Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
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Susan Petrilli
Abstract
We propose to analyze identity, freedom, and answerability in a semiotic key; that is, from the perspective of the science of signs. Individual and community identity alike may be governed by a mono-logic or by a dia-logic. The difference is profound and pervasive. Global semiotics in particular (a trend that in modern times extends from Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Welby to Charles Morris and Thomas A. Sebeok) may contribute to a critique of monologism. However, the assumptions and implications of this new approach to semiotics are external to traditional philosophy. This leads to the need for a new philosophical founding of semiotics. From this point of view, a contribution may come from those contemporary French authors who have contributed to a critique of Western thought such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. The focus of the present essay is on Levinas in relation to the semiotic perspective delineated with developments in the direction of the problem of identity, freedom, and answerability.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
- Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
- Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
- Semiosis in cognitive systems
- A view on denotation in photography
- Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
- Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
- Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
- Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
- ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
- Quelques parcours artistiques contemporains comme illustration du mouvement de la semiosis : Compte rendu d'Interpréter l'art contemporain de Nicole Everaert-Desmedt