who are able to mark other bodies and to be marked by them in in nite semiosis of nature.