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Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach

  • Susan Petrilli
Published/Copyright: September 1, 2008
Semiotica
From the journal Volume 2008 Issue 171

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.



Published Online: 2008-09-01
Published in Print: 2008-August

© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
  2. Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
  3. Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
  4. The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
  5. Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
  6. Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
  7. Semiosis in cognitive systems
  8. A view on denotation in photography
  9. Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
  10. Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
  11. Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
  12. Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
  13. Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
  14. Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
  15. A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
  16. Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
  17. ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
  18. Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
  19. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
  20. Quelques parcours artistiques contemporains comme illustration du mouvement de la semiosis : Compte rendu d'Interpréter l'art contemporain de Nicole Everaert-Desmedt
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