Figures of the Body and the Semiotics of Imprint: Semiotic Figures of the Body in the Humanities
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Jacques Fontanille
Abstract
Semiotics of the body consists essentially, in a current use, in gestural and mimo-gestural semiotics. At best, in an integrated semiotic approach, communicative gesture involved the construction of a syncretic expression plane, combined with verbal discourse. The body as conceived by psychoanalysts is, on the contrary, the source and the seat of energy itself (impulses), from which psychic instances feed their representations. The psychoanalytical body is thus both the source and the significant substance from which the semiotic actant may take form. In the phenomological conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, the proper body is that entity, the “vehicle of our being in the world”, which belongs both to “I” and to “the world for me”, which takes shape in perception, where the first (I) experienced the second (world for me). The phenomenological body seems at first sight an adjuvant, which turns out to be, for a second sight, the very principle of actantiality and intentionality. In a quick overview of the different “implicit semiotics” of the body in human sciences (psychoanalysis, theory of “I-skin”, contemporary cognitive science, psychology, etc.) it acquires a status of an actantial basis, because, as an actant, it is directly involved in the process of incorporation of agentivity and intentionality, and with two different and recurrent representations: one according to movement, and the other according to envelope. Forces and form, in short. We decide to name them (arbitrarily for now, but we’ll return to this point) the first “Me” and the second “Myself”. • “Me” is the referent instance, consisting both of sensitive matter and energy, the substrate and the dynamic bodymark for all figures and all enunciations. In short, it will be the “Me-flesh.” • “Myself ” is the body-in-construction, the living vehicle of intentionality and the interactions support, and therefore, particularly the support of confrontation with otherness; and, through these interactions, it provides the actant a patterned form through which it may be identified. In short, this is “Myself-envelope”. Then the paper may display a new typology of semiotic body figures. At each of these figures of the body, is a figure of movement. At each of them, is a figure of enunciative instances, that is to say for each of them a modality of the imprint and of its interpretation.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Front matter
- Part One. Plenary Speeches Delivered at the 11th World Congress of Semiotics Held in Nanjing, October 5-9, 2012
- Introduction
- Signs and Phenomena: Phenomenological-Semiotic Considerations
- Ren ( 仁) Humanist Ethics and Semiotics in the Future
- Figures of the Body and the Semiotics of Imprint: Semiotic Figures of the Body in the Humanities
- Part Two. New Theories and Applications of Semiotics
- A Tentative Analysis of the Linguistic Roots of Structuralist Literary Criticism — From a Semiotic Interdisciplinary Perspective
- On the Cultural Turn of Translation Studies in China in the New Millennium: A Semiotic Appraisal and Prognosis
- The Common Features of Languages and Their Symbols – Interlanguage
- Semiotics as a Global Discipline
- On the Semiotics of Tea
- An Explication of the Emperor Scepter Symbol of Ancient Babylon and Ancient China with Oraclebone and Bronze Inscriptions and Relics in Sanxingdui Ruins
- A Semiotic and Cognitive Analysis of Chinese Iconic Signs1
- A Sociolinguistic View of Animal Names in Idiomatic Expressions in Chinese and French
- Abolishing Belief to Make Room for Knowledge: An Analysis of the “Contract” Underlying Reality TV
- Advertisements of Cars as Semiotic Signs
- Iconicity and the Language of Text Messages in Nigeria
- Part Three. Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- Introduction to the Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- The Structure of C. S. Peirce’s Ten-Sign Classification System: An Exploration in Formal Semeiotic
- Part Four. Special Section for Tartu Semiotics
- Preface to the Tartu semiotics section
- A Metaphysic for Semiotics
- Vico’s Potential in Semiotics: The Imaginative Universal and its Bodily Roots
- Tartu Variations: Objects, Subjects and the Third Way
- On the “New Tartu School”
- Part Five. Special Section for Cognitive Semiotics
- CogSem Notes V On Meaning as Such
Articles in the same Issue
- Front matter
- Part One. Plenary Speeches Delivered at the 11th World Congress of Semiotics Held in Nanjing, October 5-9, 2012
- Introduction
- Signs and Phenomena: Phenomenological-Semiotic Considerations
- Ren ( 仁) Humanist Ethics and Semiotics in the Future
- Figures of the Body and the Semiotics of Imprint: Semiotic Figures of the Body in the Humanities
- Part Two. New Theories and Applications of Semiotics
- A Tentative Analysis of the Linguistic Roots of Structuralist Literary Criticism — From a Semiotic Interdisciplinary Perspective
- On the Cultural Turn of Translation Studies in China in the New Millennium: A Semiotic Appraisal and Prognosis
- The Common Features of Languages and Their Symbols – Interlanguage
- Semiotics as a Global Discipline
- On the Semiotics of Tea
- An Explication of the Emperor Scepter Symbol of Ancient Babylon and Ancient China with Oraclebone and Bronze Inscriptions and Relics in Sanxingdui Ruins
- A Semiotic and Cognitive Analysis of Chinese Iconic Signs1
- A Sociolinguistic View of Animal Names in Idiomatic Expressions in Chinese and French
- Abolishing Belief to Make Room for Knowledge: An Analysis of the “Contract” Underlying Reality TV
- Advertisements of Cars as Semiotic Signs
- Iconicity and the Language of Text Messages in Nigeria
- Part Three. Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- Introduction to the Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- The Structure of C. S. Peirce’s Ten-Sign Classification System: An Exploration in Formal Semeiotic
- Part Four. Special Section for Tartu Semiotics
- Preface to the Tartu semiotics section
- A Metaphysic for Semiotics
- Vico’s Potential in Semiotics: The Imaginative Universal and its Bodily Roots
- Tartu Variations: Objects, Subjects and the Third Way
- On the “New Tartu School”
- Part Five. Special Section for Cognitive Semiotics
- CogSem Notes V On Meaning as Such
